The Baby on the Fire Escape Quotes

“If you’re a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked, Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women. (Margaret Atwood)”
― Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

“Babies demand your entire self, but it is a funny kind of self. It is a mixture of the “all” a factory worker gives to the conveyor belt and the “all” a lover offers to the one he adores. It involves, on both counts, a fair degree of self-abnegation. This is why people who mind children suffer from despair; it happens all of a sudden—they realise, all of a sudden, that they still exist.”
― Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

“the experience of motherhood loses nearly everything in its translation to the outside world. In motherhood a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings, and like sounds outside a certain range they can be very difficult for other people to identify.”
― Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

“THE DIVISION BETWEEN mothering and creative work once seemed (more or less) absolute. Sylvia Plath feared that a woman must “sacrifice all claims to femininity and family to be a writer.” Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must collide with the egocentricity and aggressiveness and the indifference to self that a large creative gift requires in order to flourish,”
― Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

“A typical picture of a woman with children is of someone whose children are constantly breaking in. Perhaps she has shut herself into a room to write. Her kids have promised not to knock or to make noise. But she knows they are there because they are lying down and breathing under the door. Adrienne Rich longed in vain, amid “the discontinuity of female life with its attention to small chores,” for the “freedom to press on, to enter the currents of thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away.”
― Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

“the wholeness. There is also the sense of a self merged and at least temporarily erased—it is deathlike. . . . Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn’t understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies. (Louise Erdrich)”
― Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

“One day as I am holding baby and feeding her, I realize that 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,”
― Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem