by Gail Sheehy
I sensed what Erikson meant when he described each stage of adult development as marked by a crisis. “Crisis” connoted not a catastrophe, but rather, an inner impulse toward change, a crucial period of increased vulnerability and heightened potential. Something important has changed in the way we think about the meaning of our participation in the external world. At such points either achievements are won or failures occur. It signals that we know ourselves better.
This was just what I was writing about: questions of how our values, goals, and aspirations are circumstances invigorated—or violated—by the present being of our lives. How do we balance family and social roles with our work, our purpose? Is there a rising fire of individual expression that we can no longer deny?
Yes! It was rising within me. If I had been ready to break free of Clay as my mentor, I should be ready to take the leap of faith and be my own author. My final conversation with Dr. Gould was a textbook example of a concept that we had discussed. As adults, we often replace the “inner dictator”—our leftover parents’ voices—with a mate or boss or mentor we cast as “the strong one.”
“I believe I have outgrown the need for a strong one,” I heard myself calmly telling the psychiatrist. “You don’t need me, either. We both have a clear point of view. We can both write our own books.” It was my personal declaration of independence. And it felt good.
Imagine the shock, then, when the psychiatrist sued me. His intention was to enjoin publication of my book—before I had even finished writing it! The claim was that I had plagiarized him in the newsletter article. The charge was patently absurd. I had quoted him in a pro bono newsletter with full attribution. Everyone at New York magazine, including the attorney, was appalled.
But I was dead broke. I couldn’t afford an attorney to defend myself. A family market around the corner gave me an account to charge food and was lenient on being paid. Ella found an apartment across the street so she could sleep in when needed. She stretched my budget by making veggie burgers with salad for suppers for Maura and me. Mornings I powered up by holding my nose to drink a god-awful health potion with yeast, called Adele Davis’s Milk Pep-Up. Evenings I was often cheered by my warmhearted neighbor, Muriel Bedrick. She would bring over a casserole or leftover cake from one of her three daughters’ birthdays. A poet herself, Muriel read drafts of my book and found the perfect verse to illuminate each of the seven stages.
My accountant strongly advised that I offer the psychiatrist something to make his suit go away. Certain that my book would never make any money, I offered Dr. Gould 10 percent of my royalties. Dumb mistake? Yes, but what was the alternative? To be stopped two-thirds of the way through gestating a book was unthinkable. I had to deliver.
IT HAD BEEN A BRUTAL YEAR. When summer 1975 came around, I needed solace. Clay appealed to me to share weekends with him again. Being together in the sweet rented house in Wainscott contented Maura and me, all three of us.
By August, Jack Macrae was coming out to work with me in all-day editing sessions. After five o’clock, Macrae and I would be fainting from the heat. Biking to the beach, we would climb up to the lifeguard’s chair to find a breeze, survey the ocean, and talk of anything but the book.
When I finished the first full draft in mid-December of ’75, I was shocked by its heft. Almost one thousand double-spaced pages. Macrae told me it needed to be cut by at least one-quarter. And this massive editing job had to be accomplished in three weeks to meet the production deadline. I had to hire a freelance editor, Carol Rinzler, to help me slash without burning. We worked every night from 8 P.M. to 1 A.M. Then I had to hire two typists to perform the equivalent of a twin-piano act as they banged out fifty pages of notes and sources for an on-time delivery.
Macrae invited me to the Four Seasons for a celebratory lunch. Over flutes of champagne, my publisher raised a burning question, one I had been evading for months.
“Well, what’s the title?”
I had played with every variation on changes, transitions, stages, you name it. Sitting there, eyes closed, mind relaxed, a name for my baby leaped to mind at the last moment.
“Passages.”
Macrae looked puzzled. It was such an unfamiliar use of the word. “They’ll think it means ‘excerpts.’”
With a confidence that surprised me, I said, “Until they read the book.”
CHAPTER 21
Fear of Failure or Fear of Success?
MARCH 1976. THE COUNTDOWN WAS ON. Three months before Passages was to be published, Time magazine was sending its back-of-the-book editor to my apartment with a photographer. It would be my very first interview in a national publication. I suited up in my best jeans, boots, and a fitted shirt, had my hair styled as if it weren’t, and set out coffee and cookies, naively imagining this would be a friendly conversation. When I opened my door, it was to a scornful man.
