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

My thesaurus lists dozens of synonyms for “depression,” “love,” and even “tedium” but has no word for the state of boredom, alienation, and adoration induced by playing a game with a one-year-old, or the after-hours cocktail of exhaustion, fury, and addled romance served up by night waking.

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

I’ve tried in this book to trace the course of that change. I’ve tried to find out what mothering plus creativity looks like, not just in the first few years, but as part of a life story. What does it mean to create, not alone in “a room of one’s own,” but in a shared space? What kinds of work have come out of that space? What is the shape of a cre