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“She said, ‘I don't think a hero can be a mother. I don't think a mother can be a hero.’ And I felt this terrible irritation and frustration that made me realize I want mothers to be heroes. I want them to be heroes, not in the slaying-the-dragon sense, but I just want them to be the heroes of their own stories.” ~ Julie Phillips

Join Kaitlin as she chats with Julie Phillips, an American biographer & book critic, and the author of The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, which feels like the perfect topic to launch our second season. Julie's previous book, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, received several honors including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hugo and Locus Awards, and the Washington State book award. She currently lives in Amsterdam with her partner and their two children.

Kaitlin and Julie spoke about:

• Julie’s new book, The Baby on the Fire Escape.
• How we think about motherhood and intellectualism together, and also how we think about motherhood as an intellectual concept.
• What it means to Julie to be sitting at the intersection now of mothering older children and writing biographies of mother writers.
• The concept of maintenance work in relation to the political activism of women and caregivers.

More about Julie Phillips:

Website:https://www.julie-phillips.com/

Instagram: @julievanphillips

Facebook:@JuliePhillips

Order your copy of Julie’s latest book here:  The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

For regular updates:

Visit our website: postpartumproduction.com

Follow us on Instagram:@postpartumproductionpodcast

Subscribe to our podcast newsletter on Substack: https://postpartumproduction.substack.com

She said, I don't think a hero can be a mother.

I don't think a mother can be a hero.

And I felt this terrible irritation and frustration that made me

realize I want mothers to be heroes.

I want them to be heroes, not in the slaying-the-dragon sense,

but I just want them to be the heroes of their own stories.

I'm your host, Kaitlin Solimine and this is the

Postpartum Production Podcast here.

We hold conversations about the intersection of caregiving,

creative practice, and capitalist production, as well as what it

means to reproducing art while also being a parent in modern society.

Find out more www.postpartumproduction.com where you can also sign

up for our newsletter.

Today we're talking with Julie Phillip.

An American biographer and book critic and the author of The Baby on the Fire

Creativity, Mothering and the Mind- Baby Problem out from Norton

in 2022, which feels like the perfect topic to launch our second season.

Julie's previous book, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B.

Sheldon, received several honors including the National Book Critics

Circle Award, The Hugo and Locus Awards, and the Washington State Book Award.

She's currently working on a biography of Ursula K.

Le Guin.

Julie's written for The New Yorker, Ms., The Village Voice,

and many other publications.

She reviews books for 4columns.org and writes about English literature

for the Dutch Daily newspaper Trouw.

I hope I'm saying that right.

She's the fortunate recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction grant and residencies

at Hedge Brook and Willapa Bay AiR.

She currently lives in Amsterdam with her partner and their two children.

Julie spoke to me from her home in Amsterdam about her new book,

about what it means to her to be sitting at the intersection now of

mothering older children and writing biographies of mother writers.

And I expect you'll enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

I've been reading your book and rereading your book and re-rereading your book

many times in the last few months.

And I love that it's been coming to me in different formats and through

different friendships or networks and things like that as well.

So it's really exciting to see the different ways and the different

communities that are really excited about the work that you've done here.

And I think very clearly its speaking to something, and I'd love to hear

from you what you think it's speaking to that is drawing so much attention.

And also I think there's a particular moment right now where it feels like

the work that you're doing here in this book is feeling particularly relevant

and powerful to a lot of people.

I started writing this book as a biography and picked the

theme almost randomly to bring together a bunch of women I was interested in,

and I thought, oh, the common thread.

I'll figure that out as I go along.

And that really confronted me with how do you write about motherhood?

How do you talk about motherhood?

How do you turn it into a biographical narrative?

And at the same time, I really wanted there to be a narrative that wasn't just

about the first year or just about the first months or just about pregnancy.

As much as I love books like that, as much as I love the Argonauts or

Rachel's writing on the first year of her motherhood, in a lot of ways, I'm

doing this really nutty thing, which is trying to find out the experience of

motherhood by looking at other people's experience when it would be much more

logical to dig into my own experience.

But I felt a little bit confined by my own perspective, by each

single person's perspective.

I felt I could wanted to see what was out there from multiple perspectives.

And over time, and it ended up being kind of a big bag of stuff.

I feel , but it was also somehow or other, it was the book that I wanted to read.

It was the book that I needed to read about motherhood.

And I kept thinking, oh, I'm doing this wrong.

It's a big bag of stuff.

I should be writing more about myself.

I should be making it more of a narrative.

I should be putting all the pieces together.

And eventually I just thought, you know, I'm writing this kind of monster of a book

that doesn't fit any of the categories.

I might as well just make it my monster and stick more legs and

fingers, and bits and ears on it.

And so then I would just put in another quote,

I mean, I think though that's, that is what for me

really worked and what was so enticing about it from the beginning was that

there were a number of voices, and you do include your own narrative.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

, and I actually have to say that, that I found really grounding

and also really relatable.

I mean, I hate to make it about relatability, but there was a sense

of, okay, hearing those pieces of this authorial intrusion, if you

will, interjections or mm-hmm.

pauses or however you wanna define it.