“I should have written this book,” he growled. I had struck a fatal blow to the ego of a high-status editor of what was then the most powerful newsmagazine in the country. Passages had taken three years to write and thirty-seven years to live; it was not, as his article would dismiss it, a “pop phenomenon.”
Clay called and with sweet conviction said, “I bleed for you, honey. I’ve never seen such a blatant example of male jealousy.”
One Sunday I got a call about a review appearing that day in the Chicago Tribune Book World. It slammed the book for “a shocking lack of research.” My head dropped to the kitchen counter. Fifty pages of footnotes laboriously dredged up from many hundreds of sources, typed and retyped countless times on copy paper with multiple carbons—all were ignored. Why? When publishers send out early review copies, they are labeled “uncorrected proofs” and do not include footnotes, bibliography, or index. Strict warnings are given that the reviewer must wait to get the final hardcover before writing an assessment. This critic had broken the embargo on publication date and ignored the accepted rules. What to do? Again, nothing. One can never argue with newspapers; they come out too often.
My first invitation to appear at a bookstore was in early May at a small Brentano’s in Greenwich Village. I wore heels and stockings and a hot-pink cotton suit for the appearance. The sales manager gave me a chair by the window to sit in and sign books. I sat alone. I looked out the window. Nobody came. I felt like Rapunzel.
“Could I use your phone?” I asked the sales manager. I called my freelance editor, Carol Rinzler.
“I’m coming right down,” she said.
She showed up within twenty minutes, stepping into the store impeccably turned out in hat and gloves. “We have reservations at the Waverly Inn,” she announced, and swept me off so I could hold my head up high.
These early insults were discouraging, but friends kept surrounding me with cheerful messages and book parties. The party I remember best took Clay and me out to Sag Harbor. Our hosts were Robert Emmett Ginna and his wife, Margaret. They were both editors of taste and originality who found their way to this historic whaling town in Eastern Long Island along with a batch of Life magazine people. Sag Harbor and its environs were becoming a refuge for authors of the post–World War II generation such as Edgar Doctorow, Peter Matthiessen, and James Salter. I was thrilled to be in their company. Everyone asked what my next book would be. I hadn’t the foggiest.
“So what is next?” Ginna pressed me.
“Now is what’s next. I’m going to go out there and talk to everybody I can—on the street, in coffee shops, on the bus—and get them reading this book so I find out whether it speaks to them.”
WORD OF MOUTH WAS ELECTRIC. For several weeks ahead of the official publication date, I spoke anywhere I was invited. I still had no experience with public speaking, but audiences grew. Dropping into the largest independent bookstore in Los Angeles, I was surprised to learn that a dozen customers had the book on order. I felt a tingle of excitement when I overheard two women at a bus stop talking about “Catch-30”; when I heard a hairstylist comparing notes with a
manicurist about their “jailbreak marriages”; when I followed a political story to a plant opening and found two lunch-pail guys discussing “man-o-pause.”
The only thing these folks had in common was belonging to the boomer generation. The common denominator seemed to be their excitement about the possibilities of change. Instead of being confined by old roles and rules, they found validation for busting out and trying to be something more. The book was also being introduced in a period when our culture was already fiery with protest movements by women and minorities. Passages was not an angry book. It encouraged revolution, but revolution from within.
The book was often labeled “pop psychology,” which I took to mean it wasn’t academic, it was accessible. Jack Macrae, my publisher, told me, “Great word of mouth is often touched off by books that have no precedent, like Passages. People like discovering a book on their own, better than having it shoved down their throats by promotion.”
A great part of the book’s appeal was Milton Glaser’s cover design. A staircase of assorted colors had brightly colored block letters marching diagonally up the steps to spell PASSAGES. Delicious as a pack of Lifesavers, it also conveyed the promise of adult life as a progressive ascent, rather than a decline.
Most authors I asked about book tours told me they were hell. Nobody has time to read your book. You’re always worried that your hair won’t dry so you can look good on TV at 7 A.M. God forbid the makeup lady doesn’t show up. I learned fast how to “make the eyes pop” and warm up my oatmeal-fair skin with bronzer. But once the makeup lady takes over, your eyes and lips no longer belong to you. They are her creation. When you catch a glimpse on the monitor of hooker-heavy eyelids or chimp lips, it’s too late to cry, “That’s not me!”
