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The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem
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.
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.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published April 26, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 77 reviews
November 10, 2023
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.
January 28, 2022
Julie Phillips is magnificent in her observation and retelling of the motherhood experience as experienced by Audre Lorde, Doris Lessing, Susan Sontag, Alice Walker, Ursula K. Le Guin, Alice Neel, and others. How does one keep their mind in the face of Motherhood? Their creative practice? Their absolute autonomy? Each woman is looked at so tenderly and with such bite. I chewed my way through this! I respected how Phillips wove a thread through the lives of the women, through events and experiences that connected them--the loss of Martin Luther King Jr., Aldermaston marches against nuclear arms, and attending specific colleges. I was overjoyed at the queerness, the open relationships, the messy, and the sticky. Most importantly, even in discomfort, Phillips brings a tender and direct approach to writing. Any of these women could have been my mother. My mother could have been any of these women. And as we redefine motherhood for women, Trans people, and the genderqueer people navigating new parental terrain, I have a newfound confidence that we can retain ourselves despite what history and society have told us.
If you do anything creative and have given birth or will give birth or long to, this is for you. If you watched your creative parent do their practice while parenting you, this is for you.
If you do anything creative and have given birth or will give birth or long to, this is for you. If you watched your creative parent do their practice while parenting you, this is for you.
July 26, 2022
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.
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.
May 13, 2022
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).
October 9, 2023
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.
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.
October 5, 2022
Took me three months to read, but it was well worth it.
January 22, 2024
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.
October 31, 2022
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!
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!
November 7, 2023
“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.
October 11, 2022
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.
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.
June 11, 2022
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.
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.
December 22, 2023
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.
January 17, 2024
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.
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.
January 24, 2023
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!
March 25, 2023
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!
September 27, 2023
one of the best reads of my lifetime!!!! cannot say enough about how profoundly it affected me
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August 14, 2022Wow, 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.
June 13, 2022
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.
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.
September 27, 2023
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.
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.
July 29, 2022
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."
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."
January 2, 2023
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.
January 23, 2024
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
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
July 21, 2023
I thought this was a really great read.
I don't think I've ever thought that it was impossible to be a mother and write and it's probably because I was born in 2000? It's interesting that I never thought that, though, even though parents have basically no support in this country. I think that's one of the major themes of this book; in order to do more than one thing, mothers need support, and many of them don't get it.
It was super interesting to read these stories about different writers and artists from the 20th century because of how different expectations of women were. It's weird that I feel so distant from a world where you were expected to cater to your husband and have kids and set aside your own ambitions for all of that, but at the same time, it feels like this is what the United States is shifting back to. And what it is for a lot of people, like statistically women do most of the child rearing and housework even now, and there were *so* many mothers leaving work when the pandemic hit.
I really appreciate the vastness of these stories. There were queer women and black women and Black queer women! I appreciated that the author covered them just as intensely as she did the white writers. She discussed women who left their kids and had bad relationships with their kids or just complicated ones. I feel like motherhood is at once this really public thing, because everyone comments on it and there are so many standards mothers are held to, and also this private thing, since our culture acts like it isn't very interesting and conversations about the "domestic sphere" are still sort of shoved to the side.
I don't know, this made me think a lot, and I found it was interesting and also challenged me in a lot of ways. Women I admire weren't perfect parents, but do we expect that of people, and if we do, why? I love that it explored how motherhood can actually benefit you, since I think so often it's seen as a detriment. Especially Ursula Le Gruin's chapter; I love that it just felt like... family could be this really nice thing that gives you structure and helps you and it's possible to have a partner who is an equal partner in parenting!
But I also kept thinking about how many of the women profiled had abortions; I'm so happy they were able to choose when to have children and have no doubt that's why their careers flourished, but am so mad about the decisions made that will leave others without those choices. So many of the women profiled here had children they didn't want and it negatively impacted both the parents and the children for the rest of their lives, and I get so upset thinking about that happening now.
