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

by Julie Phillips

An NPR Best Book of 2022

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Parenting, Writing, Art, Feminism, Memoir, Biography

320 pages, Hardcover

First published April 26, 2022

Reviews

[Spencer Orey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for the section on Ursula K Le Guin and loved it. A compassionate grounded approach to her domestic and career lives and the challenges and beauty of both. The rest of the book is as thoughtful and kind too.

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is monumentally important to me, and I imagine that it will continue to reverberate for some time.

I also very much liked the organization and form of the book as a series of vignette biographies—gives me ideas, with the slight quibble that occasionally it took some sleuthing to get a hold on the chronology of events in a place or two because of the comparisons/form/syntax.

“It is always difficult to explore areas where so much mystification conceals a true mystery,” said one Angela Carter, and here Julie Phillips does it with intrigue and wayfinding and empathy.

[Misha Lazzara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved the blended approach of academia and biography mixed with openly discussing and exploring motherhood on a personal level. Much needed book for mother artists who desperately need different models, examples or stories to remind us that motherhood is NOT the cultural monolith that the patriarchy insists (and benefits off of).

[Vaidas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hard one for me to write a review for. One reason is that I am a man, and because of that, I will probably be judged for anything I say about the book (which is about women's experiences).

I found this book through The Daily Dad newsletter. But the reason I picked it up is that I don't know of any book about the struggles of men who are dedicated to their children and have to deal with all the other expectations that the world puts on them (to provide, to be strong, to be the stoic, in a very surface meaning of this word).

What I found were stories of women who struggled because of their time (most stories are from the mid-20th century), because of their strong calling for vocation (not everyone has this), and, I think, because of a lack of understanding of what bringing a child into this world requires from the parent (both father and mother).
The way I see it, and it's just my view, if someone truly believes they can serve humanity better than raising decent adults, they should do that and not have kids. Otherwise, let's admit that our kids require a lot from us and give them that. It's not going to be forever - in a few short years, they will go on into the world, and we will be able to claim our own ambition that was probably put on hold for a while.

[Sarah Guldenbrein · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh. I was hoping for something more relatable, but the lives of these early 20th century writers (and one painter) were so foreign to my own that it was hard to draw any insight from their stories. It was nice to read something literary about motherhood, and learn more about some writers, some of whom I've read, and some I only know from the zeitgeist. But other than that....meh.

I will say that as a big Le Guin fan, her chapter was a highlight, and she seems to be one of the only mothers in the book who was happy in her family life!

[Alexandria Faulkenbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating glimpse inside the lives of a collection of 20th century female artists and the ways motherhood impacted their creative work.

I appreciated the varied experiences of motherhood covered here and the author's commitment to showcasing both the positive and negative consequences of various mothering/creative choices.

[Ciska]

🤯🤯🤯

[Kaycee Walton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This reads like a graduate thesis. The author's own voice comes through in the introduction and rarely in the rest of the book. The biographies of the women featured are mostly informative but there is little commentary or perspective from the author. Very little narrative to distill or alchemize the message the author is trying to make. What came through for me was that all of these women, through mostly past generations, had to make either/or decisions about motherhood, partnership and their art. It all happened, in various orders, but rarely in parallel. Tons of stories of poor partnership choices (again, we can chalk this up to a different era, I suppose), divorce, child abandonment, and open relating. I know the "freedom" that can exist within a monogamous, long-term partnership with an embodied, supportive man, and felt this modern commentary was MIA. Many of the children of these women had tough upbringings and struggled to understand their mothers' choices, and I felt for them. I definitely struggle with feelings of identity in the context of raising small humans, and don't view this process as an either/or, and do not think motherhood has to equal martyrdom. I want my daughters to experience me as an embodied, feminine being who supports and shepherds them into a well-adjusted adulthood.

Other things that made this book challenging for me to digest were the jumps forward and backward in time, and the multiple characters with A names! I hard a super hard time keeping them all straight. Not really the author's problem that so many names started with A, but the timelines were super confusing as delivered.

For me, this was just a collection of depressing stories. I was not inspired. Maybe the only tidbit I really took away in a positive way is that the journey of motherhood is iterative. There are many seasons of life, and the one where there are small children involved is just one of them. Women don't need to totally lose themselves and their partners in the process. I do not accept the status quo, and know in my soul that creativity extends beyond art. Each day is an opportunity to create our reality, connecting deeply with others in our spheres of self, family and community.

