EDGE: I bet you weren't observing too clearly then.

BATESON: No, but I was able to look at myself in retrospect. I spent a lot of time trying to find out exactly what had happened, and looking at my own reaction. I think that one of the things that many women find is that they are all too willing when something goes wrong to say that it must be their fault. Certainly that was my emotional reaction initially. It was important for me to understand that other people were taking advantage of an opportunity to pursue their ambitions, while I just was too much in shock to be thinking in those terms. I was too focused on the fact that someone I'd worked very closely with had simply dropped dead, and there was a need to keep things together and move along. This is one of the stories that went into Composing A Life as part of the exploration of how people deal with discontinuities and move on.

EDGE: So how did you move on?

BATESON: I took a year's leave, finally finishing the memoir of my parents, With a Daughter'S Eye, went back and taught for a year. Then I took an extended leave, which allowed me to write two more books, Composing a Life and then Thinking Aids, with an Amherst colleague and friend. And then I took a job at George Mason University in Virginia and resigned from Amherst.

EDGE: Why?

BATESON: I knew so much about what was happening there, and could see things happen that I felt were unfair, that it was very hard to maintain the necessary distance. When a junior member of the faculty was denied tenure, for instance, they'd come to me and want me to comment. There were a lot of people in positions of authority that I knew better than to trust. Then the offer from Mason came along, and they were willing to agree to give me a regular faculty position and allow me to take a semester leave without pay every year, so that I could write.

After Amherst I rediscovered myself as a writer. And I was not going to go into another position that would prevent me from writing. Certainly not a deanship or a college presidency. And not a full-time teaching job. It's important to me to do some teaching, because you can develop your thinking in the interactive context of a classroom in a way in which you can't through lectures and writing articles.