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<\/a>Luckily, I had borrowed a pile of books from the library just before I got ill. The literary fiction didn\u2019t work for me.\u00a0 The non-fiction went a little better, although I skimmed and skipped and therefore can\u2019t really remember how to have a beautiful mind, the science and secrets of memory, the ultimate guide to household budgeting, and radical science fiction from 1950 to 1985. The one that really defeated me was The High Magic of Talismans and Amulets: Tradition and<\/em> Craft by Claude Lecouteux. Not Now, Not Ever: Ten Years On From the Misogyny Speech<\/em>, edited by Julia Gillard, had me alternately cheering and seething at how so much has changed, but not enough. Watching footage of the speech, I wondered once again how Tony Abbott ever became Prime Minister.<\/p>\nA lot of reading lately, but no writing. Exactly three years after the original covid lockdown in Victoria, I finally caught the virus. That was three weeks ago, and I\u2019m only just emerging from the illness. I have to say, … Continue reading <\/a>One book I\u2019d like to read again was The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem <\/em>by Julie Phillips. She looks at the ways in which creative women who are also mothers face the challenge of meshing the two identities of mother and artist. Her subjects are varied – writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Alice Walker and visual artists such as Alice Neel, Louise Bourgeois and Barbara Hepworth. There\u2019s a long-held idea (or prejudice) that you can\u2019t be a mother and an artist. Both are all-consuming: something\u2019s got to give. Women have to choose between maternity and ambition because a \u201creal\u201d artist needs solitude, an oasis of freedom tucked away from domestic life and especially the tasks and cares of parenthood. However, these women had the courage to stake a claim for their art –\u00a0 that it mattered, that they mattered – and they devised ways of combining care with their vocations. It’s both inspiring and depressing.
\nAnd made me remember (proudly) the time when I finished a book, typing one-handed, with a newborn held in my other arm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"