[Rachel Duff · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It’s all maternal praxis, raw material for a phenomenology of mothering”

I really enjoy reading texts around the phenomenology of mothering and this one in particular, taking a creative approach to case studies of mothers/artists/writers is so fascinating. To follow throughout time instances of mothers who desired to create and the negotiations they made with self and others to pursue those creative endeavors is such profound work. I appreciate Phillips’ attempts to abstain from judgement and also appreciate her honesty when she is unable to do so. It is a complicated matter to look at a mother’s life now in retrospect, when she has either *somewhat* balanced family and work and art, and another to do so when she has made the decision to prioritize her art. Some notes as I look through my highlights that I found to be interesting is the way that multiple women throughout the text characterized pregnancy, birth, and child-bearing as an aspect or even central component of their sexuality, as the author wrote “the bodily pleasures of mothering can be intense”. This is so fascinating to me as I think through the concept of women, care, and the body. In bell hooks’ “Teaching to Transgress” she writes about teaching and the body and the erotic, which I have attempted to continue exploring theoretically. I really enjoyed the chapter on Ursula K. Le Guin, a writer I have loved for many years – I still remember how moved I was when first reading her commencement address at Bryn Mawr while studying English in undergrad myself – and this chapter only served to reinforce my great admiration for her life and work.

[Magdalena Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book; absolutely fascinating, inspiring and so well researched! I especially loved the chapter on Ursula K. Le Guin and a brief mention of Shirley Jackson. It was so interesting to read about those women artists, writers, how they all navigated motherhood and creativity. Such a great read.

[Vaiva Staugaitytė · Rating 4 out of 5]

all expectant mothers, and women in general, should be provided with a more expansive range of motherhood models. i've noticed a lot of simultaneous fearmongering and glorification of what it means to transform into a parent in the last few years and all it does is obfuscate the reality of the complicated and messy and beautiful and rewarding mish-mash it actually ends up being. some people take to it and have great support. others struggle and reject it. some grow into themselves in the process and others hold on for dear life to their past identity. you won't know what you get until you try, and the odds of it landing somewhere in the middle are high.

[Jess˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me three months to read, but it was well worth it.

[michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

a smart, well rounded deep dive into the lives of creatives who are also mothers (mothers who are also creatives?). i don't read a lot of nonfic but this is exactly the type that i eat UP! add this to your shelf of Books That Make You Confused About Desiring Motherhood.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection of stories about women who are poets, essayists, novelists; who are single, married, divorced, in relationships with men, or women, people of other ethnicities or their own, people who are also artists, or writers, are people who have other jobs or rely on their partner to make the income...the one thing all the women have in common is that they have a child or children. The way their motherhood feeds or frustrates their writing life is part of their stories, as is the unique path of each woman's life from childhood to motherhood, from childhood to a life as a writer or painter. It made me want to return to writers I've loved in the past...Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Ursula Le Guin. Julie Phillips brings these women's stories to life. It's not a book I would typically read straight through, but once I began, I couldn't stop. I was reliving the arc of my own life, even though many of these women are older than I am. We lived through so many of the same eras...the post war baby boom, the huge shifts in culture during the sixties and seventies. So glad my friend Jana recommended this book.

p. 6 From the intro: W.D. Winnicot's "good enough mother" ...his description of a mother-child relationship that is healthy and nurturing despite the mother's less-than-perfect attention to the baby...but good enough for whom? In this model it is the child's and not the mother's needs that are being met...and the mother remains a shadowy figure who seems to disappear from the many discourses that explicitly try to account for her."

Maggie Nelson rejects the quarantining of the mother from the realm of intellectual profundity? and then quotes the poet Alice Notley on her new baby: He is born and I am undone--feel as if I will / never be, was never born.

p.8 I think making mothers mysterious is another way of keeping them unacknowledged

Louise Erdrich describes parents living and working with a divided consciousness. Rachel Kusk: being called away from a conversation to console a baby: like being split in two. In Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption, psych Baraitser writes that to have a subjectivity that is shared. "Instead of wishing for more coherence, what could be gained from embracing a shared self. ...instead of a writer in the tower, she places subjectivity, that itself interrupted, is alert to the questions that interruption asks of "normal" life. She invites us to look at the struggle with maternal STUFF...the physical carrying and furniture of life with a baby that a mother rediscovers through perpetual navigation might in its own way be generative.