And I think it does serve different purposes at different

points in the book as well.

But I was curious about that choice for you as a writer and how that felt.

Because I think it's something that is done more now, but it isn't historically

something that is allowed in literature.

I mean, I do think the book is all about me in the sense that it

was all the things that interested me and all the things that puzzled me, and there

are subjects that were less interesting to me that are kind of left out of the book.

I don't think I talked very much about maternal guilt, for instance, that feeling

of, I feel so bad for leaving my kids to write because I was writing about women

who didn't have as much trouble with it.

You know, I chose women who were at the top of their field.

Mm-hmm.

. I chose women who were really driven by their vocation.

So that's a, I think a group of people who have a little bit less doubt about what

they're doing than, for instance, I do.

Interesting.

I can see that.

, and I'd have to look at different specifics in the book, but I

do feel like if it's not guilt, there's tension for sure.

Mm-hmm.

And depending upon, I guess, how you define guilt.

I do think that inevitably there's that tension.

And I think you did say though, early on in the book, you said one thing I

really liked of your own framing, you said what mothering and creativity looks

like that you're building (mm-hmm) a story of what mother and creativity

looks like, not just in the first few years, but as part of a life story.

And I think that that was what worked so well in the book of, of, in not just

examining, like you said, an early moment or that particular intersection, but

also how that particular intersection can just blossom across a lifespan,

but across a career, but across a trajectory of one's own creative work.

And I thought that that really allowed each story in each biography to sit

independent, but also then to speak to each other, right, just as lives would.

I'm also curious, as you're saying, I didn't know, for example, that you chose

these particular biographies because to you, they lacked potentially that guilt.

Well, that wasn't the reason, but I did choose women who

were prominent writers just because that's the nature of biography.

You write about women who are well known.

You write about women who have reached the top of their field, and so I

think that's a group that has— they all approached it really differently.

And they all had their own hesitations and they all had their own limitations

and they all had their own anxieties about, am I doing this right?

But at the same time, they were all really driven.

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

What is that drive?

Because that's something I think a lot about as a writer now and as a

mother, what is capable of sustaining something that has so little support?

I mean, and that can be both the writing and the caregiving, right?

If you were to look at them, what lessons did you learn as a writer and as a mother

and as a biographer through these stories?

I interviewed a friend of Ursula K.

Le Guin's, once.

I asked her, how do you think she got through those 10 years

when she was writing, but she wasn't getting published when she

wasn't having any outward success.

And she, this other woman said, the talent has its own drive.

The talent carries you through.

And I think they all, in one way or another, had a vocation and a

talent that wouldn't be denied that really deeply needed to be expressed.

And Alice Walker says, she talks about all the black women whose talents

have been denied and who never had an opportunity to express them.

And she says, what happens?

You go crazy.

Mm-hmm.

. And I think women in the 20th century were incredibly lucky to start being

able to realize that and start being able to follow their vocation and not

just stay at home and lose their mind.

You could speak better to this, obviously, in terms

of their own life chronologies and where they were situated within

the 20th century and 21st century.

But was that intentional or were you thinking of a particular moment

of history, which obviously can apply to the history of American

literature or Western literature and also feminism within all of that?

Mm-hmm.

. . Yeah.

I picked women who were born between nineteen hundred and nineteen forty five.

Mm-hmm.

. Because they were old enough that I could get their whole life story.

And they were young enough that it gave it a kind of coherence that

they were all roughly the same age.

They were young enough not to have been written about a whole lot

I thought, you know, I'm not gonna do another book about Rebecca West and

her incredibly fraught motherhood.

I'm not gonna do, I'm not gonna write about Vanessa Bell.

I want to write about women whose stories I haven't heard about so much before.

Hmm hmm.

And it also gave me a narrative thread in the sense that so much

changed in the 20th century.

So much more became possible in the 20th century, and so I felt like

there was an optimistic narrative that was running through the book.

Hmm.

Yeah, I can make you look a little skeptical.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It did.

I was just thinking about my feeling.

No, it definitely did.

It also though, you know, as someone who was born in 1980, I feel like

having been born at that moment obviously feels different than

having been born between 1,919 40.

And so then sitting with these stories, Yes, there is optimism.

I think there's also, there's just that much more hardship at that

particular moment for those particular women than hopefully we have now.

Right.

I mean, we hope that we are progressing.

Mm-hmm.

as a whole, and especially for caregivers and for mothers.

Mm-hmm.

. And I think there's optimism in what they were able to accomplish

despite all those constraints.

I mean, you could speak to this too.

I mean, I think there were some that felt less optimistic than others.

That's true.

And I'm also thinking about, you know, things that we're

losing in the 21st century.

Mm-hmm.

, like abortion rights.

Mm-hmm.

, which are so vital to creative motherhood.

The ability to choose when to have your children.

Mm-hmm.

and.

Under what circumstances.

Reproductive justice, having healthcare.

Mm-hmm.

having a living wage are incredibly important and you know, in

some cases we're losing it.

