Gail Sheehy is the author of seventeen books, including the classic New York Times bestseller Passages, named by the Library of Congress as one of the ten most influential books of our time. As a literary journalist, Sheehy was one of the original contributors to New York magazine and has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1984. She is a seven-time recipient of the New York Newswomen’s Club Front Page Award for distinguished journalism and three-time winner or finalist for National Magazine Awards. A popular lecturer, she was named AARP’s Caregiver Ambassador in 2009. In 2013, she was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by Books for a Better Life.
As a journalist, Sheehy dared to blaze a trail in a “man’s world,” taking on assignments when she had no experience, traveling to war zones, often going undercover. She dared to suspend her tempestuous romance with Clay Felker, her mentor and editor at New York magazine, to devote herself to writing Passages. She invented psychological character portraits of national and world leaders—the Clintons, both Bushes, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Saddam Hussein and more.
Sheehy continued to break social taboos, writing bestselling books to support her life as a divorced single mother, waiting until middle age to remarry and start over in her Second Adulthood—a term she invented. Perhaps Sheehy herself describes best what compelled her to write a memoir:
“After I wrote Passages, I spent the next four decades interviewing thousands of women and men, from teens in Harlem to Benazir Bhutto days before her assassination. Suddenly, woah!, I found myself thrust into the passage to my seventies. My husband was slowly dying. What did my life add up to? The theme of my life only emerged after three years of excavation: DARING, but only as the antidote to my fears. Daring is what allowed me to outwit gender barriers. Daring is what enabled me to struggle for years as a single mother. And after the death of my beloved husband of 24 years, I dared to love again.”
In 2017, Sheehy joined with top psychiatrists as co-authors of the New York Times bestseller: THE DANGEROUS CASE OF DONALD TRUMP: 27 Psychiatrists Assess a President.
She is immersed in research for her 18th book, about millennials. “It’s delightful to revisit the earliest stages of adulthood and follow the paths of the pathfinders of tomorrow’s world.”