Review: The Baby on the Fire Escape
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.