I mean, where I live in the Netherlands, when my kids were little, daycare was

heavily subsidized, and one of the things that made it possible for me to go on

writing and keep my sanity was having access to four days a week of daycare

without having to work nonstop at a paying job just to pay for those hours.

Wow.

So it gave me a sense that I as a mother had a right to time.

Mm-hmm.

. Had a right to time to use the way I wanted for creative stuff that wasn't

making money or to earn money or to, you know, maybe spend time with my partner.

All these things that are not at all taken for granted in the US in

particularly, but also some of those subsidies have been taken away.

Mm-hmm.

in the Netherlands now.

So I think it's harder now to be a mother and a writer, or a mother

and an artist than it was here, than it was when my kids were little.

Interesting.

And the lack of social structures, right?

I mean, there's so many layers of lacks of support beyond the governmental or

institutional that we lack so much.

Even culturally, I think there's a lack of support in terms of just

the way in which we view children and elderly in capitalist societies.

I feel like there's a lot of get out of the way and you're

not serving any purpose, so—

Absolutely.

You know, we don't want any of our tax money to go to other people's children.

We don't really want you to spend your time raising children because that's not

productive of Productive of what money, I guess this resentment of the time

that care is put into caring for kids.

Yeah.

I think that when you speak of the idea, because this is not an American one at

this moment of having four days a week of childcare that I'm not paying for like

the, the mental calculus of that for me.

Mm-hmm.

is sort of mind blowing because every moment that I am spending

away from my children the, even the idea of spending mm-hmm.

, there's very few ways for me to do that.

Yeah.

You're paying for it in a way that's paying for it, and so when I am then

choosing also to do something that.

Often unpaid.

It's like this double burden of unpaid labor.

It's like, well, my creative pursuits tend not to be, again, not valued

in a way that can support my family.

It's a lot harder to do that as opposed to a lot of other careers, and so

weirdly, the subsidies for childcare in a way, in my own head anyways, would

somehow value my childcare as well.

Like it would give value to my time.

And to the choices that you make about your time.

Right?

Yeah.

Because it's allowing me to make those choices versus to not be able to because

of the cost, which is also skyrocketing.

So there's that.

You pose this question and also I think all of the work that you're examining

does as well about how we think about motherhood and intellectualism

together, and also how we think about motherhood as an intellectual concept.

And I was curious how that came about in your work and also how

you've wrestled with that personally.

It's there right from the beginning in anything

that you say about motherhood and intellectual life, that there's a

perceived split between them- that is an idea they cannot exist together.

That the kind of emotional and physical labor of care and the labor

of thinking, the labor of intellectual work, they just can't go together.

Not only in terms of time, but in terms of thinking about them

conceiving the combination of those two and what it might look like.

And of course there's a lot of moral judgment that comes into that because

there's this old idea that thinking too much is going to be bad for the baby.

It's going to draw you away from that labor of care.

It's going to make you emotionally inaccessible to this family

that is making demands on you.

There's a fear that women will neglect their care work, I think.

I mean, the whole society is built on women's care work.

I understand why it's policed so much.

Mm-hmm.

, I understand why the motherhood police is always telling you

that you're doing it wrong.

It's always asking you when you're going to have another child, or

why didn't you have another child?

Or is always voicing an opinion about how many days your kid should be in

daycare and what you should, whether ,you know, you should be leaving

it to cry or not leaving it to cry.

I mean, it is the basis of civilization.

It is not really so strange that people want to control it, but you do have to

turn your back on that at some point.

Hmm.

You have to say, okay, I am going to define it for myself, but it is hard

and there is this sense of mother and thinker as a negative space.

This came up actually in an interview I just

did last week with a writer who wrote this book called Linea Nigra.

Her name is Jazmina Barrera.

Oh, that's a wonderful book.

Yeah.

And she was talking about, oh, now here my brain goes.

Speaking of postpartum . What was she talking?

. Oh my God.

The interruptions.

Okay, let's let it go.

It'll come back.

It always comes back.

Yeah.

But speaking of your book and the way in which, like you said, the quotes,

the personal interludes, you wrote the book that you needed to read.

I needed to read this book too.

So clearly it's not, you know, it is you and it's not, and

I really appreciated that.

It's interesting though, isn't it, that it isn't a lot

of sustained thought about motherhood.

I kept finding a single quote that I thought expressed something really well.

A single bit of insight.

You know, there are some really great attempts to tackle the problem

of motherhood on the theoretical level of maternal subjectivity.

Mm-hmm.

. Mm-hmm.

And I think Maternal Encounters by Lisa Baraitser is the best one where she, she's

the one that talks about interruption as the state of motherhood, the, the

sort of fundamental state of motherhood and having to learn to live with that.

Yeah.

I appreciate by the way, after I read your book, I bought her book and I was

just trying to look for it cause it was just on my desk and it's since moved.

But yeah, it's wonderful.

And Chelsea Conaboy's book Mother Brain, which I'm sure you've read is

also fantastic about talking about the science of what is actually happening

to you in that first postpartum year.

Mm-hmm.

and why it feels like your life is being turned upside down.

Mm-hmm.

And why your emotions are so intense.

