REMEMBRANCE Gail Sheehy

One of New York’s most daring writers never stopped reporting.

- CHRISTOPHER BONANOS

YOU—OR YOUR MOTHER or your aunt or your grandmother—probably first encountered Gail Sheehy’s writing in 1976, when she published Passages. It was an immense best seller, one of the biggest books of the decade, a pop psychological way of looking at American adulthood that grew out of her reporting for New York. Your life’s journey, Sheehy argued, is made up of somewhat predictable phases and points of crisis. Your 20s are about figuring out who you are as an adult; your 30s, roaring along into that adulthood, and so forth. It was a fresh way of looking at generational and sociopolitical change, and it also felt useful: Knowing that what you’re experiencing isn’t unique can be helpful when you’re muddling through.

Sheehy—who died suddenly on August 24 at 83, after a brief bout of pneumonia—had done a lot of muddling through herself and came out on top. Before the vast success of Passages gave her some financial freedom, she spent the first part of her career as a newspaper reporter, writing for the New York World-Telegram & Sun and the Herald Tribune. Later, as a young divorced single mother, she freelanced from her apartment in the East Village. Her breakthroughs came largely in the pages of New York: first, in its days as a supplement to the