11 The more I read, the less I knew. Maternity often seems to be all description and no story. For many parental sensations there aren't even words.

25 One story of this book is how motherhood went from being an accident and an obligation to being a choice, and how profound that effect has been on women's lives.



Artists and their work considered in this collection:

the artist Alice Neel "In the beginning, I didn't want children. I just got them."

Doris Lessing writer She admired her son's energy and saw in it "the exuberant heath he inherited from me." But he was exhausted by it too. In a state of dreamy boredom, she pushed his pram through their suburban neighborhood over "Himalayas of tedium."
86 her rebellious spirit helped her make her way in the masculine postwar literary world while telling truths about women's lives. 90 the change in her relationship with her children except for Peter who became mentally ill. 93 Lessing moved to London and began turning her life into her material Martha Quest books. Her relationship with Jenny Diski. When her son told her of Jenny's plight...abandoned, in an orphanage, she took her in, (a way of rescuing herself?) Instead of telling Jenny what she expected of her, Lessing got angry when Jenny couldn't guess the rules. Lessing felt people were too emotional, and Jenny learned not to be emotional...difficult at 15.

Elizabeth Smart writer

105 She visited Doris Lessing one day "and drank and wept and wept and drank from mid day to seven at night and was savagely witty about her life and lives of women. I would not describe her as an advertisement of the joie de vivre of Soho.

110 When Angela Carter met Smart at a party, drinking and bemoaning women's lot, she was unnerved by what she saw as self-inflicted wounds and decided to reject the plots of women's suffering she'd been writing and think about alternatives.

Ursula Le Guin one of the few seemingly happy women in this collection

124 her mother, Krakie, and her father encouraged her from childhood. It wasn't that I wanted to write. I did write. Not only were her parents supportive, their help, --unlike the help of Adrienne Rich's tyrannical father, or Sylvia Plath's well-meaning mother--made her feel seen and recognized. Ursula disagreed with Tolstoy that only unhappy families were interesting. "The hell with that. The happy family --and no one's happy all the time--is fascinating. The interplay of power and control and love and dislike and frustration: it's endless.

139 Ursula and her husband were radicalized in the in the seventies, marching against the was and nuclear testing. She got more for a short story published by Playboy than for the advance for The Left Hand of Darkness

157 Louise Boourgeois she made a sculpture "The Destruction of the Father." which she claimed represented a patricidal family. "At the dinner table, my father would go on and on, showing off, aggrandizing himself, and the more he showed off, the smaller we felt. Suddenly we grabbed him, my brother, my sister, my mother, me, and pulled him onto the table and pulled his legs and arms apart...we ate him up ....that's what happens in the sculpture.


Penelope Fitzgerald

Audre Lord

181 she thought of herself as writing in the future tense of hope and change. "I think it is in our poetry...that we begin ur inner vision, that we begin to create visions of what has never been before, tht we can possibly be. Poetry is not a luxury. Our poems and our dreams extend us, make our knowledge beyond where we can understand, begin to give shape to the chaos in a way that we can then attend to it...
What lies beyond is, I think, made real in our poetry, as it is in our dreams.

Susan Sontag

Alice Walker

Angela Carter
248Sensitive and thin skinned, like Alice Neel, she had learned to protect herself and assert authority by acting outrageous. On her first day teaching at Brown she arrived in the classroom...charged with reducint the class of thirty to 15. When one of the students, with a sort of withering skepticism asked, "What is your work like?" She cocked her head and said "um" once or twice. Then she said, My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis." The room emptied out at the break. Maybe eleven or twelve remained.

262 She bought a small house and worked on her stories and a novel. Her friends, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro and Caryl Phillips and Robert Coover had the impression that she relished a sort of outsiderness. More on what she was trying to do in 1973 on p. 263 The carniverous Tiger's Bride who discovers "his appetite my not be my extinction."

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In this narrative, the problem is interruption (whether by children, guilt, or self-doubt) and the resolution is harmony. But as I look at mothers’ lives, I think these visions may not do justice to the actual maternal creative process, which alongside periods of harmony seems to involve foregrounding disruptions, leaping across gaps, piecing together careers, and other provisional and drastic measures. The frustration—and pleasure—that writer-mothers experience seems better expressed with images of improvisation and compromise than of multiple selves in amicable concord. If Rich’s energies of ‘creation’ and ‘relation’ can’t be united, parents can still hold them in a sometimes frustrating, sometimes generative balance. Ruhl compares the balance to a heartbeat, the ‘great systole and diastole of work and children.’
“This is the baby on the fire escape—not the slanderous story but the reality that it stands for, the precarious situation in which the child is just far enough out of sight and mind for the mother to have a talk with her muse. It’s the mental and temporal distance that an artist or writer needs to place between herself and her children, so she can have the presence, the permission, the ‘little sips of selfhood’ (Natasha Randall) that sustain creativity. It’s keeping and letting go. It’s art and care going on at once, for a moment, a day, a lifetime.”