Speaking of those interruptions and the pauses,

it's interesting, right, because you are suddenly holding a lot

more than you are previously.

I mean, you are literally carrying and caring for others.

Mm-hmm.

in a biological way that requires this sort of restratifying.

Right.

So that when I'm talking to you and I'm losing my train of thought, maybe

I'm losing my train of thought with you because somehow my executive

form functioning or whatever is, is telling me like I need to

be thinking in this or, or not.

But it's just, it's so convoluted.

And so before we started recording, you had mentioned that just yesterday

you helped your daughter with a move.

And in thinking about those interruptions and the holding and the space and how

that works, either with or against the work that we do as creatives as a whole,

that it doesn't end that, like you said, it's not an only early postpartum.

I think there's a heightened obvious reason why there's more of that

potentially early on, but that doesn't change that once you are a

mother, once you are a parent, once you are a caregiver, it is forever.

And apparently, as I've recently experienced, once you

start caring for the older generation or caring for anybody else, you go

straight back into that care mind.

Mm-hmm.

, that very intense, very emotionally overwhelmed state that I think I

would've, it would've happened to me anyway, but I recognized that I knew

it because I'd been there before.

Hmm.

I think even this is the first time I think, for me anyway, that I've,

just the way that you're talking about the care mind in that way.

Mm-hmm.

It's intellectualizing it.

I mean, and I'm not saying that in a pejorative way.

I mean, it really is.

It's holding space for something that we haven't, I think

culturally at least been able to.

Examine and hold space for, and then thus honor, I do think

that like, right, because the intellectual allows it to be honored.

Oh, I remember.

I remember what I was gonna say earlier.

Okay.

So yes, Mina was saying that it feels like there's a lot more energy

and attention on motherhood right now in the cultural sense at least.

And maybe that's, uh, an echo chamber.

I don't know.

No, no, no.

I think that's very true.

Yeah, it does feel like that.

Yeah.

Like there's more that's being published and she was saying like, but I hope

it's not just a motherhood moment.

It feels like it could almost be stolen from us in a sense of like,

if it's just, oh, well, okay, see we're, we're gonna have this little

motherhood moment where we seem to care and seem to publish, or will that end?

Or is it just that?

Okay, now we just, almost in some ways of naming the literature, obviously,

or having the moment having there be attention to the fact that there

is, it does sort of steal the power because it should just be a part

of, like, we have so many narratives about grief and death and loss.

Mm-hmm.

, and yet so little about birth.

And love stories.

I mean, there's plenty of room in love stories to feel and think

about your feeling at the same time.

Hmm.

And so I don't see why you couldn't write motherhood the same way.

Why you can't have all those feelings and you know, have your

thinking mind be operating as well as long as you have time.

Mm-hmm.

To go back to the idea of having, is motherhood a moment or is it

something that's going to last.

I think it might be something like feminism where you start thinking

about it in a new way and then it ebbs again, and then something exciting

happens and then it comes back.

And you make a new step forward and then it ebbs away again.

And maybe there are some losses, you know, like the overturning of Roe v.

Wade.

Mm-hmm.

is clearly a loss for motherhood and for feminism.

Mm-hmm.

. And then maybe there's something that happens politically.

Mm-hmm.

. That put Smothers in a better place.

Maybe.

Maybe we'll get more subsidies for daycare someday ever . And then, you

know, a new book is gonna come out.

If that is gonna make us think about motherhood in an even more

enlightening way, and we'll keep moving.

Mm-hmm.

, I hope.

Mm-hmm.

, I'm really looking forward to when that book comes out.

, Kaitlin Solimine: I think it's right here.

I did wanna address and, and get a deeper sense for the time of this book.

And I also kind of wanted to push you a little bit.

You said this book took too much time.

Mm-hmm.

, you said, I started thinking about it when my children were in elementary school, and

as I finished, they're both in college.

If I could keep reading, I love this paragraph.

Living in and out of the house as their plans change or are changed by

the long, slow pandemic time, they don't outgrow their clothes anymore,

though their body's temporal progress still shows in a vertical clock of

pencil marks on our kitchen wall.

As a parent of young children, I just, that just really got under

my skin in a really emotional and beautiful way, and I appreciated it.

But I, I needed to ask, you said it took too much time and of

course I feel a judgment there.

It took time.

Right.

So it, the, the idea that you're saying it took too much time.

I was curious if you could sit with that a little bit.

Well, aside from it going way over the deadline and I spent a lot

of time to, at some point, you know, having said, well, you know, obviously it

needs to be a diverse group of writers.

At some point I realized, oh, I don't know very much about black women mothering.

I mm-hmm.

. I had a lot of Dunning Kruger effect.

The less, you know, the more you think you know.

Hmm.

And the more you know, the more you realize that there is to know.

Mm-hmm.

and the more humbled you are by your own lack of knowledge.

Mm-hmm.

, and that was a learning curve for me and I felt like I had to,

I really needed to do that work.

I couldn't just say, oh, well, it's not that important.

I'll just write a faster book and leave those thoughts out.

That didn't seem fair.

That seemed like cheating.

