Journalist whose pop psychology books made the ‘midlife crisis’ fashionable

Gail Sheehy, who has died aged 83, popularised the term ‘‘midlife crisis’’ and was described as ‘‘America’s maestro of menopause’’; in a series of works of pop psychology, notably Passages, The Silent Passage, New Passages and Understanding Men’s Passages, she sought to convince millions of readers to interpret midlife blues as a positive ‘‘growth opportunity’’.

A prolific writer of articles for magazines including New York and Vanity Fair, Sheehy also specialised in profiles of politicians, demonstrating a certain flair for extracting damaging confidences from the high and mighty.

Journalist

Woodrow Wyatt recorded how she gave him a cigar cutter for arranging an interview with Margaret Thatcher. The resulting profile, published in Vanity Fair in 1989, claimed that the prime minister secretly visited a woman called Veronique, Lady Price, ‘‘a Hindu practitioner of ancient Ayurvedic arts’’, and would go to a flat in the London suburbs where Lady Price would ‘‘poach her in a hot tub and then literally electrify her’’, by turning up the amps on baffle plates lining the bath. ‘‘After an hour’s electrification she would rub down the tingling body with natural flower oils.’’

The profile prompted an article in the

Daily Mail headlined ‘‘The Ion Lady’’, and reportedly caused one minister to joke, after a particularly tough meeting, that ‘‘she must have had the full 240 volts this morning’’.

Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, wrote later: ‘‘I knew it was a mistake to let this woman in,’’ though Charles Moore noted in the third volume of his biography of Thatcher that ‘‘the most surprising thing about the story was that it was true’’.

Sheehy was best known for her blockbuster, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976), in which she complained that child development manuals stopped at 18, as if adult life was simply a period of psychological consolidation. Where, she asked, were the route maps to life as a 20, 30 and 40-something?

Based on interviews with (mainly) middleclass aspirational Americans, she went on to describe the panic people in their 40s supposedly feel when they realise they are no longer young. All, she assured her readers, is not lost. People in midlife should refuse to give in to decline, but treat the rest of life as a whole new project.

‘‘Stop and recalculate,’’ she advised. The publisher’s blurb ran: ‘‘At last, this is your story. You’ll recognise yourself, your friends, and your loves. You’ll see how to use each life crisis as an opportunity for creative change – to grow to your full potential.’’

It became fashionable to be caught in the throes of a midlife crisis, or, as one reviewer put it: ‘‘Before long it was expected that, hitting his forties, Mr Gray Flannel Suit would have a Peggy Lee moment – asking, ‘Is that all there is?’ – and respond by chasing co-eds or giving up banking for pottery.’’

The fact that reviews in sociological journals tended to dismiss Sheehy’s findings as oversimplified and vacuous did little to dampen sales. Passages sold 10 million copies, was cited by the Library of Congress as one of the 10 most influential books of modern times, and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for more than three years.

Sheehy’s other Passages titles continued to mine this seam of ‘‘life management’’. In The Silent Passage (1993), one of the first books to tackle the menopause, she informed women going through the ‘‘change of life’’ that ‘‘the task now is to find a new future self in whom we can invest our trust and enthusiasm’’.

The older of two daughters of an advertising executive and a housewife, she was born Gail Merritt Henion at

Mamaroneck, New York. She studied English and home economics at the University of

Vermont, later taking a graduate course at Columbia University, where she was taught by the social anthropologist Margaret Mead.

From 1958 she worked as a travelling home economist and in 1960 married Albert Sheehy, a doctor, with whom she had a daughter. She became a fashion consultant at a department store before being hired as a fashion editor at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, then a feature writer in what she called ‘‘the oestrogen department’’of the Herald Tribune.

In Daring: My Passages (2014), she described sneaking away from the women’s department to the ‘‘all-male preserve of the city room,’’ where she pitched stories to Clay Felker, who would become her second husband in 1984, her first marriage having ended in divorce in 1968.

When Felker co-founded New York magazine in 1968, she followed him. Her articles often made national news. One article, on pimps, prostitutes and their clients, came as the result of Sheehy dressing up as a prostitute, in hot pants and white vinyl boots, with a concealed tape recorder. It prompted Newsweek to dub her ‘‘the hooker’s Boswell’’.

Felker died in 2008. She is survived by the daughter of her first marriage and an adopted daughter, a Cambodian orphan whom she met while working on a story about refugee camps in Thailand. – Telegraph Group