Reprinted with permission from New Jersey Life

Even though she had spent most of her illustrious writing career living on the West Side of New York City, Gail Sheehy knew nothing about what lay just beyond the Hudson. When her nose for a story led her to Middletown, a quilt of communities just inland from the shore, she discovered New Jersey. A 20-year contributing editor to Vanity Fair and author of Passages, which precluded her other best-selling books The Silent Passage, New Passages, Pathfinders and Hillary’s Choice, among others—Sheehy arrived in New Jersey by way of The World Trade Center.

Following the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, Sheehy kept noticing mentions in victims’ obituaries of a placed called Middletown, a 44-square-mile township of 12 communities north of the Navesink River. Middletown, she learned, had the largest volunteer fire department in the country and many people employed in Manhattan’s financial district—two prominent groups at the center of the 9/11 tragedy. Middletown was the hardest-hit community in the metropolitan area, losing 50 people in the terrorist attack. Her upcoming book, Middletown, America: Passage to the New Normal, relives how the community and its people overcame devastation and despair to see the promise of a new life—a “passage” like no other one that Sheehy has illuminated in her well-regarded Passages books.

For 35 years, Gail Sheehy, 65, a protégé of anthropologist Margaret Meade, has studied and written extensively about “adult development”—the periodic plateaus of personal growth that grant us new vistas of enlightenment. A pop-culture pioneer of human socio-psychological development, Sheehy lends a sisterly hand as a cultural interpreter to explain what’s behind our reactions to ever-changing stations in life. Sheehy, who will be speaking in New Jersey (see below), says: “My obsession with human affairs gives my life meaning.”
— David W. Major

New Jersey Life: Middletown was devastated by 9/11. Why did you see the tragedy as part of some sort of “passage”?

Gail Sheehy: I saw this story as a huge national passage. Nine-eleven was the closest thing to a universally shared national trauma, perhaps bigger than Pearl Harbor because of the immediacy of television. I wondered: “How are we going to make this passage from a country that we presumed was detached from the world of horror to incorporating this idea that we live in this world of horror?” It was a wake-up call.

NJL: Your findings will be the subject of your new book, Middletown, America: Passage to the New Normal, which will be published at the time of the second anniversary of 9/11.

GS: I wanted to tell the story of the passage of a nation out of trauma, told through the microcosm of Middletown, which has been so hard hit. This is a difficult subject for people, obviously. People aren’t going to reach for a book that is a rehash of the 9/11 tragedy.

But this story is relevant to everybody because the people of Middletown—65 make appearances in the book—are making progress, breaking through into new lives despite their once believing it would never be possible. We are all going through this passage on some level, in light of the ongoing terrorist threat.

NJL: Readers got a glimpse of your upcoming book by reading your article, “September’s Widows,” in last September’s Vanity Fair. It followed three widows and how they were coping with their unimaginable loss. How difficult was it to approach the widows to assemble the information?

GS: I had to be, obviously, very slow and indirect and respectful. I never just called somebody. I would write a letter and follow up with a phone call. I often was introduced to a widow through a friend or somebody from the mental-health community or a church.

There was a real cycle. The first six weeks, no one wanted to talk to me. They were in pain and shock. Then, there was a period of a couple of months during which, once I got to meet people, they just spilled their story. And they would have spilled it to anybody, really, because it was all they thought about and they just had to tell it to anybody who was willing to be a receptive companion. Then, a few months after 9/11, most of them had retreated into their shell. Anybody who wanted to talk to them was perceived as an invader.

NJL: As somebody respected for having a sympathetic
understanding of people, you must have been a soothing presence?

GS: My understanding from having conducted many Passages-type interviews is that I am in the role of an educated companion: “If you tell me your story, I can try to help by the questions I ask or the pieces I can assimilate for you, to maybe help you see it in a fresh perspective.”

What I was able to do was document progress for them because, in the grieving process, progress comes in such miniscule increments that people going through it just don’t see it.

NJL: Have you been changed?

GS: This has absolutely been the most emotional story that I have pursued as a journalist. Passages was such a wonderful intellectual splurge for me because the idea for it kept proving itself over and over as I compiled the book. It changed me. I began to see life as a series of stages, or passages, and that became the template for the rest of my work and for the way I see life. But it wasn’t as emotionally demanding as this assignment. I identified with these people fairly early on and in very deep ways.

I wrestled with wondering what I could bring to the interview that would not be hurtful and might even be helpful. I was dealing with people who were very fragile, and the last thing I wanted to do was increase the horror. Talking to a politician, I don’t have to worry about that. They have barbed-wire fences around them.

NJL: Your character profiles of famous politicians are often particularly revealing of the person’s psychology. How do you get them to open up?

GS: “Saturation research.” Before I sit down with the person, I find out anything I can: what movies they like; their favorite books; their heroes. I talk to the constellation of people around them. So, come the interviews, I know the steps that person has taken in his life and I can ask him questions out of the ordinary, questions for which he can’t really prepare.

People are fascinated by their own life story. If I start telling you your life story, at least the way I am getting it from your friends and colleagues who know you best, you might interrupt and say: “Oh, no, no, no. That’s not happened. What happened was ….”

NJL: In 1984, you were the first to reveal an unknown side to presidential candidate Gary Hart, namely his affiliation with the Church of Nazarene. As we speak, he is flirting with another run.