Anyway, great read, highly recommend to other people.
I don't think I've ever thought that it was impossible to be a mother and write and it's probably because I was born in 2000? It's interesting that I never thought that, though, even though parents have basically no support in this country. I think that's one of the major themes of this book; in order to do more than one thing, mothers need support, and many of them don't get it.
It was super interesting to read these stories about different writers and artists from the 20th century because of how different expectations of women were. It's weird that I feel so distant from a world where you were expected to cater to your husband and have kids and set aside your own ambitions for all of that, but at the same time, it feels like this is what the United States is shifting back to. And what it is for a lot of people, like statistically women do most of the child rearing and housework even now, and there were *so* many mothers leaving work when the pandemic hit.
I really appreciate the vastness of these stories. There were queer women and black women and Black queer women! I appreciated that the author covered them just as intensely as she did the white writers. She discussed women who left their kids and had bad relationships with their kids or just complicated ones. I feel like motherhood is at once this really public thing, because everyone comments on it and there are so many standards mothers are held to, and also this private thing, since our culture acts like it isn't very interesting and conversations about the "domestic sphere" are still sort of shoved to the side.
I don't know, this made me think a lot, and I found it was interesting and also challenged me in a lot of ways. Women I admire weren't perfect parents, but do we expect that of people, and if we do, why? I love that it explored how motherhood can actually benefit you, since I think so often it's seen as a detriment. Especially Ursula Le Gruin's chapter; I love that it just felt like... family could be this really nice thing that gives you structure and helps you and it's possible to have a partner who is an equal partner in parenting!
But I also kept thinking about how many of the women profiled had abortions; I'm so happy they were able to choose when to have children and have no doubt that's why their careers flourished, but am so mad about the decisions made that will leave others without those choices. So many of the women profiled here had children they didn't want and it negatively impacted both the parents and the children for the rest of their lives, and I get so upset thinking about that happening now.
Anyway, great read, highly recommend to other people.
January 2, 2024
The specific stories in this book—about the conditions of motherhood for Ursula K LeGuin, Doris Lessing, Alice Neel, Angela Carter, Audre Lorde and others—were fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, always compelling— and confirmed the strong convictions I have about motherhood and creative work. As Doris Lessing put it in a letter to a friend, “The trouble with motherhood is not the work itself but the conditions under which it is done.” Those conditions are eased when one has the support of community, as Audre Lorde, LeGuin, and Carter enjoyed (and Neel, for one, did not); and when one can control one’s reproductive life. Birth control and legal abortion are as key to creativity as an income and private space.
Beautifully written, deeply researched, and occasionally drily funny (I love her references to “literary concern troll”s), this is essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth century art.
A couple quotes:
“I think everyone who tries to shift the motherhood discussion discovers how much that thing weighs and ends up moving it about two inches. My hope is that the experience and wisdom gathered here will give you heart in your own heavy lifting sessions with parenting and your muse.”
When Ursula Le Guin got married (in 1953)…The new couple’s most valued wedding gift was a gross of US military-issue condoms…
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
What has been called “women’s work” traditionally includes the nurturing of young people, maintaining a house, providing the wherewithal so that people can keep going. . . . My work is closely related in purpose to the traditional work. It just takes a different form. (June Jordan) Or, as interviewer Alexis De Veaux summarized Jordan’s words, “Poems are housework.”
The work of care alters time, linking humans to the past and future, tying us to the present, insisting on simultaneity, allowing moments of selfhood, committing us to nostalgia and futurity.
The second thing a creative mother must have, along with time, is self. She requires boundaries and the conviction that she has the right to make her art. She needs not to give away too many pieces of her being.
Beautifully written, deeply researched, and occasionally drily funny (I love her references to “literary concern troll”s), this is essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth century art.
A couple quotes:
“I think everyone who tries to shift the motherhood discussion discovers how much that thing weighs and ends up moving it about two inches. My hope is that the experience and wisdom gathered here will give you heart in your own heavy lifting sessions with parenting and your muse.”
