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The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem Hardcover – April 26, 2022

by Julie Phillips (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 60 ratings
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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.

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  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    W. W. Norton & Company
  4. Publication date
    April 26, 2022
  5. Dimensions
    6.3 x 1.1 x 9.4 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0393088596
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0393088595
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author

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

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company (April 26, 2022)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393088596
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393088595
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.11 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 1.1 x 9.4 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 60 ratings

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Julie Phillips

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
60 global ratings
MUST READ FOR A CREATIVE WOMAN (with or without children and/or partners)
5 Stars
MUST READ FOR A CREATIVE WOMAN (with or without children and/or partners)
I wish I'd had this book when I was 19 yrs. old and deciding not to attend medical school because I thought I had something to say. This sensitive, eye-opening account of how artistic mothers raised their children, handled their dreams and difficulties (and what befell them and their families), and ended up contributing to the conversation of the ages in ways big and small, may change your life.
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Top reviews from the United States

Colleen
5.0 out of 5 stars Helped with postpartum creativity
Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2024
Verified Purchase
When I was pregnant, I was really worried that my writing projects would suffer once the baby arrived. This incredible book, without being proscriptive, gave me diverse examples of how artist-mothers have navigated that dual identity in the past. Ursula Le Guin's story showed me how much writing is possible with a supportive partner; Audre Lorde's showed me that motherhood was not a loss of identity but a discovery of one's true self. Informative, engaging, and ultimately inspiring. I would not have finished writing my first book without having read this one.
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nsprng rn msn
5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece
Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2022
Verified Purchase
We've all been waiting for this one! Any woman who's lived through the 50s, 60s and 70s will recognize the terrain and probably experience another penny dropping. You don't have to be an artist to relate to the strain and collision of motherhood and additional dreams.
Told through the biographies of Ursala Le Guin, Alice Neel, Doris Lessing and others, Julie Phillips gives us rich tales as well as a pretty incredible, scholarly deep-dive into feminism, motherhood, and being a committed artist. I am very grateful she, mother and artist, wrote it.
2 people found this helpful
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J.G.
5.0 out of 5 stars MUST READ FOR A CREATIVE WOMAN (with or without children and/or partners)
Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2022
Verified Purchase
I wish I'd had this book when I was 19 yrs. old and deciding not to attend medical school because I thought I had something to say. This sensitive, eye-opening account of how artistic mothers raised their children, handled their dreams and difficulties (and what befell them and their families), and ended up contributing to the conversation of the ages in ways big and small, may change your life.
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J.G.
5.0 out of 5 stars MUST READ FOR A CREATIVE WOMAN (with or without children and/or partners)
Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2022
I wish I'd had this book when I was 19 yrs. old and deciding not to attend medical school because I thought I had something to say. This sensitive, eye-opening account of how artistic mothers raised their children, handled their dreams and difficulties (and what befell them and their families), and ended up contributing to the conversation of the ages in ways big and small, may change your life.
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3 people found this helpful
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Margaret E. Medeiros
5.0 out of 5 stars A lovely book about an extrardinary group of women.
Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2022
Verified Purchase
Found the book fascinating. It profiles a group of exceptional artists and writers and how they managed motherhood.
2 people found this helpful
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Christina Rivera Cogswell
5.0 out of 5 stars Bought it in multiple forms…
Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2023
…as I loved this book’s companionship and felt less lonely as a writer-mother.
One person found this helpful
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David Keymer
5.0 out of 5 stars A MUST READ
Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2023
The Baby on the Fire Escape was an NPR and Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year and deservedly so. Phillips won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her first (and only other so far) book, a biography of sci fi legend James Tiptree, Jr., who only toward the end of his long and successful career was revealed to be not a man but a woman, Alice B. Sheldon. In this book, which is first rate in every respect, she takes on one of the most interesting and thorny questions about womanhood: how does one juggle having a successful career in a challenging field while also being a mother.

The field she focuses on is art and what she has written is a meditative group biography of some of our most distinguished writers and artists of the twentieth century. There are separate biographical chapters on painter Alice Neel (the cover illustration is Neel’s 1967 painting, Mother and Child ( Nancy and Olivia)), painter and sculptor Louise Bourgeois, and writers Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Smart, Ursula K. Le Guin, Penelope Fitzgerald, Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, Alice Walker, and Angela Carter. Other artists are discussed in passing in the reflective chapters that form the tissue between the individual biographies –to mention a few, Louise Erdrich, Shirley Jackson, Adrienne Rich, Anne Lamott, Diane Di Prima, Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn Brooks, A. S. Byatt, Elizabeth Anscombe, Margaret Drabble.

Phillips comes up with no single remedy to the problem. Different people dealt with it the juggling act in radically different ways. Lessing had to leave her two children and her husband punished her for it by poisoning their minds against her. Neel and Lorde were notoriously independent types. Neel’s child was proud of her in his adulthood, of all that she had accomplished, but he admitted that of the two things she cared about, her children and her art, art came first and children after. Le Guin succeeded in balancing motherhood and writing and seems the most centered of the mothers discussed here. Penelope Fitzgerald didn’t make a splash in writing circles until her sixties but oh boy, did she then! Sontag’s problems dealt as much with her sexual identity as with motherhood and marriage. Alice Walker wrote: “I found it very hard to be that suddenly split person.” She wrote nothing that year “that didn’t sound as though a baby were screaming right through the middle of it.”

Though no one single answer is posited, there is one central problem: the time and attention demanded of mothering and of creative art. There is also a question of self: many of these artists experience a crisis of identity: who am I (not we) while mothering, and a drastic narrowing of horizons.

Along the way, Phillips delivers wonderful judgments about the work of her subjects. There’s this on the writings of Doris Lessing: ”Realizing early on that if you said what seemed unthinkable it might turn out to be what everyone else was thinking, she made a career of bringing up uncomfortable subjects.” Or Ursula K. Le Guin: “[She] approached mothering and writing as two distinct projects that happened to occupy the same place and time. . . . Ambitious and proud, she wrote about the deeds of heroes, while she limited motherhood’s claims on her selfhood by becoming, in her fiction, a man. . . . For a long time she didn’t know how to write about her own experience in a genre in which mothers are seldom subjects. She didn’t see how a mother could be a hero.” Audre Lorde, already outside the pale as a queer mother, wrote about herself: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people‘s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” Early on, she realized “that she thought differently than other people, not logically, ‘step by step,’ but ‘in bubbles up from chaos that you had to anchor with words,’ so that ‘everything was like a poem, with different curves, different levels.’ “

My copy of this book is filled with notes, my asides to the written text. By the chapter on Angela Carter, an author I’ve admired but about whom I knew relatively little as a person, I wrote, simply, “What an interesting woman!” She’s not the only one in this admirable and eminently readable book.
3 people found this helpful
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Kate Boswell
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic, important read
Reviewed in the United States on 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.
One person found this helpful
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Omordia
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting subject written in jargon
Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2023
This book tackles a fascinating topic: How certain 20th century Western women balanced creativity and motherhood. Much of the book is written in a jargonistic dialect that is unlikely to age well (IE, at one point she feel it important to tell the reader that Alice Walker wrote on a topic we now would consider "self-care." I hope we go back to Walker's words on the subject because they're less cringy than this modern phrase.). It's unclear to me why some of the women are given more attention than others (Le Guin vs. Byatt). All of the women were successful in their artistry, but I wish she would also provide some information in regard to how the children they mothered turned out and what effect the various approaches had on them.
2 people found this helpful
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