Essential reading and meditation for mother/creatives. Short, insightful biographies of Anglo/American women mothers/artists (U.S., South Africa, England, Canada) and how every creative mothering life can look different, how every parenting and artistic choice unfolds and creates ripples and rhythms.

I most enjoyed the chapter on Ursula Le Guin, whom I do not know well, because she seemed like a rare example of a woman who had a beautiful childhood and a harmonious marriage—and was still able to create lasting, moving works of art. So often Art Monsters are held up as the standard, people who wreck their lives and the lives of everyone around them for the sake of their work, and I am so glad Julie Phillips included Le Guin as a vital exception to that rule.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars and many mixed feelings! On the one hand, the research and care here is fabulous: Phillips paints a mural of so many different artistic lives. And I definitely would recommend this book, among others, to artists and writers contemplating motherhood — and their partners.

On the other hand, I felt there was too much of a commitment to the thesis — that motherhood indelibly changes everything, including our art, for better or worse — and that many of the shifts in these women’s lives were over-attributed to their family lives. I say this as someone who does firmly believe our family lives shape us and can make or break us. Still, the book would have felt more expansive if it showed the ways these mother-artists still developed and grew in ways that weren’t all so neatly tied to their family lives.

So in the end I was left with a feeling of having been boxed in, a little, as a woman! But still glad and grateful to have read this.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I previously read “Daily Rituals: Women at Work” by Mason Currey and the short paragraphs interested me in the topic of how women throughout the ages have been able to do produce different forms of art despite the challenges of society’s expectations for wives and mothers. This book is a more satisfying look into this topic as the structure allows more detail and history to be told of specific authors and their struggles, challenges, and victories as working mothers. The subjects the author choose were interesting examples of how different external factors can shape the journey motherhood has on authors. I found the topic to be really interesting and would recommend this book to others.

[Jessica Toro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book alongside Barrett's 'Irrational Man' and an anniversary edition of Goldberg's 'Writing Down the Bones'. As with every book since I fell in love with reading, these three books fell into my hands simply because their siren made me feel "right" or "whole" at the time. I would alternate between the books depending on what I had time to dive-into. Goldberg's was easy to pick-up and put-down, Barrett's was for when I had time to critically think and underline passages, and this one was for peace, healing, leisure. It was unexpected that the texts were so intimately connected. Phillips had mentioned existentialist philosophy and referred to the "heroine" multiple times, as well as Camus directly. I couldn't avoid the existentialist message that a mother had the responsibility to be authentic, to discover the self, and to create more than a baby, but a part of herself for herself...or otherwise be lost in the dark castle of her mind; a disservice to both herself and her family. At the time I was reading these books, I had also been struggling to write with my 9-month old baby's demands and cries, and playful laughter, and feedings, and diaper changes, and baths, and my own work in an office. Goldberg's book was the inspiration to write, while this book showed me what it looked like to live my life both as a writer, and a mother...but "mother" is only one label on the disparate intersection of many other labels that describe who we are.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed listening to this book as I painted. I'm grateful for every woman who has pushed against the wrong narrative that women should only be housewives and mothers.
The book is well written in sharing about each creative woman and their journey as female in the world of male dominant creative career paths. While also sharing their different decisions about relationships, children and how they carved out time to pursue their creativity.

[Misty DeRosier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic! For anyone who is a mother and tried to do anything else simultaneously, you will see yourself in this book. I appreciate how she looks at different women through the last century or so and all the different ways they combined their writing with motherhood, some failing at times at writing, relationships or motherhood. It’s important to note that each woman who was able to accomplish this monumental feat had some privilege that some women do not. Now I want to read all of the work by the authors mentioned that I haven’t already read!

[Olga Zilberbourg · Rating 5 out of 5]

So smart and so well told. I love how loose the central thesis is and how much room it allows for difference between the stories. A total page-turner. I can't wait for Phillips's next book!

