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lightreadsThe Baby on the Fire Escape: Motherhood, Creativity, and the Mind-Baby Problem
3/5. Profiles of assorted women artists (mostly writers, all no longer with us) with attention to their childbearing and motherhood in relation to their creative work. The tensions, the felicities, the trials, the pregnancies wanted and aborted, the books written in stolen minutes, the (mostly useless) men.
I really like the project of this book, and many parts of it are great and thought-provoking. The abortions and their circumstances are particularly interesting, and these are just the ones publicly spoken of. One has to assume, for example, that Ursula Le Guin’s life would have gone very differently had her well-heeled parents not paid for an expensive (and safe) abortion during college.
My problem is that I don’t like Julie Phillips’s brain. I knew this – her much lauded bio of James Tiptree, Jr. drove me nuts. But here I am back again for another dose of her judginess, her unsourced conclusory assumptions about people’s emotional lives, her intense desire to boil human beings down to pithy elevator pitches. At least she knows it? She says at one point in this book that she was trying to approach these women’s lives, often tumultuous as they are, objectively. But she found herself judging Doris Lessing for, gasp, pearl clutch, once having sex while pregnant with a man who was not the father of her child. Yes, Julie. I know you are judging everyone. It’s what you do.
Would have been great if by another author. But don’t listen to me, everyone else seems to love her.
Content notes: All the things that go with maternity -- many sorts of pregnancies accidental and not, wanted and not. Miscarriage, infant loss.
3/5. Profiles of assorted women artists (mostly writers, all no longer with us) with attention to their childbearing and motherhood in relation to their creative work. The tensions, the felicities, the trials, the pregnancies wanted and aborted, the books written in stolen minutes, the (mostly useless) men.
I really like the project of this book, and many parts of it are great and thought-provoking. The abortions and their circumstances are particularly interesting, and these are just the ones publicly spoken of. One has to assume, for example, that Ursula Le Guin’s life would have gone very differently had her well-heeled parents not paid for an expensive (and safe) abortion during college.
My problem is that I don’t like Julie Phillips’s brain. I knew this – her much lauded bio of James Tiptree, Jr. drove me nuts. But here I am back again for another dose of her judginess, her unsourced conclusory assumptions about people’s emotional lives, her intense desire to boil human beings down to pithy elevator pitches. At least she knows it? She says at one point in this book that she was trying to approach these women’s lives, often tumultuous as they are, objectively. But she found herself judging Doris Lessing for, gasp, pearl clutch, once having sex while pregnant with a man who was not the father of her child. Yes, Julie. I know you are judging everyone. It’s what you do.
Would have been great if by another author. But don’t listen to me, everyone else seems to love her.
Content notes: All the things that go with maternity -- many sorts of pregnancies accidental and not, wanted and not. Miscarriage, infant loss.