Daring: My Passages: A Memoir
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Daring: My Passages: A Memoir Hardcover – September 2, 2014
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Here, she looks back on her remarkable life with unflinching candor.” (O, the Oprah Magazine)
“Daring is an inspiring portrait of a resilient woman who fought hard to live an authentic life, and won.” (More.com)
“Daring is an inspiring portrait of a resilient woman who fought hard to live an authentic life, and won.” (More.com)
From the Back Cover
The author of Passages, a book that changed millions of lives, now lays bare her own life passages in a captivating memoir that reveals her harrowing and ultimately triumphant path from groundbreaking 1960s "girl" journalist to fearless bestselling author who made a career of excavating cultural taboos—from sex, menopause, and midlife crisis to illness, caregiving, and death. Daring to blaze a trail in a "man's world," Gail Sheehy became one of the premier practitioners of New Journalism at the fledgling New York magazine, along with such stellar writers as Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, and Jimmy Breslin. Sheehy dared to walk New York City's streets with hookers and pimps to expose violent prostitution; to march with civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland as British soldiers opened fire; to seek out Egypt's president Anwar Sadat when he was targeted for assassination after making peace with Israel; and to break the glass ceiling in a media world fueled by testosterone, competition, and grit.
Daring: My Passages is also the beguiling love story of Sheehy's tempestuous romance with Clay Felker, the charismatic creator of New York magazine and the mentor who inspired her to become a fearless journalist who won renown for her penetrating character portraits of world leaders, including Hillary Clinton, both Presidents Bush, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, among others.
Sheehy reflects on desire, ambition, and wanting it all—career, love, children, friends, social significance—and coming to terms with waiting until midlife to achieve it all. With candor and humor, she describes her early failures; the pain of betrayal in a first marriage; her struggles as a single mother; the flings of an ardent, liberated young woman; the vertigo of becoming an internationally bestselling author; her adoption of a second daughter from a refugee camp; the poignant account of Clay's decline; and her ongoing passion for life, work, and love.
Fascinating and no-holds-barred, Daring: My Passages is a testament to guts, resilience, and smarts, and offers a bold perspective on all of life's passages.
More About the Author
Gail Sheehy is the world-renowned author of seventeen books, most notably the New York Times best-seller Passages, named one of the ten most influential books by the Library of Congress and which has been translated into twenty-eight languages.
Her latest book, DARING: My Passages, is a memoir available now for preorder; September 2014 from HarperCollins.
As a literary journalist, Sheehy was one of the original contributors to New York magazine. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1984, she won the Washington Journalism Review Award for Best Magazine Writer in America for her in-depth character portraits of national and international leaders.
Sheehy is a seven-time recipient of the New York Newswomen's Club Front Page Award for distinguished journalism. Among her other bestsellers are Sex and the Seasoned Woman; Hillary's Choice; New Passages; Understanding Men's Passages; and Passages in Caregiving.
A popular lecturer, she is represented by American Program Bureau (617-614-1607).
She currently resides in New York City.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
By
Rushmore
VINE VOICE on July 23, 2014
Format: Hardcover
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I was one of those young women who read Passages at a critical time in my life. It meant a lot, to have a blueprint or at least a frame of reference for what my adult years held in store. There was no other book like it at the time. Now, of course, it is a cottage industry, but in the mid-70s Gail Sheehy taught us to celebrate our differences from men and be our best selves. These concepts are second nature to us now but they were groundbreaking at the time. Later on, The Silent Passage was so important to me personally in dealing with menopause. (It's pretty hilarious, and at the same time sad, that at the time she wrote the book, many people told her they had never heard the word "menopause" spoken aloud.)
Now comes Gail Sheehy's personal story. I did want to know more about her life. As a journalist, she has been in the middle of some of the most important historical events worldwide. She has profiled international political figures. She has raised two girls into womanhood. She has been married, divorced, remarried and widowed.
At the same time I was reading this book, I was listening to the audiobook of Carole King's autobiography, A Natural Woman. Although the two women are from different spheres and took very different paths, both have a strong New York connection. It was a very interesting counterpoint. But I digress.
Gail Sheehy's memoir Daring is interesting, readable, and provides a new (to me) perspective on well-known historical and popular persons and events. (Her take on Hillary Clinton is particularly compelling IMO.) I do think she holds herself somewhat aloof in recounting the story of her life. She has essentially turned her journalist's eye on herself.Read more ›
Now comes Gail Sheehy's personal story. I did want to know more about her life. As a journalist, she has been in the middle of some of the most important historical events worldwide. She has profiled international political figures. She has raised two girls into womanhood. She has been married, divorced, remarried and widowed.
At the same time I was reading this book, I was listening to the audiobook of Carole King's autobiography, A Natural Woman. Although the two women are from different spheres and took very different paths, both have a strong New York connection. It was a very interesting counterpoint. But I digress.
