In case anyone forgot, the past two years have been a reminder of just how hard it is for a woman to have children and get any work done. In her new book, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Mothering, and the Mind-Baby Problem (Norton, April 26), biographer Julie Phillips examines the role motherhood played in the lives of painter Alice Neel; writers Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Angela Carter, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison; and many others.

A few of the stories are well known, but Phillips fleshes them out and complicates them. Yes, Lessing left two young children behind when she moved from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to England, but letters she wrote to a friend reveal the conflicts she had with her ex-husband as she tried to spend more time with them before she left. Penelope Fitzgerald, married to a lawyer with a drinking problem, struggled to support her family and didn’t publish her first book until age 58.

A.S. Byatt once said that Fitzgerald was a genius, and “geniuses are not nice people.” Mothers are supposed to be nice people, so how to square that circle? Phillips, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (2006), has been exploring the lives of women writers for years; she’s now working on a full-scale biography of Le Guin. We spoke over Zoom from Amsterdam, where she lives with her partner, Jan van Houten, and two children, Eise, 23, and Jooske, 20. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Your own experiences as a mother and a writer clearly informed the book, but it’s not a memoir at all—you barely mention yourself.

I was just so curious about other people’s experiences. And in some ways, I felt like my experience didn’t compare with theirs, partly because I live in a country that has subsidized day care and health care, and it’s much, much easier to survive with a kid. And I had a really supportive partner, so it wasn’t the kind of fraught space for me that it is for a lot of people. My experience was more like Ursula Le Guin’s—being a mother actually made a happier space for me to work in; it was a nice solid emotional base for me where I could go out and deal with the scariness of writing from this place of certainty about what I was doing and whether I was needed in other parts of my life. It was nice to have something I thought I was good at.

How did you approach writing the book, which includes minibiographies of so many different women?

It took me a long time, because first you have to research everybody’s life. There are a lot of books of biographical essays that do such a good job on where women come from and their careers—a book like Sharp [by Michelle Dean], about women critics, that’s a book that I really love about how their careers and their personal lives intersect. But you need an extra layer of intimacy to talk about motherhood, you need to do research in personal papers, you need to go looking for things you don’t find anywhere else, because it’s not something that people talk about. And that was the other biggest part of my problem, I think, just not knowing how to think about motherhood in a biographical way. How to take what often amounts to a bunch of anecdotes and turn it into a story of someone’s life.

A lot of the recent writing about motherhood, which is really great and really exciting, by people like Jenny Offill and Sheila Heti, Sarah Manguso, Kate Zambeno, there’s a whole list—and The Argonauts [by Maggie Nelson], of course—they’re all talking about this really immediate experience, what happens in the first year, what’s the process of getting used to being a mother. So this incredibly complicated process has been intensely documented in recent years, but then the whole course of somebody’s life, where they are not only becoming a mother, but then moving on, and then the next phase, and how they deal with their vocation, and what the problems were. And they all had trouble with the empty nest, which surprised me. I realized that this was a missing piece of the story.

It was interesting that you chose women who were older. The youngest is Alice Walker, who was born in 1944.

I really wanted whole lives, to see how that played out. And I wanted to do the 20^th century partly just for time unity, because it’s not one of those books where people knew each other.

Even though your subjects aren’t all connected, it felt like they were part of the same milieu. There were people connecting them—Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich.

Yeah, Adrienne Rich keeps coming in with some really great quotes. Allen Ginsberg keeps showing up. I didn’t put him in the Susan Sontag section, but Sontag knew him in Paris, and he was babysitting Diane di Prima’s kids, and he intersected with Ursula Le Guin. One of the great things I wouldn’t have found if I hadn’t gone into the papers was all these letters from Diane di Prima to Audre Lorde, and that made me realize how much their friendship was based on both mutual admiration and influence in their writing and also, you know, “Thanks a lot for the box of baby clothes.” Diane di Prima gave Audre Lorde a desk and published her first book of poems, and Audre Lord delivered Diane di Prima’s fourth baby!

There are so many voices in the book, not only those of the women you write full chapters about. There are sections that are almost grab bags of quotes about motherhood.

I liked the idea of having so many voices because there are so many different ways to be a mother. And also I thought maybe this will be a useful resource for other people. In Tillie Olsen’s Silences, she has all these different quotes, partly from men silencing women and partly from women about the experience of being silenced. And I read other books and essays all the time that still draw on those quotes, and I thought, I don’t know how well it works to read all these quotes, but maybe they will be useful for other people thinking about motherhood. And some of them are just really funny.

This book is about motherhood, but virtually all the women you write about also had abortions. What effect did that have on their lives?

It was massively important for all of them. And not only because in a lot of cases it made their careers possible. They were almost all illegal abortions, and so there was this feeling of having survived at all. But it also gave them a really strong sense of self-possession and self-determination that they had made this choice for themselves about their bodies and their future.

You also write a lot about contraception.

I didn’t really think that a book about mothering was going to be a book about contraception quite as much as it was, but it created drama in every single one of their lives—trying to get contraception, trying to have a plan versus unplanned babies. And to some extent, I put in a lot of information about contraception to say: Don’t judge. Don’t judge Doris Lessing for having a kid at 20, don’t judge Susan Sontag for having a kid at 19, don’t judge women for getting into these situations because there weren’t a lot of other options. And the more abortion continues to be contested in the United States, the more I think it’s super important to realize that this whole generation of women writers in the 20^th century simply would not have existed without effective contraception.

That sounds like the headline, Julie.

Unfortunately, like everything about motherhood, you should be able to take it for granted, but you can’t. You should be able to take for granted that there are books about maternal psychology that actually look at it from a mother’s perspective and not a child’s, you should be able to take for granted that affordable day care should be available so that women can get their work done, you should take for granted that women can have all the support they need to have children if they want to have children and not to have children if they don’t want them.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.