The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem
Julie Phillips
Apr 2022 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Marnye Young
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9 hr 13 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
An insightful and provocative exploration of the relationship between motherhood and art through the lives of women artists and writers. 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.
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5.0
2 reviews
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.
Marnye Young is a SOVAS and AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator for New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling authors. Praised for her impeccable comic timing as well as her ability to make you cry, she has recorded hundreds of audiobooks. Marnye has also been called an "accent guru."
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