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VOL.27, NO.10
Gail Sheehy’s latest passages
OCTOBER 2015
I N S I D E …
PHOTO COURTESY OF GAIL SHEEHY
By Barbara Ruben The phrase “Don’t you dare,” is anathema to Gail Sheehy. Daring defines her. The best-selling author of Passages and more than a dozen other books built her career as an intrepid rule breaker, forsaking the confines of an early position where she wrote for “the women’s pages” at the New York Herald Tribune to “march across enemy lines into the all-male testosterone preserve of the city room” to pitch a weightier story idea. In her on-the-scene reporting, she came perilously close to being shot on what became known as Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland while writing about “the Troubles” for New York magazine. Sheehy once plunged herself into an “electrical bath” zapped with a mild current to get a better handle on why Margaret Thatcher found the practice rejuvenating. Most recently, she donned a leopard print mini skirt and drove an RV to the Burning Man festival in Nevada — a raucous annual event in which upwards of 70,000 people head to the remote desert, build a temporary city, and create dozens of art installations, which they ultimately tear down and burn. Sheehy wrote about her experience in September in an article titled “Diary of a 70-Year-Old Burning Man Virgin,” for the Daily Beast — a news website that’s heavy on political and entertainment reporting.
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LEISURE & TRAVEL Gail Sheehy, best-selling author, journalist and popular lecturer, interviewed thousands of men and women over the past 50 years as she wrote 17 books exploring the issues facing all of us as we age — from her classic best-seller, Passages, to her book about menopause, The Silent Passage, to Sex and the Seasoned Woman, to her recent memoir, Daring: My Passages. Sheehy will speak about her life’s work, and the importance of courage and daring, at the Beacon’s 50+Expo on Oct. 25 at Ballston Mall in Arlington, Va.
For wholesome entertainment and live music, try Branson, Missouri; plus, wineries abound in nearby Middleburg, Va., and airport lounges worth a visit
A compelling memoir Last year, Sheehy, who is actually 77, wrote her memoir, titled Daring: My Passages. [She will be speaking about the memoir and her life’s experiences at the Beacon’s 50+ expo on Sunday, October 25 at Ballston Common Mall in Arlington, Virginia.] “It took me three years to write the book, pulling apart my ribs and digging deep into the quicksand to find out what was the meaning of my life,” she said in an interview with the Beacon. “From the title of my book, you might think I was born fearless. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Sheehy said. “In fact, I am a naturally fearful person. I’ve been known to have a panic attack. So I had to find a way to use my fear to compel me to act.” And act she did. As a 12-year-old girl,
page 41 she would sneak out of her New York City suburb and take the train 25 miles to Grand Central Station, telling the ticket seller she was off to a tap dance class. In reality, she would walk around and gawk at the city that would become her home for most of her adult life. She became a “protégée” of anthropologist Margaret Mead while in graduate school at Columbia University after Sheehy won a fellowship to study there. Mead was both a neighbor and mentor to Sheehy, who said that, “It was when I came under [Mead’s] tutelage that my intellectual life began to take shape.” Sheehy raised her daughter Maura alone in the 1960s after she was blindsided by her husband’s infidelity and divorced him.
Then, in the late 1970s, she wrote a story for the New York Times on the dire refugee crisis in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. While reporting in Cambodia and Vietnam, Sheehy met a 12year-old orphaned girl she couldn’t get out of her mind. Maura had just left for college, and Sheehy felt a void in her life. Sheehy worked for a year to bring the girl she renamed Mohm to the United States and adopt her. In what she calls a “daredevil exercise,” on the one day that a loophole opened in a law that had forbidden immigration of the refugees, she was able to get Mohm into the country. The bedlam of New York with its sirens, See SHEEHY, page 50
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