Composing a Life Cover
Podcast Mentions

Composing a Life

Mary Catherine Bateson

Mary Catherine Bateson has been called "one of the most original and important thinkers of our time" (Deborah Tannen). Grove Press is pleased to reissue Bateson's deeply satisfying treatise on the improvisational lives of five extraordinary women. Using their personal stories as her framework, Dr. B...

Podcasts 1
Quotes 4
On Being with Krista Tippett

This book explores the concept of composing a life as an improvisational art, particularly relevant for women balancing career and family in the late 20th century. The podcast extensively discussed the book's central metaphor and its implications for a constantly changing world.

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I've read Composing a Life and I read With a Daughter's Eye years and years ago

— Episode: [Unedited] Mary Catherine Bateson with K...

Episode: [Unedited] Mary Catherine Bateson with Krista Tipp...

This book explores the concept of composing a life as an improvisational art, particularly relevant for women balancing career and family in the late 20th century. The podcast extensively discussed the book's central metaphor and its implications for a constantly changing world.

"

I've read Composing a Life and I read With a Daughter's Eye years and years ago

In a stable society, composing a life is somewhat like throwing a pot or building a house in a traditional form. The materials are known, the hands move along familiar tasks, the fit of the completed whole in common life is understood.

I like to think of men and women as artists of their own lives, working with what comes to hand through accident or talent to compose and recompose a pattern in time that expresses who they are and what they believe in, making meaning even as they are studying and working and raising children, creating and recreating themselves.

Composing a further life?

Note: The book recommendations on this page are discovered automatically from podcast transcripts, and may be incorrect or incomplete.