Mm-hmm.

the easy way out.

But then there were whole periods of time when I just didn't know what the

book was about and where it was going and, and when I just kinda set it aside

and thought every day that I should be working on it and didn't work on it and,

you know, found ways to procrastinate and at some point I read a passage by Ursula

Le Guin, where she talks about heroism and she says she's frustrated with heroism.

She feels like it is just the old fantasy of men with swords slaying the dragon and

rescuing the maid and that she wants a new way of telling stories, but so she said,

I don't think a hero can be a mother.

I don't think a mother can be a hero.

And I felt this terrible irritation and frustration that made me

realize I want mothers to be heroes.

I want them to be heroes not in the slaying-the-dragon sense,

but I just want them to be the heroes of their own stories.

To be able to be at the center and not pushed off to the side.

And it made me realize that I hadn't conceived of them that way yet.

Hmm.

In their motherhood, their, I was writing about their motherhood

as things happening to them.

Hmm.

And not as things that they were doing that were changing them.

Hmm.

And that was, I think, the, the insight that made it possible

for me to finish the book.

Hmm.

At what part of the process did that happen?

Basically when all the chapters were done.

Mm-hmm.

, except Audre Lorde.

Audre Lorde was going to be a short chapter and Susan Sontag

was going to be a long one.

And then I just found it to too difficult to write about Susan Sontag's life, and

I didn't like her motherhood very much.

Hmm.

Although in retrospect and talking later to somebody who knew her, I think that she

might have been on the autism spectrum, which I kind of wish I'd discussed as

a possibility because I think that that undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder

would really complicate your motherhood.

Mm-hmm.

in ways that clearly were not her fault.

Mm-hmm.

, and it makes it possible for you to see that, that not her fault.

I really enjoyed discussing the concept of maintenance

work in relation to the political activism of women and caregivers with Julie.

It was something I hadn't thought about and hadn't framed in the way that she had,

and I found it really helpful to look at the work that we do both in the home and

outside of the home through that lens.

To that end, as I've previously mentioned, we're looking at ways to maintain this

space on the podcast as a place we can offer a living wage to our production

team to eventually build out caregiver stipends for our guests, and to build a

residency program for listeners like you.

It's definitely a hustle, I'm not gonna lie, but I'm excited that

sometimes there are glimmers of hope.

And in this episode, we'd love to highlight a product and company

that's working to build technologies to assist caregivers in early

phases of postpartum and caregiving.

The Bonoch Long Range Baby Monitor.

I have to say that even as a co-sleeping family of five, there are many times

I've left my children in bed or a bassinet and needed the security and

safety of a monitor to know they're safe.

The Bonoch Long Range Baby Monitor is perfect for larger

houses and bigger families.

So you can effortlessly hear your children when they wake

and ensure they're cared for.

At the same time, as you know in early postpartum and recovery from childbirth,

having an extra set of eyes on a sleeping infant is that needed peace

of mind to get better rest and care.

To find out more about the impressive specifications of the Bonoch Long Range

Baby Monitor and to receive a special 30% discount available only to our

listeners, please check the links in our show notes and also the Bonoch website,

which is https://invi.tt/P27J (Probably easier to find it in the links.) Now

picking back up on our conversation with Julie about maintenance work.

I still sort of found ways to let maintenance work

get in the way of writing I noticed actually in the fall of 2020, I

did a ton of get out the vote work.

Mm-hmm.

, because I was so anxious, about what might happen.

Mm-hmm.

, and I think of that as maintenance work in, you know,

Miriam Muley is a sense mm-hmm.

of the cooking and the cleaning, and the keeping the household running

and keeping the country going along.

Mm-hmm.

without too much disaster is also just a kind of maintenance that I think is

done a lot by middle-aged moms actually.

Mm-hmm.

. Mm-hmm.

. And you're abroad?

Yeah.

I live in the Netherlands.

I live in Amsterdam.

I mean, I talk about that a little bit I was saying that I raised kids

in really different circumstances, and I think much happier circumstances.

It's a much more relaxed parenting culture here.

People can afford to work part-time.

A lot of women, and particularly mothers, tend to work part-time, which

is a very relaxed way to raise kids.

Ideally, you know, both the mothers and the fathers would work part-time.

Mm-hmm.

, but often it's the mother.

So there's a debate about that.

Why?

Why is it women who given the choice, choose that?

Should they choose other things?

I think there's pressure on women here to be less ambitious.

Mm-hmm.

in ways that maybe are not good.

While I also think that the pressure on women in the US to work really hard

and earn and achieve and, you know, to support their kids and to pay for the

daycare and so, and is not great either.

Mm-hmm.

, but you know, of course you look at the US and you know, you think this

could, you know, it's still my country and it, it's scary that it happens

and it has an effect worldwide.

I mean, people look at it and say people in other countries are

influenced by what happens in the US.

Yeah.

It's also a responsibility to my kids in a certain way, even

though my kids think it's stupid.

But getting out the, the, the work of—

the getting out the vocal stuff, they think it's a, they think it's

kinda a stupid, weird hobby, but.....

