Gail Sheehy and the Mid-Life Crisis
GAIL SHEEHY, the writer, was born in Mamaroneck, New York in 1936 as Gail Henion. Determined to be daring and to break with traditional gender roles, Sheehy wrote vivid and popular magazine pieces and 17 books. “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life” is her best-known book; it helped a great many people to understand the “midlife crisis.”
Gail’s father, Harold Henion, owned an advertising business. He and Gail’s mother were conventional people who tried to rein in Gail’s imagination in order to keep her safe. Fortunately, her paternal grandmother Gladys was something of a feminist. Grandmother Gladys gave 7-year-old Gail a typewriter, and encouraged her to write. Gladys was also a successful real estate agent and a model of the working woman. As an adolescent, restless in Mamaroneck, Gail would slip into New York City on Saturday mornings, to soak in the atmosphere of the city. Her parents didn’t know about these little trips; Gladys did, but kept her secret.
The University of Vermont in the 1950’s was not exactly what Gail was looking for. All through the long Vermont winters, women on campus had to wear skirts. Her father forced her to major in Home Economics. Without telling him, she added a second major in English. And the Home Economics Department offered courses in Economics and also in Public Speaking, both of which she found useful.
After college, she married a medical student named Albert Sheehy and they had a daughter Maura. But Albert couldn’t understand her restlessness with traditional gender roles.
Gail and Albert separated but, for Maura’s sake, tried to have “family dinners,” pretending to a closeness they didn’t feel. At a quite early age, Maura asked Gail, “Who’s coming next time? ‘Daddy’ or ‘Albert?’
Gail got a job as a fashion coordinator in a department store, and then a newspaper job in Rochester — but in the Women’s section.
From there she moved to the Women’s section of the New York Herald Tribune, which she called “The Estrogen Department.” She screwed up her courage and pitched a story to Clay Felker, the editor of the “New York” Sunday supplement to the Herald Tribune. He approved it, she turned in the story and never went back to the Women’s section of the paper.
In 1966, when the Herald Tribune died, Clay Felker borrowed over a million dollars to acquire the name “New York Magazine” and launch this new magazine. He recruited some gifted and interesting writers, including Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem — and Gail Sheehy.
She divorced Albert Sheehy, and moved in with Clay Felker.
She’d wanted, as a young woman, to escape the safe, conventional life and now she threw herself into the joyous, chaotic late 1960’s. As a journalist, she followed the 1968 Presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy. She went to India to meet the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. She went to the rock festival at Woodstock, partly to keep her drug-addicted sister away from her sister’s pusher.
Gail won a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and earned a Master’s degree at Columbia, studying with the great anthropologist Margaret Mead, who encouraged her to study cultures. One remark of Mead’s struck Sheehy. Mead said when you hear of a great cultural phenomenon, “stand at the edge of the abyss and look down into it. You will see a culture turned inside out and revealed in a raw state.”
New York magazine debuted on April 8, 1968. It featured splashy articles on politics, finance and crime — plus shopping and design suggestions, and film reviews. Felker liked to think of his magazine as “a guide on how to live in this city.”
In late 1971, Sheehy insisted to Felker that New York magazine should send her to Northern Ireland to cover the sectarian warfare between the Irish and the British. She wanted to be an “intrepid journalist.” She knew that war reporting was how many male journalists earned their stripes. Why couldn’t a woman do it?
Felker was skeptical. ‘We’re trying to help people know how to live in New York City. What does the trouble in Northern Ireland have to do with New York?’
Gail replied that half the people in New York had Irish ancestry. She also reminded him that he’d asked her to write pieces that would bring in female readers, and a starkly beautiful article about the pain, struggles and glories of Irish women caught in a civil war would bring female readers to New York magazine.
‘Okay,’ Clay Felker said. ‘Go to Northern Ireland and write about the women. Women are fighting a war in Northern Ireland. That’s your story. And be careful over there.’
On January 30, 1972, Gail was in Derry, Northern Ireland, interviewing a young protester when he was shot in the face. She braved fire from British soldiers to try to drag the dying young man to safety. Thirteen unarmed protesters were killed before the massacre was over. It was “Bloody Sunday.”
