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Salem Health: Aging, 2nd Edition

Sheehy, Gail

by Virginiae Blackmon

Born: November 25, 1937; Mamaroneck, New York

Relevant Issues: Family, health and medicine, psychology, sociology

Significance: Sheehy is the author of widely read self-help books dealing with midlife crises and passage through life stages, particularly middle age through menopause and beyond.

Gail Sheehy won many awards during her career as a journalist and had authored 17 books by 2019. Sheehy’s most popular published works are Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1974), The Silent Passage: Menopause (1992), and New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time (1995). A survey conducted in 1991 for the Library of Congress on the most influential books in people’s lives listed Passages as ninth.

In The Silent Passage, Sheehy discusses what she calls one of the few remaining taboos in modern society. She states that she was surprised to find out how little had been written about menopause but came to realize that in earlier times, before about 1800, men and women infrequently lived into the menopausal years, as the average lifespan rarely exceeded 30 years.

Sheehy was criticized for not taking into account the existing body of work on the subject. According to Washington Post reviewer Diana Morgan, “Sheehy focuses excessively on her own experiences in the book. The reader is told an astounding amount about the angst of Gail Sheehy.” Barbara Ehrenreich, noted feminist author and New York Times Review contributor, applauded Sheehy for meeting the challenge of putting “the Change” on public view. Ehrenreich took exception to descriptions of the menopause as “an almost invariably volatile, frightening experience” and stated that Sheehy’s book “actually supports a far less alarmist view.”

New Passages began as an effort to revise Passages, but Sheehy soon realized that an entirely new book was needed. Cheryl Lavin, Chicago Tribune contributor, wrote that, “Sheehy wandered into a revolution of life cycles. People were taking longer to grow up and longer to die.” Lavin reported, “Sheehy said men move from competing to connecting, while women graduate from pleasing others to realizing their own goals.” Sheehy told Lavin that she intended New Passages to be a wake-up call to help people see themselves as they are, celebrate that they have a second adulthood, and get on with planning and enjoying it.

Nancy Matsumoto of People Magazine challenged the author to speak to the charges that Sheehy had shied away from dealing with the problems associated with growing older. Sheehy replied that, “Getting yourself into the second adulthood is not easy. It is about allowing yourself to experience this little psychic death and not trying to deny that you’re moving into another stage. But society has always focused on the deficits, not on the gains.” Sheehy argued that the gains far outweigh the losses.

Sheehy had many experiences abroad as a journalist throughout her career. She was in Thailand writing a story on Cambodian refugees for the New York Times Magazine when she first met her adopted daughter, Mohm, who was eleven and had been orphaned at age six by the Khmer Rouge. She became the subject of Sheehy’s seventh book, Spirit of Survival (1986). Sheehy believed that Mohm’s story offers lessons of self-help for every-day misfortunes. “Above all Mohm reminds us we have the power to prevail,” Sheehy wrote. Both Mohm and Sheehy’s biological daughter, Maura, became writers.

Sheehy also wrote many articles for many magazines, including such as New York Magazine and Vanity Fair, as she took part in a style revolution characterized as “the New Journalism” by Tom Wolfe (also known as creative non-fiction), which used dialogue, scene-setting, and intense detail. Sheehy also wrote character studies of many important people, including Hillary Clinton, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Anwar Sadat, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

See also: Aging: Biological, psychological, and sociocultural perspectives; Men and aging; Menopause; Middle age; Midlife crisis; Women and aging

For Further Information

1 

Sheehy, Gail. Daring: My Passages: A Memoir. Reprint ed., William Morrow, 2015. Sheehy returns with her inspiring memoir—a chronicle of her trials and triumphs as a groundbreaking “girl” journalist in the 1960s, to iconic guide for women and men seeking to have it all, to one of the premier political profilers of modern times.

2 

———. New Passages: Mapping Lives across Time. Ballantine Books, 1996. Sheehy discovers and maps out a completely new frontier—a Second Adulthood in middle life.

3 

———. Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. Bantam Books, 1976. Gail Sheehy’s brilliant road map of adult life shows the inevitable personality and sexual changes we go through in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond.

4 

———. The Silent Passage: Menopause. 6th ed., Pocket Books, 2010. Candid, enlightening, inspiring, and witty, with the latest information on everything from early menopause to Chinese medicine and natural remedies.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Blackmon, Virginiae. "Sheehy, Gail." Salem Health: Aging, 2nd Edition, edited by Pamela Roberts & Paul Moglia, Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Aging2e_0263.
APA 7th
Blackmon, V. (2019). Sheehy, Gail. In P. Roberts & P. Moglia (Eds.), Salem Health: Aging, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Blackmon, Virginiae. "Sheehy, Gail." Edited by Pamela Roberts & Paul Moglia. Salem Health: Aging, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2019. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.