Gail Sheehy Wants Women to Admit We’re Different

September 8, 2014 3:- Vulture - By Kat Stoeffel

Gail Sheehy has made a career of real talk about the lives of adult woman. She mapped their midlife crises in Passages (1976) and Pathfinders (1981), then candidly discussed menopause (The Silent Passage, 1992) and sex after 50 (Sex and the Seasoned Woman, 2006). Now 76, she got down to writing about her own life. Sheehy’s memoir, Daring: My Passages, published this month by William Morrow, turns a feminine lens on the golden age of magazine writing as it describes how Sheehy goes from New York editor Clay Felker’s protégée turned lover to a celebrated nonfiction writer, and later Tina Brown’s political portrait artist. Sheehy talked to the Cut about how feminism and journalism have changed over the course of her long career.

The first half of your memoir is about juggling a writing career and the responsibility of being a single mother. Is it frustrating to see us, 40 years later, still having the same work-life balance conversation?

I don’t think we’ll ever be past it, because women are different. We never wanted to admit that when we were starting the feminist movement, but we do have one time frame that is relatively finite, although much less so now than it was in the past. There is no formula. I don’t think there is ever going to be one.
I do think taking the 20s to take the most chances you can is important, because you’re not going to hurt anyone else during that time. And if you do have a partner, you need a couple years to rehearse that relationship. So it seems like, to me, somewhere between 30 and 35 is a really, really good time to turn your eggs into babies. One of the other reasons that’s a good time I learned while writing a story called “The Happiest Woman in America.” It was based on a lot of in-depth research from a company called Healthways, which partners for Gallup for daily polls on well-being. I found the happiest woman in America is between 50 and 55, is happily married, has made significant progress in her career, and lives in a community where she can easily exercise outside. But the most important single thing was she had her last child before she was 35. So she was an empty nester and didn’t have any caregiving responsibilities at 50.
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