...because they feel like it won't have an impact

or because it's something that is taking you away from them or what?

I mean, I'm just...

Oh, I just, I think that the impact feels very, abstract

when you're a kid and you feel like your parents are taking care of the

world and it's all going to be fine.

Hmm.

And kids are aware a lot of particularly climate change.

Mm-hmm.

. and I got involved in politics partly through helping my daughter

organize a March for Our Lives event.

Oh, wow, wow.

Because I was thinking a lot about my own kids and if they should

ever go to school in the us mm-hmm.

and what could happen.

Mm-hmm.

, you know, I mean, they're looking to me to, to fix all this, but in that

case, somebody in my generation has to be doing that very basic work.

That maintenance work.

Mm-hmm.

. Yeah.

That work that has to get repeated over and over and over and over just to

keep things running on a basic level.

Mm-hmm.

Interesting.

I hadn't thought of that political work in that way, but it makes a lot of sense.

And like you said, it's likely a reason why the demographic fits the work as well.

And I don't know whether or not are we acc cultured to sit in that space?

Or is there an expectation of this is the type of work that you do

and therefore it fits that mold?

I'm certainly not studied enough to understand that, but I'm just

thinking about it as you're saying it.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know.

I mean, I get why women would show up for that work.

I don't get why more men don't show up for that work.

It is, it is not visible labor like your

children are saying, right?

Like you're not, that doesn't, you don't see the impact in a tangible sense.

No.

If that's true,

it's not very glamorous.

Yeah, it's not very visible.

Right.

It's much more exciting to talk about making change than it

is to talk about maintaining

. Kaitlin Solimine: Interesting.

I've been thinking about this a lot, about

the value of just maintaining.

The value of keeping going as opposed to working for those

moments of radical change.

And yet, and yet my whole book was about admitting those moments of change

into the narrative of motherhood.

If you don't mind my asking, have you unpacked, like why

you're sitting with that more right now?

Moments of maintaining?

Oh, I think, you know, cuz there was just another election

cause of this work of care for an older person I've been doing, bringing me back

to that very basic place of, you know, here is someone who needs to eat mm-hmm.

and you need to come up with something that she can eat, that she will eat.

You need to coax her to eat.

Mm-hmm.

, you need to make sure she's comfortable.

You need to, you know, do a lot of cleaning work.

Mm-hmm.

The value in that.

It's so interesting.

And the intimacy of it was really intense.

Mm-hmm.

for, especially for someone who you were not maybe intimate with.

Mm-hmm.

on that level before.

Right.

But you had me thinking back to the quote that you mentioned in terms of Ursula

Le Guin, the hero, the heroism , because I feel like that applies to what you're

saying in terms of the maintenance work.

I mean, there isn't heroism in that, at least no.

Right.

And so therefore, as a culture, it's difficult then to ascertain

the value when there isn't the hero.

And I think that's what Ursula was saying was, Hey, let's

look at the value of maintenance work.

Let's look at the value of gathering instead of hunting.

Let's look at the value of caring instead of fighting, you know,

let's make stories out of that.

Hmm.

Hmm.

How does your book wrestle with that then?

I think what I realized was that all of the women that I wrote

about had moments when their lives fell apart or when they fell apart emotionally,

when either in connection to their art or in connection to their motherhood

when they just, it was too much for them.

Or they hit a wall or they hit a crisis or their work wasn't

going, or they ran out of money.

Mm-hmm.

or they lost a child.

Mm-hmm.

And they had to recollect themselves and put themselves back together emotionally

and find a new house, find a new partner, start writing again after a long pause.

Hmm.

And I think that's heroic.

Hmm.

To collect the pieces and keep moving.

Mm-hmm.

. And to hopefully discover something about yourself in that process.

And I think that's really what biography is about.

Achievements is that the dissent into the underworld and in its very Joseph Campbell

sort of terms and coming back with new knowledge about yourself in the world.

And I think that happens in motherhood all the time.

And you just have to look and you just have to recognize, Hmm.

Thank you.

I feel like I shouldn't say anything else now.

That was perfect.

Like served it on a platter.

Thank you.

I have nothing else to say that was really lovely in terms of just tying

together all the threads that are loosely jumbling around threads,

marbles, whatever inside my brain when I read your work, so I appreciate.

And actually answers a question that I was going to ask and I don't have to in

terms of, I think you've answered it.

Well go ahead.

I might have something else.

Ok.

Okay, fine, fine, fine.

I was gonna say in terms of your work as a biographer, because to be honest, I don't

know that I've know many biographers.

I've spoken to many biographers, and so hearing you speak about biography

in that way is really helpful.

But I was curious in terms of your work as a biographer and

a mother and that intersection.

Mm-hmm.

And I think you just, if there's more to say than what you just said.

Hmm.

I mean, one thing about, you know, I'm working on the biography of Ursula

K Le Guin, that's my next project.

And people tend to look at that and say, well, not very much happened in her life,

so how are you going to deal with that?

And I think.

Okay, here is somebody who, she came from a certain place.

She had a certain education, she got married, she had three kids,

she raised kids, she worked.

