Gail Sheehy (1936–2020,) born Gail Henion, was an American writer and journalist. She wrote seventeen books and many high-profile articles focused on cultural shifts for magazines such as New York and Vanity Fai .
Sheehy’s work examined racism, menopause, and drug addiction. She is most famous for Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1977,) which the Library of Congress identified as one of the most influential books in people’s lives.
Born in Mamaroneck, New York, Sheehy graduated from the University of Vermont with a B.A. in English and home economics. She also got a M.A. in journalism from Columbia.
Sheehy was a pioneer in “New Journalism” or “Creative nonfiction,” in which journalists and essayists experimented with adopting various literary techniques. She is best remembered for her “Passages” series of self-help publications on life’s stages, including Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976,) The Silent Passage: Menopause (1993,) and New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time (1995.)
Sheehy also wrote biographies of foremost twentieth-century leaders, including Hillary Clinton, presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat, and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Her memoir is Daring: My Passages (2014.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Gail Sheehy
Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one’s own unnecessary vegetation.
—Gail Sheehy
Topics: Change
Ah, mastery … what a profoundly satisfying feeling when one finally gets on top of a new set of skills … and then sees the light under the new door those skills can open, even as another door is closing.
—Gail Sheehy
Topics: Growth, Problem-solving
The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests.
—Gail Sheehy
Topics: Leaders, Leadership
To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist.
—Gail Sheehy
Topics: Challenges
There is no more defiant denial of one man’s ability to possess one woman exclusively than the prostitute who refuses to redeemed.
—Gail Sheehy
When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.
—Gail Sheehy
Topics: Women, Retirement
Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough.
—Gail Sheehy
Topics: Success & Failure, Self-respect
We hear the haunting presentiment of a dutiful middle age in the current reluctance of young people to select any option except the one they feel will impinge upon them the least.
—Gail Sheehy
Topics: Conservatives
Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties
—Gail Sheehy
Topics: Letting Go
If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.
—Gail Sheehy
Topics: Security, Living, Growth, Change
If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing.
—Gail Sheehy
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