Gail Sheehy is the author of 16 books, including the classic New York Times bestseller Passages, named one of the ten most influential books of our time by the Library of Congress. 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. A popular lecturer, she was named AARP’s Ambassador of Caregiving in 2009.
After four decades of attention-getting books and articles, Sheehy admits the difficulty in writing this memoir, describing "the patience and painstaking effort required to burrow into one’s past and salvage the richest moments." Certainly one thing is perfectly clear, there are millions of magical ones to choose in her career in journalism. Her mentor Clay Felker told her: "Gail, the way to make your name as a journalist is not to do lots of little stories. No matter how good they are, they won’t start a new conversation. Tackle a big story, something everybody’s talking about, but they don’t know the why."
Sheehy followed his advice and wrote a major piece on Bobby Kennedy shortly after his assassination. It wasn’t long before she was catapulted into the sacred circle of New Journalists (Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion)). She married Clay Felker and kept on repeating her mantra: "Lean forward, shoot off the edge of the pool, and keep on swimming."
We were very much taken with Sheehy’s Passages in which she charts the predictable crises of adult life. What she accomplished was popularization of a new social science via her own unique and accessible writing style. Growing up is not an experience that ends in the early twenties, she explained to us. Rather it is a lifelong process which continues through adulthood.
In her book Pathfinders, Sheehy discovered flourishing individuals who were willing to take risks, handle transitions with aplomb, and create their own life of meaning and purpose. Looking at this description, it comes across to us as a perfect way of summing up Sheehy’s versatile and exciting career as a journalist and an enterprising woman. There is much more to her story to savor in your leisure.
