The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

by Julie Phillips

Overview

An insightful, provocative, and witty exploration of the relationship between motherhood and art—for anyone who is a mother, wants to be, or has ever had one.

What does a great artist who is also a mother look like? What does it mean to create, not in “a room of one’s own,” but in a domestic space? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge.

With fierce empathy, Phillips evokes the intimate and varied struggles of brilliant artists and writers of the twentieth century. Ursula K. Le Guin found productive stability in family life, and Audre Lorde’s queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms. Susan Sontag became a mother at nineteen, Angela Carter at forty-three. These mothers had one child, or five, or seven. They worked in a studio, in the kitchen, in the car, on the bed, at a desk, with a baby carrier beside them. They faced judgement for pursuing their creative work—Doris Lessing was said to have abandoned her children, and Alice Neel’s in-laws falsely claimed that she once, to finish a painting, left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment.

As she threads together vivid portraits of these pathbreaking women, Phillips argues that creative motherhood is a question of keeping the baby on that apocryphal fire escape: work and care held in a constantly renegotiated, provisional, productive tension. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393088595
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	391,999
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Julie Phillips is the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. The recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction grant, she lives in Amsterdam with her partner and their two children.

Table of Contents

The Mind-Baby Problem 1

"The Presiding Genius of Her Own Body" 21

Outlaw Mothering: Alice Neel (1900-1984) 27

All the Time: Art Monsters and Maintenance Work 57

The Discomfort Zone: Sex and Love 65

Incompatible Pleasures: Doris Lessing (1919-2013) 73

The Discomfort Zone: The Unavailable Muse 103

"Poems Are Housework": Books versus Babies 111

All Happy Families: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) 121

The Discomfort Zone: Ghosts 149

The Discomfort Zone: Late Success 159

Mother, Poet, Warrior: Audre Lorde (1934-1992) 165

The Discomfort Zone: Not Being All There 195

Freedom: Alice Walker (1944-) 211

The Baby on the Writing Desk; or, Two Things at Once 239

Her Own Version: Angela Carter (1940-1992) 245

Time and the Story 273

Acknowledgments 279

Notes 281

Bibliography 308

Text Credits 311

Illustration Credits 312

Editorial Reviews

02/07/2022

Critic Phillips (James Tiptree Jr.) explores the conflicting demands of being a mother and creating art in this astute look at how trailblazing artists stayed true to their craft. When people imagine artists, Phillips suggests, they picture “solitary concentration.” To counter this, the author asks, “What does it mean to create, not... in ‘a room of one’s own,’ but in a shared space?” She examines a wealth of artists’ lives and work: American painter Alice Neel, for example, lost two daughters and was coerced into relinquishing her third to disapproving relatives and escaped to Greenwich Village, where she raised her subsequent children with other “orphans of the avante-garde” and created art that was startling in its frank portrayal of maternal unease. South African novelist Doris Lessing is infamous for leaving her children, but Phillips digs through correspondence to reveal a more nuanced account of a woman who lost the legal rights to her children after divorce. Audre Lorde’s “open marriage to a gay man,” meanwhile, “was a practical way to raise children as a lesbian.” Phillips’s sharp observations and candor add force to the survey: “Thinking about mothers awakened my desire for safety and conventionality, and some things mothers did made me uncomfortable.” The result is a memorable examination of game-changing artists. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/01/2022

Phillips (James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon) explores and explodes the interpenetrations among motherhood and authorship—as a profession and a passion—through analyses of women novelists (Ursula Le Guin; Doris Lessing; Audre Lorde; Margaret Mead; Alice Walker). For Phillips, these women's fictional and life stories are anything but conventional, even though each has had to conform, at times and by degrees, to socially constructed images of motherhood. In each chapter, Phillips explores connections between mothering and creative work. Here "mothering" doesn't necessarily mean parenting; rather, it's the extent to which a writer must sacrifice their claim to femininity or family in order to pursue their career. Phillips's book is engaging and accessible, especially when carefully discussing the private life of Lorde (a Black lesbian mother) and its influence on her writing; black-and-white portraits of the novelists are a highlight. VERDICT These constructions are far from new, yet Phillips's powerfully researched, thoughtful, sensitive examinations will be of interest to literary scholars as well as to general readers grappling with their own oscillating creative and pragmatic selves.—Emily Bowles

Library Journal

2022-02-01
An intimate look at motherhood and creativity.

Years ago, when her now-college-age children were in elementary school, Phillips, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for James Tiptree, Jr., began wondering if “maternal bliss conspires with maternal guilt to erode creative work.” Interweaving personal reflections with biographical sketches of British and North American writers and artists, she considers a question that has vexed them all: “How can I have children without sacrificing my vocation, my perspective, my independence, my mind?” The book takes its title from an accusation made by the in-laws of painter Alice Neel: When she was trying to finish a painting, they claimed, she left her baby on the fire escape. Like Neel, other women struggled to find time and space for mothering: Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Angela Carter, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Shirley Jackson are among many whose lives and work Phillips explores. “I’ve tried to look at the moments when their maternal or creative selves seem to fall apart,” writes the author, “when they get lost in the woods and come out—if they do come out—with new insight, and with themselves changed.” Their responses to motherhood range from rebellion to celebration. Lessing abandoned her two toddlers, explaining that she was leaving them “to fight economic injustice and racism.” She soon longed for them and pleaded with her estranged husband to allow her to see them; after two years, he finally gave in, not without criticizing her political views and unconventional lifestyle. Le Guin, on the other hand, felt nourished by her family, and “she claimed authority by leaving home in her work, writing about male protagonists in invented worlds.” Phillips admits there is no simple answer to her overarching question, although A.S. Byatt comes close: “What you have to learn to do is pay complete attention to two things at once.”

A thoughtful meditation on the intersection of life and art.

Kirkus Reviews

"I devoured every word of The Baby on the Fire Escape, grateful for its penetrating insights about the idiosyncratic arrangements, logistical and psychological, devised by women artists who become mothers. Phillips’s compassionate, clearheaded, and lively book forwards our long, vexed cultural conversation about maternity and art. It made me resee my own life as a writer and parent."

Pamela Erens

"Before I met Ursula K. Le Guin, I had no personal models for how a woman with children might also be a writer. What I did have was the children. Here, with her customary clarity, with empathy, nuance, and acuity, Julie Phillips questions some of our most admired artists about the ways in which the creativity required by motherhood and the creativity required by art have thwarted and supported them."

Karen Joy Fowler

"An expansive, absorbing survey... Phillips can’t resist a good story or a good quote, so her book brims with both... Although The Baby on the Fire Escape examines the particular challenges of gifted artists as they tried to balance the demands of creative work with the demands of motherhood, the book actually addresses a problem faced by all mothers: how to nurture both the child’s development and one’s own... Illuminating."

Wall Street Journal - Heller McAlpin

"[A] tremendous group biography... Phillips is an expert distiller. Instead of developing complete portraits of the artists and writers, she works to connect themes and ideas. She knows when to tread lightly and keep the expository writing tight; she pulls examples that illustrate her points... Her authority is built on knowledge and a mutually trusting relationship with the reader."

Los Angeles Times - Lauren LeBlanc

"Wonderful.… Investigating motherhood as lived by an inspiring group of twentieth-century writers and artists, The Baby on the Fire Escape refutes all received ideas about creativity and absolute solitude. Julie Phillips examines the lives and work of artists from Gwendolyn Brooks to Louise Bourgeois, from Shirley Jackson to Susan Sontag, who refused to choose between intellectual rigor and motherhood, and finds it’s the courage to claim their own centrality that defines them as artists."

Chris Kraus