When Ursula Le Guin got married (in 1953)…The new couple’s most valued wedding gift was a gross of US military-issue condoms…
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
What has been called “women’s work” traditionally includes the nurturing of young people, maintaining a house, providing the wherewithal so that people can keep going. . . . My work is closely related in purpose to the traditional work. It just takes a different form. (June Jordan) Or, as interviewer Alexis De Veaux summarized Jordan’s words, “Poems are housework.”
The work of care alters time, linking humans to the past and future, tying us to the present, insisting on simultaneity, allowing moments of selfhood, committing us to nostalgia and futurity.
The second thing a creative mother must have, along with time, is self. She requires boundaries and the conviction that she has the right to make her art. She needs not to give away too many pieces of her being.
May 27, 2023
Creative women have always struggled to balance motherhood and art. This book showcases the examples of a number of women who had children and tried to reconcile the demands on them as mothers while still producing art, primarily in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
The one painter profiled is Alice Neel, whose painting of a mother and child is shown on the cover. She's the one who was slandered by her sisters-in-law for putting her baby on the fire escape in order to finish a painting. It almost certainly never happened, but it's a great metaphor for the struggles these women had.
Most of the women are writers. Some left their children, like Doris Lessing, and some balanced a family and work life, like Ursula Le Guin. The Black mothers in particular (Audre Lorde and Alice Walker) faced difficulties because of their situation (Lorde was in a lesbian relationship with a white woman, while Walker had a child with her white husband) that white mothers didn't face. (OK, Susan Sontag was a lesbian, or at least bisexual, but never admitted it in public).
The author describes the different ways that the women navigated 'the motherhood plot', as she puts it. The thread that runs throughout is that the women who were most successful also had the most help, either from a spouse, relative, or good friends.
Perhaps it does 'take a village to raise a child', but this book shows that for many mothers, 'it takes a village to make great art' as well.
The only reason I'm not giving this 5 stars is that the author has (what seemed to me) a choppy style of narrative, interspersing random (but pertinent) quotes throughout the text, and offering occasional asides about her own thinking. This may add food for thought for some readers, but it interrupted my appreciation of the narrative. There are many women's stories to keep track of, and the insertions didn't help the narrative flow.
Your mileage may vary, however. Some of the quotes are quite memorable.
The one painter profiled is Alice Neel, whose painting of a mother and child is shown on the cover. She's the one who was slandered by her sisters-in-law for putting her baby on the fire escape in order to finish a painting. It almost certainly never happened, but it's a great metaphor for the struggles these women had.
Most of the women are writers. Some left their children, like Doris Lessing, and some balanced a family and work life, like Ursula Le Guin. The Black mothers in particular (Audre Lorde and Alice Walker) faced difficulties because of their situation (Lorde was in a lesbian relationship with a white woman, while Walker had a child with her white husband) that white mothers didn't face. (OK, Susan Sontag was a lesbian, or at least bisexual, but never admitted it in public).
The author describes the different ways that the women navigated 'the motherhood plot', as she puts it. The thread that runs throughout is that the women who were most successful also had the most help, either from a spouse, relative, or good friends.
Perhaps it does 'take a village to raise a child', but this book shows that for many mothers, 'it takes a village to make great art' as well.
The only reason I'm not giving this 5 stars is that the author has (what seemed to me) a choppy style of narrative, interspersing random (but pertinent) quotes throughout the text, and offering occasional asides about her own thinking. This may add food for thought for some readers, but it interrupted my appreciation of the narrative. There are many women's stories to keep track of, and the insertions didn't help the narrative flow.
Your mileage may vary, however. Some of the quotes are quite memorable.
May 12, 2022
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.
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.
