Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

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

Phillips, Julie

Hardcover

ArtistsLiterary FiguresWomen's Studies

Publisher Price: $27.95

ISBN10: 0393088596
ISBN13: 9780393088595
Publisher: W W Norton & Co
Published: Apr 26 2022
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.05
Height: 1.20 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.60
Language: English

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.

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