[Eliza Pillsbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the best reads of my lifetime!!!! cannot say enough about how profoundly it affected me

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it!

[Anlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating series of biographical vignettes on creative women (a painter and many writers) that poses the questions, among others, "How can I have children without sacrificing my vocation, my perspective, my independence, my mind?" Of course, as the author points out, there is no single answer. However... "On the evidence of women in this book, a certain amount of "outlaw mothering" is helpful, as well as friends to do it with ... But really it is two things" -- time and self... p274

Some notes/further reading:

Chapter: Alice Neel (1900-1984)
- p6 concept "good enough mother" (DW Winnicott)
- p6 A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother
- p12 "the motherhood plot"
- p13 Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution
- p13 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
- p16 Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity ("a woman who becomes a parent has to deal with two new relationships: one with her child, one with herself as a mother")
- p23 The Group
- p23 Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949
- p24 painting: "Well Baby Clinic"
- p33 painting: "Futility of Effort"
- p42 painting: "Hartley on the Rocking Horse" https://www.aliceneel.com/works/p/har...
- p44 painting: "Flight Into Egypt" (Alice Neel)
- p45 painting: "Minotaur" (Alice Neel, 1940)
- p45 painting: "Alice and Richard" (Alice Neel)
- p47 Life Magazine article: "End of WPA Art: Canvases which cost the government $35,000,000 are sold for junk" (see also https://livingnewdeal.org/art-preserv...)
- p49 Beat film: Pull My Daisy (Alice Neel in it)
- p3/50 In 1962 ... careers of women with children began to fluorish. Happenings include: Alice Neel ARTNews profile, Angela Carter's first magazine story, Ursula Le Guin's sci fi, Susan Sontag's first essay, Gwendolyn Brooks finally not denied teaching jobs, Alice Walker/Audre Lorde in 1968, Faith Ringgold, Toni Morrison novel 1970, Toni Cade Bambera ed. The Black Woman: An Anthology
- p52 painting: "Mother and Child" (https://www.aliceneel.com/works/p/mot...)
- p53 painting: "Linda Nochlin and Daisy" (https://www.aliceneel.com/works/p/lin...)

Chapters: All the Time: Art Monsters and Maintenance Work + The Discomfort Zone: Sex and Love
- p59 Film: Finding Christa (1991)
- p61 Mierle Laderman's subversive performances 1960s-70s
- p66 Naomi Haldane's writings

Chapter: Doris Lessing (1919-2018) aka Tigger Wisdom
- p50, 74 The Golden Notebook
- p74 Children of Violence series (incl autobigraphical novels Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage, plus A Ripple from the Storm, Landlocked, and The Four-Gated City)
- p78 memoir: Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949
- p93 The Grass Is Singing
- p97 The Summer Before the Dark
- p98 The Memoirs of a Survivor
- p98 Jenny Diski's and Doris' memoirs of relationship: Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 - 1962, In Gratitude
- p100 The Grandmothers
- p100 The Fifth Child
- p101 Queen, "the hot magazine of swinging London" see also Elizabeth Smart

Chapters: The Unavailable Muse + "Poems Are Housework": Books versus Babies
- p104 Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept "female road novel"
- p110 The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals
-p112 Maud Martha

Chapter: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)
- p122 Rocannon’s World
- p125 The Tombs of Atuan
- p134 Ursula's 1958 novel about San Francisco family caught up in Communist witch hunts
- p135 Theodora Kroeber's The Inland Whale: Nine Stories Retold from California Indian Legends and Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America
- p136 short story? "April in Paris"
- p138 The Farthest Shore
- p138 the books that made her famous: A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)
- p139 short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973)
- p144 The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
- p145 short story "sur" (1982)

Chapters: Ghosts + Late Success
- p150 To Room Nineteen
- p150 Shirley Jackson's The Lottery
- p152 Life Among the Savages
- p152 The Haunting of Hill House
- p161 Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop (1977)
- p163 Offshore (1979)

Chapter: Mother, Poet, Warrior: Audre Lorde (1934-1992)
- Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
- Loba
- The Black Unicorn: Poems (1979, inspired by trip to West Africa)
- p181 New Lincoln School (upper east side) - once a private experimental coeducational school in Manhattan
- The First Citiesp181
- p188 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
- p192 The Cancer Journals
- p193 Lorde's talk "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"
- poem "A litany for survival" -- "insistence that children's future must not require the death of their parents' dreams"

