NEW YORK -- Gail Sheehy, the journalist, commentator and pop sociologist whose bestselling "Passages" helped millions navigate their lives from early adulthood to middle age and beyond, has died. She was 83.
"It occurred to me that what Gesell and Spock did for children hadn't been done for us adults," Sheehy wrote. "It's far easier to study adolescents and aging people. Both groups are in institutions where they make captive subjects. The rest of us are out there in the mainstream of a spinning and distracted society, trying to make some sense of our one and only voyage through its ambiguities.
"Passages" helped set off a conversation that lasted for decades. The New York Times praised Sheehy for her "pertinent and persuasive" objections and a 1991 survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club ranked "Passages" among the books that most influenced people's lives.
When not writing books, Sheehy was a popular lecturer and television commentator and a well-travelled journalist specializing in psychological portraits of public figures. For New York magazine, Vanity Fair and other publications, she interviewed everyone from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Margaret Thatcher to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Sheehy's journalism career began at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle and the New York Herald Tribune, her colleagues including Tom Wolfe, before joining New York in 1968. Felker, the volatile and visionary publisher, became her mentor and lover. They dated off and on for more than a decade before marrying in 1984. Felker, who died in 2008, was the "love of her life," she would later write. She credited their bond in part to lessons she had absorbed from "Passages.
Aw! Sorry to hear that. RIP Ms. Sheehy. I learned a lot from your book. 🌷Thanks