Balancing Art and Babies: A Review of 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

by Julie Phillips

W. W. Norton & Company, 2022, $27.95

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I learned about The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem by Julie Phillips a few months after its publication in April 2022. When I read Janelle Sheetz’s literary reflection titled “Creativity and Motherhood Are Not at Odds” in Literary Mama’s September/October 2022 issue, Phillips’s book jumped to the top of my reading list because I wanted to learn more about women who continued their creative lives after becoming mothers.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed The Baby on the Fire Escape. Phillips presented well-researched biographical sketches of six women in a way that did not feel like reading a textbook, even with all the references and footnotes. The book starts with an overview of how each woman related to her children and her work, followed by chronological reviews of their lives. Having their motherhood and work relationships in mind provided a framework to help us see how their creative interests and maternal situations developed.

For the sake of practicality, Phillips limited the book to women who were British or North American writers and artists, the main six being Alice Neel, Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Angela Carter. Born during the first half of the twentieth century, these women were “young enough to have experienced the changes that came with feminism, old enough to have mothered for a lifetime.” 

While these women had some things in common, their lives were varied enough that the majority of creative mothers who read this book will see a bit of themselves in at least one profile. Maybe, like Audre Lorde, they write images or phrases on scraps of paper stashed away in a diaper bag while running errands. Or they waited until their forties to become a mother like Angela Carter, putting “space between herself and the everyday business of child-raising” with the help of her “maternal tribe.”

Some of these mothers had to make difficult decisions because of unplanned pregnancies or endure prejudice based on sexual orientation or race. Ursula K. Le Guin had an abortion in college, keeping it silent for decades while raising three children and approaching “mothering and writing as two distinct projects that happened to occupy the same place and time.” 

Lorde also had an abortion prior to starting a family. She was a Black lesbian, but she married a gay white man because she wanted to have children. They had two children together while in a polyamorous relationship. Audre observed, “As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody’s comfortable prejudices of who I should be.” Her countermove was to redefine motherhood as a place of both safety and defiance while giving her children the gift of themselves.

Like Lorde, Alice Walker faced racism throughout her life. After Walker was hit in the eye with a BB pellet when she was eight, her father asked a white stranger to help take her to the hospital. But the person drove off upon hearing it was a Black girl who was injured. As an adult and mother, she needed large blocks of time to write, but found herself interrupted not only by her baby, but by threatening phone calls and letters because of her race, her interracial marriage, and her husband’s work as a civil rights lawyer.

Phillips also clarifies some misrepresentations of these women that resulted from others passing judgment on them for being mothers with creative pursuits. Doris Lessing was said to have abandoned her two eldest children, which turned out to be “more or less, a fiction.” Alice Neel’s in-laws falsely accused her of forgetting her child on the fire escape when she was concentrating on her painting.

In addition to the six featured women, Phillips includes some additional chapters to address a few specific topics.

The topics covered in “The Discomfort Zone” chapters include sex and love, unavailable muses, ghosts, late success, and not being all there. Phillips introduces additional talented women, giving shorter summaries of their lives as creative mothers as they relate to each chapter’s theme. For example, in the chapter on ghosts, she notes that Shirley Jackson was “a successful author who seemed to thrive on writing and parenting her four children.” However, the maternal ghosts in her story were “passive and doomed or vengeful and dangerous” in contrast to the author’s real-life persona. 

Phillips concludes with the observation that creative mothers need time. Not just hours in the day, but moments of insight or undoing or even a maternal clock. They also need boundaries. A creative mother must not give away “too many pieces of her being.”

She acknowledges that there is no one way to be a mother and an artist or writer: 

The Baby on the Fire Escape is an interesting and inspiring read. In her literary reflection, Sheetz wrote that she hopes to “serve as an example to other expectant mothers worried their creative life will soon end.” The women that Phillips features in this book do exactly that.