Gail Sheehy's memoir Daring is interesting, readable, and provides a new (to me) perspective on well-known historical and popular persons and events. (Her take on Hillary Clinton is particularly compelling IMO.) I do think she holds herself somewhat aloof in recounting the story of her life. She has essentially turned her journalist's eye on herself.Read more ›
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21 of 26 people found the following review helpful
By
Geneva Lewis
VINE VOICE on July 7, 2014
Format: Hardcover
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Gail Sheehy has made a career of writing books about the Baby Boomers and their most pressing concerns: identity, gender roles, sex, aging, career, money, success. She has almost created a self-generating franchise out of her initial Passages book, which examined the "predictable crises of adult life" which morphed into "New Passages," a part deux to her original bestseller. In the last decade or so she has put her pulse on the prescient fears and nascent realities of the Boomers: menopause (The Silent Passage) and caregiving (Passages In Caregiving).
In "Daring: My Passages" Sheehy has written a 460 page autobiography, begun with compelling foundational chapters about her bittersweet childhood with a mother whose aspirations to be a professional singer went unfulfilled and led to her alcoholism, and a wayward ad exec father whose womanizing and perfectionism exerted a pall on Gail's life. The meat of the story is about Gail's career path from a University of Vermont double major (English and Home Economics) whose desire to become more than a woman's section newspaper writer is catalogued in extensive detail. Young Gail, supporting her first husband who was in medical school, sniffs out opportunities from New York City to Rochester, eventually morphs from a women's section columnist to a bona fide investigative journalist. Birth of her daughter Maura, her eventual divorce, and career (and life-changing) move to New York magazine, headed by Clay Felker, follows.
The book has a constant patter of background family dramas, romantic entanglements, financial woes, schlepping and hustling in her chosen career of journalism, and single motherhood, making for a dizzying array of arenas in her storytelling.Read more ›
In "Daring: My Passages" Sheehy has written a 460 page autobiography, begun with compelling foundational chapters about her bittersweet childhood with a mother whose aspirations to be a professional singer went unfulfilled and led to her alcoholism, and a wayward ad exec father whose womanizing and perfectionism exerted a pall on Gail's life. The meat of the story is about Gail's career path from a University of Vermont double major (English and Home Economics) whose desire to become more than a woman's section newspaper writer is catalogued in extensive detail. Young Gail, supporting her first husband who was in medical school, sniffs out opportunities from New York City to Rochester, eventually morphs from a women's section columnist to a bona fide investigative journalist. Birth of her daughter Maura, her eventual divorce, and career (and life-changing) move to New York magazine, headed by Clay Felker, follows.
The book has a constant patter of background family dramas, romantic entanglements, financial woes, schlepping and hustling in her chosen career of journalism, and single motherhood, making for a dizzying array of arenas in her storytelling.Read more ›
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By
Bookreporter
on September 8, 2014
Format: Hardcover
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If the name Gail Sheehy doesn’t ring a bell, it should. Sheehy was --- and still is --- one of the most intrepid journalists of our time. Over the course of 50 years, she has contributed to New York, Vanity Fair and the New York Times, among other publications. She has interviewed countless politicians, from Robert Kennedy to Hillary Clinton to Margaret Thatcher, and has written hundreds of cutting-edge exposés on everything from menopause to prostitution to frontline reports from Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. She has also published 16 previous books, including the groundbreaking bestseller PASSAGES, which documented the predictable stages of adult life punctuated by marker events, and PATHFINDERS, about overcoming crises. Now in her seventh decade, she turns the gaze on herself in a memoir titled DARING: MY PASSAGES.
The title of Sheehy’s latest book couldn’t be more appropriate. Since her early years as a young journalist in the 1960s, Sheehy has both embraced and challenged the status quo. As a fledgling reporter for the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle and then for New York’s Herald-Tribune, she insisted on bolstering mandatory fluff pieces about fashion and high society courtships with grittier, more substantial fare. In an already-much-circulated anecdote, she shares how she got her first big break at the Trib by sneaking down the building’s back stairwell that connected the Women’s Department to the male-dominated city room to pitch a story about bikini-clad beachcombers hired by men to attract party-goers on Fire Island to Clay Felker, the then-editor of the Sunday supplement.
“Why couldn’t a woman write about the worlds that men wrote about?” Sheehy figured at the time. The move turned out to be fortuitous. Sheehy’s daring landed her a feature. Then another.Read more ›
The title of Sheehy’s latest book couldn’t be more appropriate. Since her early years as a young journalist in the 1960s, Sheehy has both embraced and challenged the status quo. As a fledgling reporter for the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle and then for New York’s Herald-Tribune, she insisted on bolstering mandatory fluff pieces about fashion and high society courtships with grittier, more substantial fare. In an already-much-circulated anecdote, she shares how she got her first big break at the Trib by sneaking down the building’s back stairwell that connected the Women’s Department to the male-dominated city room to pitch a story about bikini-clad beachcombers hired by men to attract party-goers on Fire Island to Clay Felker, the then-editor of the Sunday supplement.
“Why couldn’t a woman write about the worlds that men wrote about?” Sheehy figured at the time. The move turned out to be fortuitous. Sheehy’s daring landed her a feature. Then another.Read more ›
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