Gail Sheehy
Gail Sheehy
Gail Sheehyis an American author, journalist, and lecturer. She is the author of seventeen books, including Passages, named by the Library of Congress one of the ten most influential books of our times. Sheehy has written biographies and character studies of major twentieth-century leaders, including Hillary Clinton, both presidents Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Her latest book, Daring: My Passages,is a memoir...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth27 November 1937
CountryUnited States of America
I actually interviewed other people about myself, and that alerted me to the fact that I had to really investigate my memories.
I was devastated when I got the review for my first book. The book came out a couple years before the women's movement broke through, and people were putting it down, asking, 'Why does the woman in this book need to get a divorce? Why can't she just shut up and be happy?'
People in grief need someone to walk with them without judging them.
With the only certainty in our daily existence being change, and a rate of change growing always faster in a kind of technological leapfrog game, speed helps people think they are catching up.
Speed as a drug disorganizes the personality; speed as the goal of information dissemination commits a subtler crime. People are mainlining our words. We rarely read of the rational alternatives, only of the commands that all must change or else. This is a prescription for public panic.
Leaders are people we as followers want to regard with awe as the fullest flowering of our own possibilities.
According to the prevailing mythology, to be younger is to be better; therefore, we should expect to find young people in the majority of those who reflect high well-being... In fact, the one finding that registered more consistently and emphatically than any other in the course of my research was this: Older is better.
If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living.
Like everyone else in the first weeks after the tragedy of 9/11, I was looking frantically for some way to help.
There is nothing in the world as great as finding your sexual excitement in your fifties.
There certainly are middle-aged children who have an oh-my-God, Mom's-gone-wild reaction if Mom starts to date. But what they should recognize is that if Mom has a boyfriend, she won't be nagging them about how they have to come to her for Christmas.
It seems like, to me, somewhere between 30 and 35 is a really, really good time to turn your eggs into babies.
I've had the experience of having a book praised but then it doesn't sell. Or not praised but then it sells.
I'm a liberal, but I think there's so much that the private sector can do and does do.