Customer Reviews

A Question of Balance: Artists and Writers on Motherhood

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Whether or not you are an artist or another career-woman, this book offers insight and advice and encouragement to anyone who is struggling with combining ambition and motherhood while keeping sane. I recommend this book to my women's group and any mother I meet.

As an artist and mother of a toddler with another on the way, I found this book invaluable in helping me see that I am not alone in my frustrations & struggles of balancing my two passions.

There are 11 artists and 14 writers interviewed. While I couldn't relate to every woman featured, I took bits of advice and perspective from most of them. It was the first book I've ever read on this topic and it made me hungry for more.

I've listed the artists & writers interviewed below:

Artists:
Linda Vallejo, Alisa Saar, Sarah Charlesworth, Roxanne Swentzell, Bea Nettles, Karen Horn, Elizabeth Murray, May Stevens, Trina Schart Hyman, Betye Saar & Faith Ringgold

Writers:
Mary Morris, Cristina Garcia, Perri Klass, Dorothy Allison, Mary Gordon, Rita Dove, Kate Braverman, Joyce Maynard, Patricia Smith, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Jane Yolen, Linda Hogan, Rosellen Brown, Ursula K. Le Guin

I find biographies so inspiring and this collection of 25 mini-biographies on artists and writers balancing their craft with motherhood was just what I needed since it addresses what I'm struggling with now. I think what distinguished this book from others I've read on similar topics is that the interviewer included the practicalities, how they actually do it: these women's daily schedules, their weekly schedules, whether they have home help, how the practicalities changed as their children got older. It's such a wide selection of women that you get a great sense of the variety of the ways women cope. She also covers artists and writers of different ages and stages of motherhood - women with babies and women whose children are grown and left home. Such a great book. I wish someone would update it.

If you have a creative woman in your life you truly love - have her read this book. It will lighten her heart.

Reading the personal accounts of other writers and artists that have combined motherhood with creative life gives one hope that more women can achieve great things. Though we seem wired from birth to nurture others, many of us feel in our souls the need to have our lives stand for something more. This book is a testament to all women that it can be done - and done well - with balance and grace.

This is my other favorite book in the studio. Each of my jobs as mother and artist are like crawling under a rock. Art is done lonely, slaving away without recognition for long spurts between shows, sublimating self into objects. Kids demand everything I have, especially when they are newborn, there is virtually no time for me to exist. I don't make my professional identity to hang out with other artist moms, that wouldn't even be good for business. I just love having this and one other book like it around for redemption. Agree or not with their parenting styles, it feels good and makes me wiser to know how they did it, how it is, how it goes in their worlds as artists and mothers. Candid stories, valuable stories, lessons but no preaching.