NEW YORK — Gail Sheehy, the journalist, commentator and pop sociologist whose bestselling “Passages” helped millions navigate their lives from early adulthood to middle age and beyond, has died. She was 83.
Sheehy, widow of New York magazine founder Clay Felker, died Monday of complications from pneumonia in Southampton, N.Y., according to her daughter, Maura Sheehy.
“Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life” was published in 1976 and immediately caught on with a generation torn by the cultural revolution of the time, sorting through mid-life struggles, marital problems, changing gender roles and questions about identity. As Sheehy noted in the book’s foreword, close studies of childhood and old age were widely available, but far less scrutiny had been given to the years of work and relationships.
“It occurred to me that what Gesell and Spock did for children hadn’t been done for us adults,” she wrote. “It’s far easier to study adolescents and aging people. Both groups are in institutions (schools or rest homes) where they make captive subjects. The rest of us are out there in the mainstream of a spinning and distracted society, trying to make some sense of our one and only voyage through its ambiguities.”