And on the surface, that's a very kind of ordinary story, and this is somebody

with such an intense inner life.

And so many complex wrestlings with that inner life and with her situation

and somebody who was constantly reinventing herself as a writer.

And I think, how can you not be excited by that?

Hmm?

How can you not see that the narrative of biography is always the inner life.

Mm-hmm.

, no matter where the person is or who they're meeting, you know, it's always

about how they are shaped by their circumstances and what they do with it.

How that emerges in their work.

Hmm.

Well, thank you because you've also answered my other question, which was

in terms of your next book and your next work, where I think some additional

color could be given is in terms of where your care work and your maintenance

work are right now as a biographer and as a writer, and where they're heading.

If you could just tell us more about whether or not that looks different

or how that feels different, how the constraints are or are not different?

Yeah.

My kids are 24 and 21.

My son, who's 24, is still living at home and going to college and my

daughter's not living at home right now, but she's in the same city, so

I have the good fortune to get, spend a fair amount of time with them.

But I definitely identify with the writers who I talk about who found

the empty nest painful, and who found the shift from full-time motherhood to

part-time assistant parenting difficult.

I really enjoyed my motherhood.

I really liked living in a family.

Mm-hmm.

, I really liked the demands that it made on me and felt like I could,

most of the time, more or less answer those demands as opposed to the

demands of writing, which seemed to me much more mysterious and difficult.

And some people, I think, are exactly the other way around.

There are so, so, so very many responses to both of those things.

Mm-hmm.

I was curious if you think whether or not it's something specific to

you personally or specific to your circumstances that allowed you to enjoy

the motherhood work that you have done.

I identify with Audre Lorde, who felt very unrecognized as a

kid and who in being able to recognize her own children to use her psychological

gifts to see them and value them for who they were, was able also to repair some

of the feelings that she had had as a kid.

And I think that it was a process like that for me too.

] Kaitlin Solimine: Hmm.

Yeah.

I, I feel that and I once you have that confidence in self and in them, like I

think that for me at least, whether this is on or off the record, I don't know

where it'll go with this, but I just feel like I, especially where I am now

as a mother of three, is just liberating weirdly, it's like, it's not supposed to

be liberating, but the more liberating it becomes, the more empowered I become as

a mother and as a writer, interestingly.

Liberating in what way?

From ideas about how it should be done, you mean?

Yeah, I think so, but also in terms of the more I am

able to see my children as human beings, honestly, in a way that I

don't, that I was, or that culturally, generationally, that children were.

Mm-hmm.

. The more I empower my children, the more I empower myself, the more that they

have a sense of self, the more mm-hmm.

I do.

It's so odd.

Yeah.

It's a great gift to be able to give someone.

And how often do you have that chance to give such a powerful gift?

Mm-hmm.

, right?

Not with the intimacy, as you said.

I think there's few relationships that you have that kind of intimacy of

relationship where there is that power.

And I think that that's where personally, or I think also culturally, like there

is so much power in the parent-child relationship and so to be able to

empower children at the same time.

For me, it's just sort of rights the balance and it also has

allowed me to do my own, my own work that was needed to be done.

But I am, it has impacted my own writing and my own creativity in

different ways that at sometimes I worry about in terms of whether or not

it's impacting it negatively or not.

And I'm not talking about like the time or the the interruptions.

I'm talking more about just the work that I wanna do as a writer

and worrying that it's not gonna fit the scope and the the cannon.

And that's something that Jazmina and I had spoke about as well, of

what is sort of allowed to fit.

And so when you start to write in a way that feels somehow outside of

the traditional Western patriarchal

yeah, I mean maybe you can sort of carry some of that

empathy practice into biography.

Mm.

. but, it's difficult because you do have to turn off some of the parts

of yourself that you love the most.

I think in order to terminate , not just, you know, turning away from your

kids, but turning away from that side of yourself, that is for others, and that

enjoys being for others and, and into that kind of solitary place where you're

confronted with yourself and you think, oh, haha, finally time to write, but it's

not always as comfortable a place to be.

Mm-hmm.

, although you had me thinking about, again, like the pleasure of that

and, and your, your book and in the biographies do wrestle with this as well.

Right.

The pleasure of motherhood, the pleasure of writing, and again, I think there's

an, and not to make it too political, but to me it just feels like inevitably

there's a kind of activism or resistance in that, and I know there's a lot

culturally that's being spoken about now, like Ross Gay's work on Inciting

Joy and there's a lot of mm-hmm.

momentum around that right of joy as activism.

But I think you're right because there's this sense of, well, if this

is the book that I wanna write, I mean, look, at the end of the day, it's

not gonna pay me very much anyway, so

yeah, just make your monster and stick on some extra things.

But I, I really appreciate hearing too what you drew from

this work and that you needed to write this book in this way because in the end,

that is what worked and it worked for me, so, and I know it's working for others.

So thank you for sticking to that kernel of truth.

I mean, thinking about the way the book has been received, one of the

things I've been considering lately is how it is— I mean, it's fantastic that it is

affirming for people and that people can recognize themselves, but in a sense that

seems to edge it out of the literary world that I thought it was in, in a funny way.

