Gail Sheehy Of Sag Harbor Dies August 24

Gail Sheehy, a groundbreaking journalist and author, died at Southampton Hospital on August 24 after being taken there from Sag Harbor. The announced cause of death was complications from pneumonia.

Gail Merritt Henion was born on November 27, 1936, in Mamaroneck, New York. She grew up there, attending its public schools. Her mother, Lillian Rainey Henion, was a homemaker. Her father, Harold Henion, owned an advertising business. She graduated from the University of Vermont in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in English and home economics. Her first job was as a consumer representative for J.C. Penney.

She married Albert F. Sheehy in 1960, and moved to Rochester, New York, where he attended medical school and she worked as a fashion coordinator at McCurdy’s department store, decorating windows. She then interviewed for a job on the fashion page at The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, though the editor was reluctant to hire her. However, Ms. Sheehy was hired, and her career as a reporter began. After she and Mr. Sheehy divorced, her next journalism job was at The New York Herald Tribune, where one of the editors was Clay Felker. He and Ms. Sheehy embarked on a professional and then personal relationship.

Mr. Felker had worked at Sports Illustrated and Esquire magazines. After losing a battle for Esquire editorship to Harold Hayes, Mr. Felker left to join The Herald Tribune. He revamped a Sunday section into New York and hired writers such as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Ms. Sheehy. He was one of the early proponents of New Journalism and key to its emergence. The Herald Tribune closed its doors in 1966, and two years later Mr. Felker reconstituted the Sunday section as New York Magazine, along with the designer Milton Glaser (who died in June). It became one of the most imitated magazines of its time, both from a design perspective and in the way it combined service and life-style articles.

By this time, Ms. Sheehy was a participant in New York’s literary scene and a practitioner of creative nonfiction. She also studied anthropology with Margaret Mead. She applied those skills to explore the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s and to gain psychological insights into the newsmakers she profiled. According to The New York Times, “In articles for both Vanity Fair and New York magazines, her specialty was connecting the dots of a biography to show how character was destiny.”

She married Mr. Felker, who encouraged her to write “big” stories. In one of her earliest articles, she traveled with Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. She wrote presciently about subjects that marked turns in the culture, including blended families and drug addiction.

Her articles in New York often caused a sensation. In one, in 1972, titled “The Secret of Grey Gardens,” she revealed the little-known bohemian life of Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, an aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Ms. Beale’s daughter, known as Little Edie, in East Hampton.

Ms. Sheehy became a contributing editor at Vanity Fair in 1984. Her first story for the magazine was a profile of Gary Hart, and three years later she helped to break the story of his infidelity that would ultimately end his candidacy in the 1988 primaries. Over the next few decades, she specialized in profiles that were as psychologically probing as they were focused on the horse race of politics.

Of her 17 books, the most prominent and influential was “Passages” in 1976, which examined the predictable crises of adult life and how to use them as opportunities for creative change. It sold 10 million copies, was named by the Library of Congress as one of the 10 most influential books of modern times and remained on The New York Times’s best-seller list for more than three years. As she noted in the book’s foreword, most studies of life’s mileposts were focused on children and older people, but she wanted to look at those in the vast middle. “The rest of us,” she wrote, “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.”

In its obituary of Ms. Sheehy, the New York Times reported that it was in Belfast that the seed for the book “Passages” was planted. She was talking with a boy there when, she wrote, a bullet “blew his face off.” She herself nearly took a bullet, a moment that traumatized her and made her think about what she called “the arithmetic of life.”

Ms. Sheehy was able to build the concept of “passages” into a franchise, spinning off more books and articles that examined other stages of life, including “The Silent Passage” (1992), about menopause; “New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time” (1995), which proclaimed middle age obsolete and explored new options after age 50; and “Understanding Men’s Passages” (1998). The last book in the series (though she was working on another at the time of her death) was “Daring: My Passages: A Memoir” (2014). In it, Ms. Sheehy wrote about her own life. According to one review, “The book would make a good primer for young women interested in the history of feminism and women’s battles to gain acceptance in the professional world, but men will also find her look at these issues engaging and insightful. Young, and older, journalists and authors will find a wealth of information, advice and encouragement on reporting and writing.”

In addition to living in New York City, Ms. Sheehy and Mr. Felker (who died in 2008) owned a house in East Hampton for 20-plus years. They raised Maura Sheehy, from Ms. Sheehy’s first marriage, and adopted a Cambodian refugee, Mohm Sheehy, who had lost most of her family during the murderous Pol Pot regime. In addition to her daughters, Ms. Sheehy is survived by a sister, Patrica Klein; her companion, Robert Emmett Ginna Jr., a former Harvard professor and a co-founder of People magazine, who lives in Sag Harbor; and three grandchildren.