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
Adapting to our Second Adulthood is not all about the money. It requires thinking about how to find a new locus of identity or how to adjust to a spouse who stops working and who may loll, enjoying coffee and reading the paper online while you're still commuting.
My husband, Clay Felker, died 17 years after his first cancer due to secondary conditions that developed from treatment.
Most women have learned a great deal about how to set goals for our First Adulthood and how to roll with the punches when we hit a rough passage. But we're less prepared for our Second Adulthood as we approach life after retirement, where there are no fixed entrances or exits, and lots of sand into which it is easy to bury our heads.
I keep returning to the central question facing over-50 women as we move into our Second Adulthood. What are our goals for this stage in our lives?
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.
Character is what was yesterday and will be tomorrow.
Back in 1968, when I was 30, my entire life blew up. I had a life plan, and it collapsed for no rational reason.
I actually interviewed other people about myself, and that alerted me to the fact that I had to really investigate my memories.