Gail Sheehy

Gail Sheehy (born Gail Henion; November 27, 1936 – August 24, 2020) was an American author, journalist, and lecturer. She was the author of seventeen books and numerous high-profile articles for magazines such as New York and Vanity Fair. Sheehy played a part in the movement Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism, sometimes known as creative nonfiction, in which journalists and essayists experimented with adopting a variety of literary techniques such as scene setting, dialogue, status details to denote social class, and getting inside the story and sometimes reporting the thoughts of a central character.

• Creativity could be described as letting go of certainties.
  • Pathfinders (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1981), pt. 2, ch. 5 (p. 97)

• Ah, mastery ... what a profoundly satisfying feeling when one finally gets on top of a new set of skills ... and then sees the light under the new door those skills can open, even as another door is closing.
  • New Passages (New York: Random House, 1995), pt. 4, ch. 8 (p. 198)

New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.

• If women had wives to keep house for them, to stay home with vomiting children, to get the car fixed, fight with the painters, run to the supermarket, reconcile the bank statements, listen to everyone’s problems, cater the dinner parties, and nourish the spirit each night, just imagine the possibilities for expansion — the number of books that would be written, companies started, professorships filled, political offices that would be held, by women.
  • Pt. 3, ch. 11 (p. 129)

• The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.
  • Pt. 7, ch. 25 (p. 408)

• Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough; and when you have enough, you have self-respect.
  • Pt. 7, ch. 25 (p. 416)