Gail Sheehy
Journalist and author whose bestselling 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, Gail Sheehy also specialised in profiles of politicians, demonstrating a certain flair for extracting damaging confidences from the high and mighty.
Woodrow Wyatt recorded how she gave him a cigar cutter from Asprey’s for arranging an interview with Mrs Thatcher. The resulting profile, “The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher”, 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 the amps up to 0.3 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”.
Mrs 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 the former PM that “the most surprising thing about the story was that it was true”.
Gail 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 twenty-, thirty- and fortysomething?
Based on interviews with (mainly) middle-class aspirational Americans, she went on to describe the panic people in their forties 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. “Imagine the day you turn 45 as the infancy of another life.” The publisher’s burb 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 Gail 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’s than three years.
Gail Sheehy’s other Passages titles continued to mine the rich 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.”
New Passages in 1995 explained how, in her mid-fifties, Gail Sheehy had decided to “reshape” her body with jogging, yoga, aerobics and suchlike, and found the whole thing “wonderfully empowering”. Everyone facing post-menopausal depression, she suggested, should follow her example and reinvent themselves as completely new people, “blazing with energy and accomplishment”.
However, a review by Bryan Appleyard of her Understanding Men’s Passages: Discovering the New Map of Men’s Lives (1998), a guide to how to survive the “male menopause”, described her study as “commercially brilliant and humanly false. To those of you who do find truth and consolation in these pages, all I can say is: stay away from me, you are mad.”
The older of two daughters of an advertising executive and a housewife, she was born Gail Merritt Henion at Mamaroneck, New York, on November 27 1936. 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.
The Herald Tribune was then the seedbed of the “new journalism”, with reporters immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. Gail Sheehy adapted instinctively to this more intimate, subjective perspective and treated readers to profiles of Robert Kennedy, whom she interviewed shortly before he was assassinated, and of Catholic women in Belfast during the Troubles.
It was there that the seed for Passages was planted. She was talking with a young boy when, she wrote, a bullet “blew his face off ”. She herself was nearly killed, an experience that made her think about what she called “the arithmetic of life”.
When Felker co-founded New York magazine in 1968, she followed him. Her articles often made national news, notably a 1972 story about “Little Edie” Beale and her mother, “Big Edie”, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy whom she discovered living in squalor in a derelict mansion on Long Island.
Another article, on pimps, prostitutes and their clients, came as the result of Gail Sheehy dressing up as a prostitute, in hot pants and white vinyl “go-go” boots, with a concealed tape recorder. It prompted Newsweek to dub her “the hooker’s Boswell”.
From 1984 she contributed political profiles to Vanity Fair, some of which were adapted into books, including The Man Who Changed the World (1990), a biography of Mikhail Gorbachev; and Hillary’s Choice (1999), a portrait of the former first lady which, one reviewer observed, made “very good light, sensational reading, with plenty of sharp, plausible insights”.
In other profiles she pronounced George W Bush dyslexic (a claim he rebuffed by saying: “This woman who knew I had dyslexia – I never interviewed her!”), and in a merciless dissection of Dan Quayle entitled “The Making of a Non-entity’’, described the vice president as “dumb blond … a sunshine boy of questionable intellect and no great ambition’’.
Gail Sheehy wrote 17 books, including Daring: My Passages, a work described by The New York Times reviewer as “extremely effusive, mostly about herself ”.
Gail Sheehy’s husband Clay Felker died in 2008. She is survived by the daughter of her first marriage and an adopted daughter, a Cambodian orphan whom she had met while working on a story about refugee camps in Thailand.
Gail Sheehy, born November 27 1936, died August 24 2020