Composing a Life

which commitments are continually refocused and redefined. We must invest time and passion in specific goals and yet at the same time acknowledge that these are mutable. The circumstances of women’s lives now and in the past provide examples for new ways of thinking about the lives of both men and women. What are the possible transfers of learning when life is a collage of different tasks? How does creativity flourish on distraction? What insights arise from the experience of multiplicity and ambiguity? And at what point does desperate improvisation become significant achievement? These are important questions in a world in which we are all increasingly strangers and sojourners. The knight errant, who finds his challenges along the way, may be a better model for our times than the knight who is questing for the Grail.
    Current research on women often focuses on a single aspect or stage of life. Dissection is an essential part of scientific method, and it is particularly tempting to disassemble a life composed of odds and ends, to describe the pieces separately. Unfortunately, when this is done the pattern and loving labor in the patchwork is lost. This book started from the effort to explore different ways of thinking about my own life, to see its pattern as a whole, and to illuminate it by looking at the lives of other women I admire, lives of achievement as well as caring, that have a unitary quality in spite of being improvisations.
    The person who first came to mind in thinking about this project was Joan Erikson. I have known Joan and her husband Erik Erikson, friends of my parents, since my childhood. Whatever composing a life is all about, Joan seemed to me to be someone who, at least for her time, got it right. She has three grown-up children and a career that includes several books of her own as well as a complex weave of collaboration with her husband’s work, which led Brown University in 1972 to give them simultaneous honorary degrees. Joan was trained as a dancer and dance educator, the first of several careers that became subordinated to child bearing and a husband’s work. Now in her eighties, she still moves like a dancer, conveying to younger women the sense of beauty transcending age, and she and Erik hold hands in the street. Joan’s creative work has been done in scraps of rescued space and time, in marginal roles that have had to be invented again and again. The theme of improvisation is very clear. Once she described to me how she got started in jewelry making:
    “I used to find places in the house to work, a hole here or a hole there, and after I’d gotten far enough along so I could do something, I asked a man who was a very good craftsman in Berkeley to let me work in his workshop and he promptly said, ‘No way!’ “Joan laughed. “So I said, ‘Well, just wait a minute, I’ll tell you what I want, I want to learn a few skills from you. I’m not good enough to be your apprentice, but there are a few things you could teach me on maybe a Saturday morning to keep me going.’ And he said, ‘I don’t even know if you have any skill or imagination or anything else.’ I didn’t have much to show him, just a few things I had made, but I guess I was kind of persistent, so he gave me a box of junk—you know, when you’re working you always have some bits and pieces here or there—and he said, Tut me something together out of that.’ And when I did he said, ‘Humph, so when can you come?’ It was very sweet. My gosh, craftsmen are so nice. When they’re nice they’re very generous. I went on doing that for quite a while, coming in with a list of things I needed to know. But the next year he left to teach, and when he left he gave me his workbench and the tools he didn’t want to take with him. At that point I had to find a better workshop, so I added something onto the garage for a little place to work.” Several years later, Joan’s designs were appearing in regional and national exhibits.
    On the whole, women today follow their interests into more formal careers, but there remain unexpected similarities between the multiple commitments and discontinuities they face and the patterns of Joan’s improvisations. Because I have always earned an income and had a professional title, as an instructor or a professor or a dean, the course of my life that led to the writing of this book looked in many ways very different from Joan’s. I rushed my degrees to fit in with my marriage