Chapter: Not Being All There
- p195 Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor
- p197 The Well of Loneliness (1928)
- p203 In America
- p206 play: Alice in America

Chapter: Alice Walker (1944- )
- p212, 223 The Color Purple -- "unchosen maternity"
- p212, 237 The Temple of My Familiar
- p217 Morehouse exchange -- white students to historically black college?
- p218 short story "The Abortion"
- p221 Black women writers taught by Alice Walker: Nella Larsen, Ann Petry, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Paule Marshall, Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha, Zora Neale Hurston
- p222 The Third Life Of Grange Copeland (draft finished 3 days before Alice went into labor)
- p224 Film: Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth (2013)
- p225 essay: "One's child of one's own"
- p228 Meridian (psychic toll of the civil rights movement on a woman activist)
- p229 Revolutionary Petunias: A Collection of Witty and Pungent Poems on Love, Loss, and Hope (1974)
- In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973)
- 1974(?) National Book award acceptance shared (Adrienne Rich for Diving Into the Wreck
- p234 Rebecca's memoir: Black White and Jewish
- p237 Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence (Rebecca Walker)

Chapter: The Baby on the Writing Desk; or Two Things at Once
- p239 Lorna Sage's Bad Blood
- p241 The Millstone
- Second Class Citizen
- A.S. Byatt
- p242 Lorna & Vic's arrangement to finish uni as teen parents

Chapter: Angela Carter (1940-1992)
- p248 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
- p256 Shadow Dance (1966)
- The Magic Toyshop (1967 "wonderfully strange")
- p260 Love
- p262 magazine: Spare Rib
- p263 The Passion of New Eve (1977)
- p267 Short story/Film: The Company of Wolves
-p270 Wise Children

[Hannah Garden]

Wow, what a book! I really really enjoyed this. Would love to give it a longer and more careful reread as part of a book discussion group, TBH, it was so full of info and ideas and I just loved it! Maybe I’ll see if anybody wants to do a discussion group of it at the library.

[catinca.ciornei · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I wanted to do a book about women writers who leave their children, but that would be too depressing” says author Julie Phillips to her editor. This may be that book but it’s neither depressing nor about abandoning children. It’s a retelling of the bios of few renowned women writers (Doris Lessing, Ursula Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, Angela Carter and others) on how they dealt with artists’ and feminist’ arch daemon - motherhood. Liife’s greatest joy and artists’ greatest fear, the total dedication and ego dissolution of motherhood, as described by a representative bunch of powerful creative women, is beautifully recounted in this volume. These women “keep brightly burning that lamp above the dark blind sea which is motherhood” (Lessing in ‘Martha Quest’). On the other hand, they realize “this is exactly the state of mind and heart that so many male writers from Thomas Mann to James Joyce describe with yearning - the mystery of an epiphany, the sense of oceanic oneness, the great ‘Yes’, the wholeness” (pg 116, from Louise Erdrich). I’ve enjoyed the read.

[Ddoddmccue · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title is a captivating!

Phillips goes beyond Wolfe’s “room” to explore the conflict for women between creativity and motherhood, merging the academic with biography.

Though well researched and a topic of personal interest, it proved a labored read, possibly a function of the artists selected to highlight.

[Jasper Smit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ik vond deze echt heel mooi. Het is een verzameling korte biografieën van schrijvers en kunstenaars in de 20e eeuw met als centrale vraag: hoe lukt het ze (niet) om kunstenaarschap met het moederschap te combineren?

Het onderzoek en bronvermeldingen zijn duizelingwekkend , maar de toon blijft glashelder. Het zijn stuk voor stuk unieke leesbare levensverhalen en ze zijn allemaal prachtig.

De keuzes die de vrouwen moeten/niet kunnen/denken te moeten/niet mogen maken, de ongelooflijke krachten van de maatschappij om zelfs de gedachten en verwachtingen van vrouwen voor zichzelf te vormen, hoe hard ze moeten vechten om een plek voor zichzelf als individu en liefhebber en moeder en kunstenaar te maken, het is ontluisterend en verbazingwekkend.

Ik vond het ook superleerzaam, want hoewel ik als blanke heteroman maar een schaduw van een schaduw van het dilemma kan meevoelen, probeer ook ik het kunstenaarschap en ouder zijn te combineren. En dat is schipperen, met supermilde versies van waar zij mee te maken hebben.

