10 Books That Resist Conventional Artist-Mother Narratives

I first read Jenny Offil’s Dept. of Speculation when it was published in 2014. Reading it again after the birth of my first child, nearly a decade later, I was newly struck by her concept of the art monster: “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.”

Offil’s protagonist goes on to become not only a wife but a mother. But her concept of the art monster provoked questions, inside the novel and out, of what is required to dedicate oneself to art. Parenthood, especially the role of the mother and/or primary caretaker, has long been popularly understood as antithetical to art-making. English art critic Cyril Connolly’s damning quote, “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,” has held sway over the minds and career prospects of artist-parents for nearly 100 years (though of course the attitude he was describing was centuries old). Moms are boring, the culture seems to agree, mothering is a niche subject, and anyway, aren’t you too busy raising kids to make art?

What, I wondered, did all this portend for me, as an artist-now-mother? I say “wondered,” but I’m understating it by a mile. I became obsessed with how caring for a baby was changing my entire sense of self, while trying to figure out how to reshape my arts practice (which had previously involved performing live onstage 25 weekends a year) into this new role and schedule.

Happily, I am far from the only person asking these questions, as is made clear by a recent shower of books exploring the tensions, possibilities, and challenges of the dual roles of the artist/mother. Ranging widely across genres (memoirs, novels, personal essays, landscape surveys, and biographies), the works below re-examine and resist conventional motherhood narratives, while never shying away from complexity and difficulty.

How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (And Other Parents) by Hettie Judah

In this slim, powerfully argued book, British art critic Hettie Judah makes a well-researched case that barriers to participation for artist-parents are systemic, not personal. Focusing on visual arts, Judah analyzes the challenges artist mothers face, from career-limiting assumptions to a lack of childcare provisions at residencies and exhibition openings that conflict with bedtime. She shares interventions and provocations, such as Berlin’s gallerie asterisk* which allows any artist who gives birth or cares for children to apply for an exhibition (even retroactively) to fill in the blank space on their resume. Judah is adamant and convincing that the current state of affairs is a dual injury: to artist mothers who need to be able to participate in the art world, and to an art world that, by excluding them, is inherently lacking and incomplete. 

Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History by Camille T. Dungy

In this essay collection, award-winning poet Camille T. Dungy is refreshingly direct in confronting the economic realities of parenthood, particularly as a non-tenured professor whose work requires travel multiple times a month. As she flies back and forth across the country with her baby daughter, Dungy offers a nuanced exploration of the ways their Blackness is perceived. In her essay “Inherent Risk, or What I know about investment,” Dungy uses collage-like juxtaposition to contrast her personal dilemmas, trade-offs, and choices, with historical inserts about property and land-use in the Bay Area (her home at the time of writing), creating a complex look at concepts of value and worth. While the book is suffused with love for her daughter, Dungy is clear-eyed about the impossibility of “having it all” as a mother and author, at least under current societal conditions, writing, “I can count seven women writers who told me that having a family cost them at least one book because of the ways they had to reorganize their lives to accommodate having children.”

Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes by Jazmina Barrera

This lyric essay, composed in fragments and elegantly translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, follows the author from pregnancy through early motherhood in Mexico City. Interrupted by literal earthquakes and the profound disruption of becoming a parent, Barrera attempts to write her contracted book but instead writes this one, a book that travels through her experiences and reflections of the stages of pregnancy, her own relationship with her painter mother, cultural stigma around breastfeeding in public, other artists’ perspective on motherhood, and the unfolding wonder and exhaustion of her new baby. Overhearing a man at a bookstore wondering why motherhood has become a popular topic in literature, she asserts “there will be more of us. Many more. In my opinion, there will never be enough of us.”

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story by Leslie Jamison

Like Barrera, Leslie Jamison’s memoir is composed of fragments (“splinters of prose”). While her separation, divorce, and subsequent romantic encounters are major storylines, for me this book was most magnetic in the many sections offering an under-the-microscope look at the kaleidoscopic swirl of emotions generated by caring for a baby while attempting to continue your art practice. She writes, she teaches, she goes on book tour, she wonders at her baby and despairs at how her focus has been shattered. A professor, Jamison describes a photo of a party she held at her house for her students, with her eleven-month-old baby in a bouncer, “and I do look like both a mother and a teacher. But I never felt doubled. I felt more like half a mother and half a teacher, constantly reaching for each identity as if it were a dangling toy—mother, teacher, mother, teacher—until the elastic tether of the other self snapped me away again.”

100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater by Sarah Ruhl

Playwright and poet Sarah Ruhl didn’t have time to write this book, as the title, introduction, and every essay makes clear. These micro-essays are sometimes as short as one paragraph, often barely two pages. (The shortest: “#60. Is there an objective standard of taste? No.”) Even in the author’s introduction to the book, interruptions from her children catch her mid-sentence, perfectly setting the reader up for the brief snatches of thought and theory that follow. 