That night she called Clay in New York, needing to share the awfulness of what she’d been through. This was one time when he didn’t “get it.” He was warm, he missed her and said nice things, but he was full of New York news that seemed to her trivial compared to the death of a young man who’d been standing right next to Gail a moment before. Clay was comfortable in his apartment. When she tried to describe what had happened that day, Clay’s response was not to offer a lover’s comfort but to remind her, as her editor, that she’d promised to write about the WOMEN of Northern Ireland, and to stay safe while doing so.
She came home and suffered post-traumatic stress. For the first time, she thought deeply about her own mortality. She couldn’t forget the face of the young man who’d been fatally shot right next to her. Once when traveling, she opened her bag and found that in the heat some shoes of hers had leaked red dye. It looked like blood and she began to feel herself losing control.
As she worked her way through this trauma reaction, she became fascinated by “the mid-life crisis.” Doing research, she found that the various stages of childhood had been thoroughly examined and written up, and the stages of old age had been written about — but few books had been written about the stages we go through in our prime adult years, the years of job changes, marriage, children and divorce — and buying books.
She was fascinated by roads less traveled, and by travelers on life’s journey who never realized they were at a major crossroads, or who failed to leave their safe, boring track, for no better reason than a lack of role models or a failure of nerve.
And why were the lives intimately examined in books so heavily weighted toward the ‘celebrated and the sainted’ or “glamorous neurotics” or the clinically ill? What about the great mass of people who were none of those things?
She had the courage to tell Clay Felker that she and her daughter Maura were moving out, that the journalistic high life of dinners and parties and film openings was keeping her from writing her book about the mid-life crisis. She was daring in that sense.
But as she began the book she felt insecure about having no medical degree, no Ivy League affiliation, no psychiatric practice. She knew how to write for a broad audience: what would interest a mass public, and what would not. But sometimes she craved the approval of people with stronger credentials.
Interviewing experts in the mid-life crisis, she found that almost all of them were men, writing about the mid-life crises of men. Their general conclusion was that a man’s midlife crisis was healthy enough so long as it occurred in a sequence of neat stages: a,b,c,d…
She asked these men, Dan Levinson at Yale especially, what about WOMEN at mid-life? If, for a mid-life crisis to be successful it has to go in neat stages, why aren’t all women crazy? She reminded Levinson that few women have the luxury of arranging their lives around their own needs. Women adapt to the lives and needs of their boyfriends, their husbands, their children, their aging parents… Maybe, she suggested to Professor Levinson, this is part of why men and women are so often out of synch.
And Dan Levinson, to his credit, was intrigued by what she said, and urged her to write a book about that. She asked if he would like to collaborate with her on a book: his research, her writing. He demurred but told her that a UCLA-affiliated psychiatrist named Roger Gould was also working on a theory of the mid-life crisis. Perhaps Gould might like to collaborate on a book.
To her eternal regret, she approached Roger Gould with the idea. Gould shared some of his thoughts about the mid-life crisis — and later sued her for stealing his work without proper attribution. She didn’t have money for a high-priced lawyer to fight the suit. Eager to make Roger Gould go away, she agreed to pay him $10,000 for his ideas, plus 10% of whatever profits resulted from “Passages.” She thought they would be minimal.
“Passages” was on the New York Times bestseller list for three years and sold 10 million copies. The Gould lawsuit had the unfortunate effect of drawing attention to the way Sheehy had used the work of others. Some people criticized her book for leaning too much on the work of Dan Levinson. (Then again, when Levinson published his own book, “Seasons of a Man’s Life,” people complained it was too much like “Passages.”)
Sheehy had an on again, off again relationship with Clay Felker. The two of them adopted a Cambodian refugee, and in 1984, Gail finally married Felker. Years later, she also became his chief end-of-life caregiver. Gail Sheehy died herself in Southampton in 2020, at age 83, of complications of pneumonia.
Her work has the flaws of a popularizer. She generalized. She tended to focus on the white upper middle-class, and her work might have gained from more interviews with working class people, and people of color. But many of her readers have been comforted by her contention that we go through a passage, fail, and then return and get better. Gail Sheehy was sure that for the risktaker, there were richly meaningful rewards in mid-life — and beyond.