GS: When I interviewed him, I didn’t expect it to be a character portrait. While most reporters were on the campaign bus, I went to his hometown in Colorado and learned what shaped him. I met a Native-American woman who claimed to be his spiritual guide and who told me this wildly erotic story involving the two of them. I thought she was just some groupie with a good imagination. When I mentioned her to Hart later, he grew quite voluble: “You know Marilyn?” So it went from there.

NJL: You have profiled Hillary Clinton, Mihkail Gorbachev, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush and many more. What do you find fascinating about politicians?

GS: I think they are all a little bit crazy (laughs). And some are crazier than others. They truly believe they have special powers and they have been called upon, and need, to help change the world in some way. They almost always have an overwhelming need to win, to gain that power of position.

NJL: So that quest, which has a deep psychological component, dovetailed from your research on adult development.

GS: Early on, I wasn’t particularly interested in politicians, actually (laughs). But my husband Clay Felker certainly was. It was hard to have a good conversation with him. I found my own way to be interested in them—which opened another way to parse politicians.

No one was doing this kind of reporting at the time: “character studies,” I thought. I came to understand the study of character. I read Plutarch’s Lives and all of Shakespeare’s history plays, which explore the human character in all its dimensions. So, what I had in mind evidently had a long, very good tradition.

In 1988, when I did a series of character studies for Vanity Fair, the exercise was very fresh for me and the candidates were far less guarded before the advent of the industry of spin.

NJL: You were the victim of spin on, at least, two occasions. Your bestselling book Hillary’s Choice—in which your portray, in part, a power-hungry Hillary Clinton willing to overlook her husband’s infidelities in exchange for the Presidency—was castigated by the Clinton White House. Then your Vanity Fair profile of candidate George W. Bush—in which you suggest, rather sympathetically, that Bush has dyslexia—was harshly criticized by his public relations machine. They just kind of drowned you out.

GS: I went through a great deal of trouble to be accurate and fair. If it had been a fair fight with them, that would have been one thing. But if you get into that argument, then the story becomes the argument and you can’t win because you don’t have a big megaphone like they do. So, you just have to let what you write stand, and if it has validity, people will realize it.

NJL: People realized you were on to something when you wrote Passages, which a Library of Congress survey deemed one of the 10 most influential books of our time. In it, you outline how adult life is—or certainly can be—a continuum of growth and change, rendering life to be a series of illuminating stages—or passages—of personal development. You changed millions of people’s lives.

GS: I look at this way: They did the changing. I used to have this reoccurring day dream, that one day I would hear the door bell ring, I’d open the door and there would be a line of people around the block holding my book Passages, demanding: “I want my old life back. I changed it, and it sucks!”

I was so relieved that that didn’t happen. But, yes, many people did say to me: “Boy, I was in a funk. I read Passages, and I realized I wasn’t crazy. I was normal.”

NJL: Did you remain normal after Passages became a hit?

GS: The success of Passages was very disruptive for me. It was a case of the star being born overnight. People overreacted in one of two ways: they were overly impressed by me or they became very competitive. I wanted to say: “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I think you should be on top of the bestseller list.”

I had been living very frugally because I had used all my money researching the book. It was as basic as I didn’t have the money to buy something nice to wear on television—at least if I had to be on more than twice (laughs).

I was so rigid, too; no one was going to sell me any snake oil. Accustomed to being a struggling writer, I was determined to save this money, which then became a source of embarrassment. So, I literally started giving it away. My husband finally said: “Gail, get a grip. You are not rich.” I then bought a house—which felt like digging a hole in the sand and burying the money. It was over. I began to relax.

NJL: It couldn’t have been relaxing to be asked, overnight, to honor speaking engagements. You still lecture very frequently. (Sheehy will speak March 29 at the “Women of the New Millennium,” sponsored by Pascack Valley Hospital at the Hilton Woodcliff Lake. Registration required, $60; 201.358.6000.)

GS: Public-speaking engagements were new to me. It has only taken me 25 years to get good at it (laughs). I wasn’t shy but I was used to a life behind the typewriter.

At first, I had meltdowns of self-consciousness, believing I wasn’t coming across to the audience, and I would get more nervous and flustered and fearful they couldn’t hear me. So, I decided I had to learn how to do this. I got coached in public speaking, which was enormously helpful and built my confidence. Then I really began to value it.

NJL: Women found value in another book of yours, The Silent Passage. You addressed another unspoken concern among women at the time: menopause. Remarkably, it was still a taboo subject
in 1991.

GS: When I sat down to update the fourth edition of that book, in 1998, I was still amazed by the crying need for The Silent Passage. A new generation of women—baby boomers—may be reinventing the taboo around menopause. When I hear stories of denial, it reminds me of the constant need to expand our consciousness about this silent passage. It is not the inevitable harbinger of a downhill slide.

NJL: Men have their own forms of menopause and transitions to make—which, in your pioneering way, you explored in Understanding Men’s Passages.

GS: Given their increasingly unpredictable and elongated lives, men need to reinvent themselves and expand the ways they demonstrate their manliness. And men in middle life have the best chance to become masters of their fates.

NJL: The fun begins as an adult, for men and women, after 50, according to your book New Passages. It’s the frontier of Second Adulthood, as you put it. Has it been so for you?

GS: Yes, it has. But, you have to know to look for these “passages” for them to happen or for you to facilitate the changes or appreciate the changes when they do happen.

I really do appreciate the moments much more now than before I was 50. And that’s colored very much by the fact that you don’t know how many more years you have.

I now recognize precious moments, precious friends and precious times, which are not the big holidays or the big events. I try to imprint them so I can go back to them. There is really a sublime appreciation that develops at this age, like really good wine: You are able to taste all the flavors.