January 17, 2024
I admire the depth and breadth of Phillips’ well-researched opus on motherhood among Creatives. Many of the featured women were rebels or outlaws or misfits according to societal norms, but their need to create art superseded convention. While I identified most closely with Le Guin’s attitude toward the intersection of motherhood, marriage, and writing, I appreciate the trailblazing spirit of all of Phillips’ highlighted artists. Thanks to their tenacity, women can leverage motherhood as evidence of fortitude and commitment, qualities that can enhance rather than detract from artistic endeavors.
Nonetheless, conspicuously absent from the list of featured mothers were women with special needs and/or medically compromised children. Phillips notes that time is essential in making art, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that mothering children with additional needs often steals that extra smidgen of time that allows for personal enrichment and creation.
Overall, this was an inspiring read, mercifully devoid of the saccharine opines so common in discourse about motherhood. Thanks for keeping it real, Julie Phillips.
Nonetheless, conspicuously absent from the list of featured mothers were women with special needs and/or medically compromised children. Phillips notes that time is essential in making art, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that mothering children with additional needs often steals that extra smidgen of time that allows for personal enrichment and creation.
Overall, this was an inspiring read, mercifully devoid of the saccharine opines so common in discourse about motherhood. Thanks for keeping it real, Julie Phillips.
July 2, 2022
A group biography of 20th century American mother-artists, with a focus on their struggles to reconcile motherhood and a vocation Very thought-provoking, especially for a new parent. This should not be an unexplored subject, but surprisingly it is, making the book both relevant and original. Contains many excellent articulations of the titular "mind-baby" problem. One example:
But also:
There is a lot more.
Writing depends on authority, the belief that what we say matters. But I’d weigh every paragraph of that necessarily crappy early draft against my children’s needs, and the paragraphs mattered little. Fear made me doubt the desire I’d relied upon. I couldn’t write as Mama. (Heather Abel)
But also:
At first one resists children, tries to keep on with one’s life, etc., however as time goes on more and more one becomes that normal thing—‘a parent’ and relates with it. Then suddenly . . . life yawns in front of you, that same big black terrifying hole you’ve always been afraid of. (Alice Neel)
There is a lot more.
June 9, 2022
Sometimes the exact right book comes along at the exact right time, and you know you’re going to love it. When I read the description of this book (and saw that Alice Neel cover!) I knew it was going to be excellent—and it was. Phillips deftly blends scholarly research, personal anecdotes, and biography to try to answer the question: how does one sustain creativity in motherhood? If you can’t have a room of one’s own, are you forced to stick the baby on the fire escape?
This book doesn’t offer any easy answers to those questions. Instead, it deftly traces the lives of several female artists, writers, and thinkers, looking at their experiences of motherhood. Ultimately, the book is a celebration of both mothering and creativity, arguing persuasively that both are worth pursuing, however difficult the task may be. Pair this with the excellent novel Nightbitch for the best baby shower present for the writer/artist in your life.
This book doesn’t offer any easy answers to those questions. Instead, it deftly traces the lives of several female artists, writers, and thinkers, looking at their experiences of motherhood. Ultimately, the book is a celebration of both mothering and creativity, arguing persuasively that both are worth pursuing, however difficult the task may be. Pair this with the excellent novel Nightbitch for the best baby shower present for the writer/artist in your life.
April 27, 2023
I bought this book thinking it was going to be a feel-good journey of artistic mothers thriving (so I avoided it for 3 months). It wasn't that but what it did provide was a historical and realistic glimpse into the changes of motherhood throughout the past century for artists in the Northern Hemisphere. In the beginning, I felt "this is bleak." Near the end I began to notice the profiles of artists are featured sort of chronologically but also a vibe change in "finding a balance" for the artists due to societal change and their own will. The real pivot switch was a line in Angela Carter's chapter describing she felt a "... sense that she and her generation were new women in the history of the world, with more power over their sexuality and fate."
I recommend this to people exploring motherhood, society, and artistic practice. It explores many different ways of mothering and is rooted in female realities through history.
I recommend this to people exploring motherhood, society, and artistic practice. It explores many different ways of mothering and is rooted in female realities through history.
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