And I wonder if maybe, you know, audiences really want an artist or

writer who's an art monster because that person is more completely devoted

to them, to the audience as well.

I mean, you don't wanna have to share your, share your

artist with with their kid.

You don't wanna know that they wrote the book in between naps.

Mm-hmm.

, you don't wanna think about it's almost like sibling rival.

Hmm.

Hey, I'm here too.

Mm-hmm.

I'm your reader.

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Yeah.

That intersubjectivity that happens through the process of

art, but then parenting too.

That's so inter— yeah.

Gosh, I hadn't thought about that.

We're like greedy little kids saying, be there for me.

Create a world just for me.

Hm.

Don't share it.

That's so funny.

I personally, I actually really like work that does that, but I don't know,

I haven't unpacked why I'm like that.

That that does what?

I, I prefer work that is attempting to also understand itself.

So I prefer work that doesn't just sit in a box in a sort of like,

isn't this packaged deal but rather that kinda wrestles with its own.

The kinda auto fiction that acknowledges the

circumstances of its own creation.

Mm-hmm.

. Yeah.

I mean that's kind of great too.

Yeah.

I mean, I love Annie or No, so , before she won the award, I was like, oh

my gosh, I'm so happy that she won.

And also like, yeah, yeah, . But again, it's a particular artistry I think.

And so that's just for me that's a form that speaks to me more than others.

And that's the beauty of obviously like, right?

I mean, all of the different works that you encounter in this book and

the diversity of motherhood as well.

I think.

Yeah.

If you can't identify with some of the writers, at least you can find, hopefully

you can find something that doesn't make you feel excluded from the book because

you're kind of mothering isn't in it.

Mm-hmm.

. Yeah.

Interesting.

Your temperament or your needs aren't in it.

I love belonging to the community that I feel like I've landed

in of, creative mothers.

It's an amazing place.

Mm-hmm.

seeing everybody's work.

I think that community was always there.

Hmm.

, but it does really have a new energy and intensity that I think

wasn't there when I was working.

Mm-hmm.

. Yeah.

I definitely feel like there's so many ways in which there are now so

many different supportive communities, depending upon your own mm-hmm.

identification and your own experiences.

And so I think there's, I, I really appreciated seeing that a lot more that is

speaking to the intersection of motherhood and creativity and caregiving and mm-hmm.

and is doing amazing work, both being supportive and also being forward

thinking and active and political and just, just sort of like politicizing a

lot of things that actually then give, like we were saying, like can give

a lot more power to the maintenance work and just becoming more mainstream

in a way than like you were saying, where the motherhood narrative isn't

just seen as this moment or like a section of the right child, but rather.

The motherhood memoir section.

Right, that it's now, it's just the more here it is, then

the more power it has in that sense.

So I appreciate that, and I'm really grateful to have read and reread

and I could we'll continue to reread your book and also the books that it

pointed me to, which I also really appreciated to explore other things

that I may not have been exposed to.

I really appreciated that as well.

You know?

Motherhood is such a huge topic.

It's really tempting to want to go everywhere and read every book and

acknowledge every experience and go down every sort of political and

cultural and creative happening , and I wish I could have done that, but

that was another thing that took me a long time was just feeling

like there's always more out there.

Yeah.

And I hope that those books get written.

I hope that the people who are working on those books are working on them right now.

Yeah.

I think in a weird way, actually, I, I've been obsessed.

You've been obsessed with the maintenance.

I've been obsessed with scarcity lately, and I think mm-hmm.

, as you're saying that, it's making me feel like Right.

There's a sense as a writer, I think that like, oh my gosh, I'm, I, I'm, I'm

not doing, I'm not pulling in enough.

And I'm like you said, but it just.

Let that there is someone else's moment to do that or someone else's interest

and, and we can do what we can here.

Mm-hmm.

again, there's like a liberation in that and that pushes against

the scarcity sense, right.

Like that Oh no, no one can do that.

No one's gonna have unpacked that or, or mentioned that book or, right.

Like, uh, dug into that narrative.

It's not all your work to do.

Mm-hmm.

. Yeah, exactly.

Well, thank you.

Many, many lessons learned from me here today.

So I have, like I, I, I have like, I tend to like put up little quotes and

your book does a wonderful way of having these really wonderfully concise ways of

saying things that I can't say clearly.

So I think that this conversation also has done that for me.

So I'm excited to extract wonderful pieces of wisdom from this and

remind myself of it down the road.

So thank you for that too.

I really enjoyed this conversation with Julie Phillips

whose work The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Mothering,

and the Mind-baby Problem can be found in our show notes and on our

bookshop.org recommended reading list.

I highly recommend you check it out.

A reminder too, that as listeners, you'll receive a special 30% discount

on The Bonoch Long Range Baby Monitor.

So please be sure to check out our links in the show notes for the

discount code and to learn more.

I am your host, Kaitlin Solimine, and this is the

Postpartum Production Podcast.

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Thank you for listening today and being a valuable part of this community

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pushing forward with a new system in which art and caregiving are