“In any case, please forgive the shortness of these essays; do imagine the silences that came between—the bodily fluids, the tears, the various shades of—

 In the middle of that sentence my son came in and sat at my elbow and said tenderly, ‘Mom, can I poop here?’” 

The short form may be the native genre of writing for parents of young children, and Ruhl’s book surprises and delights with its brief but keenly observed insights into everything from aspects of playwriting to heart-twisting conversations with her young children. 

From the Womb of Sky and Earth by Leslie Contreras Schwartz

“I have been called monstrous. In my own mythology, I am like Medusa, Lady Blood, La Llorona [but]…What is monstrous is behind the mirror, the people holding it up, the mirror itself tainted with blood and violence.” In these brief, impressionistic essays, poet Leslie Contreras Schwartz explores intricacies and overlaps between motherhood, abusive relationships, friendship, becoming a writer, intergenerational trauma, medicalized racism, and post-partum depression. While unflinching in her presentation of personal and institutional violence, this book offers far more than a story of survival. It’s an assertion of narrative control: In keeping an awareness of her own past while raising her children, Contreras Schwartz argues that to tell a story is to inscribe the future: “Though my mind wants to shift between stories that exist in me, they are stories that I can’t let be passed on.”

The Long Form by Kate Briggs

Kate Briggs’s novel, The Long Form, opens with Helen, a translator, navigating the “co-project” of caring for her baby. With its patient attention to the minutiae of playmats, of watching a baby’s eyes open and close as they drift off, Briggs’ prose reproduces for the reader the way the gravitational pull of caring for a new baby bends time into new shapes. Helen is a translator, and, as she tends to her infant, turns words over and over and inside out. The outside world intrudes into Helen’s intimate, domestic setting when a copy of Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones arrives. As Helen shifts her attention between the baby and the novel—which itself begins with a baby’s arrival—Briggs uses this juxtaposition to explore how the “long form” of literature and the specific novel Tom Jones illuminate the inherently experimental nature of forming a relationship (or executing a “co-project”) with a brand-new human. 

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

Julie Phillips takes a biographic approach to exploring the tensions and possibilities that present themselves to the artist-mother, while interweaving her active thinking and theory-making. With a focus on now-cannonical British and North American visual artists and writers from the 20th century such as Alice Neel, Doris Lessing, and Audre Lorde, Phillips probes their lives and work to examine how they carved a way to make their art despite (often formidable) social and cultural obstacles. But this is no look-at-how-good-we-have-it-by-comparison argument; this is a smart and ambitious book, looking at structures and psychologies that are very much alive today. Phillips never underestimates the challenge and complexity of what she dubs “the Mind-Baby Problem,” offering in the acknowledgements that “I think everyone who tries to shift the motherhood discussion discovers how much that thing weighs and ends up moving it about two inches.” In its keen attention to how motherhood shaped these artists’ work and vice versa, I think this book moved it at least three.

The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity by Catherine Ricketts

While Catherine Ricketts’s book also structures itself around profiles of artist-parents, she interweaves memoir of her own experience of adjusting to motherhood. Though Ricketts discusses established writers and artists such Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Madeleine L’Engle, and Ruth Asawa, I was particularly compelled by her interviews with mid-career living artists, many of whom have received acclaim, but none of whom are at the retrospective-at-the-MoMA stage. In conversation with Lauren Gloans, half of the folk music duo Loland Hum, Ricketts learns how, after the birth of their baby, the couple re-envisioned their approach to performance to de-emphasize their exhausting touring schedule. In these and other interviews, Ricketts is able to highlight the real and highly varied approaches that contemporary, working artists are applying in order to engage in both childcare and art-making. But this book doesn’t offer any easy answers. “First off,” artist LaToya Hobbs advises her, “don’t try to model your practice around what you see other people doing. Be OK with your journey, and give yourself time and grace.”

Mothering Myths: An ABC of Art, Birth, and Care edited by Laurie Cluitmans & Heske Ten Cate

Clocking in at over 280 alphabetically organized pages, this wide-ranging, international, and wonderfully intersectional book takes an encyclopedic approach to cataloguing work and thought around artist motherhood via black-and-white print entries as well as gorgeous, full-color spreads. With entries ranging from “decolonizing the womb” to “drag mothering values,” and from “shit mom” to “trad wife,” Mothering Myths contains essays, excerpts and quotations from contributors including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Angela Davis, Camille Henrot, bell hooks, Silvia Federici, Maggie Nelson, Linda Nochlin, Sheila Heti, Taka Taka, and many, many, many others. This is not a book to sit down and read cover-to-cover, but to dip into during moments of curiosity, despair, and delight. Is this the be-all, end-all of art mom books? I asked myself, before realizing, No, even better—it’s launching an amazing new chapter.