En vreselijk maar waar: vrouwen hebben eeuwen meer ervaring met proberen het ouderschap te combineren met iets voor zichzelf doen. Ik vind het een voorrecht om hun ervaringen te lezen en te voelen dat ouderschap en kunstenaarschap inderdaad niet altijd lekker samen gaan.

Tenslotte: ik vind het ouderschap best zwaar. En geweldig. En oersaai. En subliem. En tijdrovend en energieslurpend. Niet omdat ik een moeilijk kind heb, maar omdat ik leef in mn hoofd. En met een kind heb ik mijn hoofd niet voor mezelf. Het is prettig om van zoveel moeders te horen dat zij het ook zwaar vinden, dan voel ik me daar toch een beetje minder schuldig over.

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not 100% convinced by the "you can do it!" conclusions of this book, because so few of the stories seem to earn that exclamation point. It's true, though, that people can and did do it, and it's worth reading about how.

[EmelineB · Rating 5 out of 5]

Julie Phillips’ The Baby on the Fire Escape (2022) is a collection of biographies and essays about 20th century artists and writers who are mothers. Alice Neel (the one accused of leaving the baby on the fire escape to paint, giving the book its title), Doris Lessing,  Ursula K. Legion, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and Angela Carter all have their own chapter, intersped with short essays. Biographies focus on artists’ path before and to motherhood, whenever possible the details of how they adapted to motherhood (we read about Leguin’s routine of chores and childcare, or Walker’s children commenting on not having elaborate lunch boxes), and what happened after those responsibilities eased. 



The essays bring together threads across biographies: different ways of combining or separating creative work and parenthood (“All the time”: Art Monsters and Maintenance Work, Poems are Housework, The Baby on the Writing Desk), returning to creative work past the intensive years of motherhood (Ghosts, Late Success), the suffering and obstacles to being a full self and ways of coping with contradictions and circumstances (The Unavailable Muse, Not Being All There), the role of contraception (The Presiding Genius of Her Own Body), sexuality and love (Sex and love). Toni Morrison, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her care performances, Louise Bourgeois, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Smart, Shirley Jackson, make an appearance among others. The concluding chapter illuminates the author’s own relationship to motherhood and the writing craft. The project began when her children were of elementary school age. It is published as they have left for university. A red thread neatly tied: creative mothers need to play the long game.



Some biographies go into far more details than others about how mothers made it work. The chapter on Ursula K. Leguin stands out in that regard. Leguin has written about her experiences of motherhood and writing and Phillips is working on her biography and. The diversity of practices, and the historical span of the book renders direct comparison between the women depicted impossible, but highlights the changing material circumstances that 20th century’s fights for women’s rights help secure. If Phillips highlights the resolve each of these figures needed to continue their craft, the book avoids the pitfalls of a “Nevertheless, She Persisted” slogan. She shows the toll, the losses, the ones who lost themselves. And of course we will never know about those who haven’t been able to reconcile motherhood and creative practice.



We read Phillips’ book for the December book club of Mothers in Art and Design (aka MAD). It touched on many of our own concerns - finding space and time for our practice, making sense of motherhood for ourselves, and the kind of mothers we want to be, can be. The Baby on the Fire Escape is neither self-help nor a parenting book, but it does outline diverse ways of doing that can be learned from. We debated what the book does and what it doesn’t and that we’d love to see. The book contributes to discourses about art and parenthood that now well acknowledge the many barriers encountered by artists and the material and relational resources they need, whether they continue practicing or take a break. A partner supportive at home and in one’s career, friends and family involved in their children’s lives, financial security, flexibility in their travel arrangements. The earliest biographies were (unsurprisingly?) found harder to understand or relate to, again a testament to the progress of women’s rights. More acutely aware of the details of the writing craft, some wished for accounts of arts practices that discuss more closely the changes of medium and themes during early motherhood, due to access to studio space, materials or tools safety and the interruptions that some crafts can not accommodate. We wished also to hear more about their children’s views - while growing up, later as adults, and as they bring to the world their own children.



What I retain from this book is that, if few chapters show a happy combination of motherhood and practice, and if none are depicted as easy, the book felt hopeful. It’s not about making it work perfectly, it’s about making the best choices at a given time for our now many selves. It also anchors our January pick, “Everything She Touched”, a biography of Ruth Asawa by Marylin Chase, in a broader historical landscape.

Originally written for Mothers in Art and Design