The Baby on the Fire Escape

Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

The Baby on the Fire Escape
Julie Phillips
RRP:
NZ$ 52.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 45.04
Hardback
h239 x 160mm - 320pg
5 Jul 2022 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780393088595
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one' s own," but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge. With fierce empathy and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, who had to choose between her motherhood and herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, who found productive stability in family life; Audre Lorde, whose queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms; and Alice Neel, who once, to finish a painting, was said to have left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary women' s lives.
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 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
Julie Phillips is the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of James Tiptree, Jr. : The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon and The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem. A biographer and critic fascinated by questions of gender and creative work, she has written for many publications including 4Columns, LitHub, and The New Yorker. The recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, she lives in Amsterdam with her partner and their two children.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780393088595
Published: 5 Jul 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: WW Norton & Co
Publisher: WW Norton & Co
Format: Hardback
Height: 239mm
Width: 160mm
Spine: 28mm
Weight: 505g
Pages: 320

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