You move across country on an invisible conveyor belt, appearing every morning on a facsimile of the Today show. A pair of hosts who look identical to yesterday’s hosts apparently move along the time zones just ahead of you. They always seem to be called Sandy and Dave. After engaging in essentially the same patter from Philadelphia to Dallas, I once dozed off during a commercial break.
I decided that the best way to approach this new role was like an actress opening out of town. Two great costume changes and a spiral notebook full of my best anecdotes would make me feel like a pro. Oh, yes, and I would remember to lie to the makeup lady that I had a cold sore on my lips, don’t touch. When my tour hit Los Angeles, Clay happened to be there on business. He took me to a boutique on Rodeo Drive. I picked out two fitted silk shirts, one pale pink, one baby blue, with matching scarves, and an orange wraparound skirt to wake up the interviewers. My “show wardrobe” cost $500, the most I’d ever spent on anything that I couldn’t live in.
My first lecture about Passages was in a prime venue: Marin County. This was the City Arts and Lectures crowd, superhip culture vultures raised on Allen Ginsberg and Joan Didion. Roughly three hundred people were stacked in bleachers to hear me enlighten them about the “Predictable Crises of Adult Life.” I was scared to death. My voice faltered. When I couldn’t be heard, people started climbing down from the top rows of the bleachers and walking out. I dropped my note cards.
Finally, I noticed in the front row the wife of a man I’d written about in the book, in a chapter called “Living Out the Fantasy.” Her husband had left her to live high on a commune in Mexico with a Latin dancer. Notwithstanding, she looked strong and radiant. I took strength from her and belted out the remainder of my speech. The half of the audience too polite to walk out did applaud.
I called my friend Lesley Stahl to tell her how poorly I performed. She urged me to see her speech coach. Dorothy Sarnoff was a former singer and Broadway star who had incorporated the positive reinforcement strategies of the human potential movement. “I don’t criticize,” Miss Sarnoff told me off the bat. “I’ll give you loving suggestions.” She had me stand behind a lectern. “Stay on both feet, no shifting weight. Lock on my eyes; ninety percent is eye contact. Nice smile, but don’t overuse it. Animate. That’s it. You LOVE being here. Now give me the vibe of authority.”
Then she turned on the TV camera and recorded me. Just cleaning up the “ums” and “uhs” and “you knows” was like learning English all over again. But after three sessions, I began enjoying the experience of talking through the camera to an imagined audience of one person in her living room, engaging her, persuading her, making her laugh and think. The secret was all in one’s imagination.
Once the official book tour launched, I began enjoying it. Media heroines of mine, such as Susan Stamberg on National Public Radio and Nancy Dickerson at the Washington, D.C., public TV station, were such smart interviewers, they made me sound good. Milt Rosenberg was a fixture on WGN in Chicago, where I was paired with the Washington Post’s gossip columnist, Sally Quinn, for two hours of small talk masquerading as social psychology.
However, some interviews were endurance contests. Newspapermen in their twenties wanted to play Woodward and Bernstein and find the smoking gun. Men as smart as Ken Emerson interviewing me for the Boston Phoenix just couldn’t imagine that any passages described by men over thirty would be relevant to them. They had life all figured out. I decided this is the way the young male psyche is built, which is why so many can be sent off to war without considering the possible side effects. My debates with these younger men could stretch up to two hours. The only argument I could not use was to state the obvious: That’s all right . . . it’s just the stage you’re in.
BY JULY, THE BOOK HAD RECEIVED a very good notice in the New York Times Sunday Book Review and a rave in the Washington Post. Interview requests from notable journalists were piling up. I was sure the bubble was about to burst. This could not really be happening.
Was it fear of failure? Every writer has it. What we write is so much of who we are. To be rejected for who you are is about the worst fate one can imagine.
Fear of success? Foolish as it may sound, I suffered from it. Success is much more devious than failure. Success is the whole object of the American dream. But do people love you for it? I was fortunate in that the man in my life was totally behind my aspirations and benefited from my success as a writer. But the prospect of achieving what I most wanted—that is, to be taken seriously—could also open me to unexpected consequences.
What if, based on the observations I made in my book, people risked dramatic changes in their lives? Like divorce. What if women struck out to finish their college degrees in their forties, overshadowing their husbands, and their marriages fell apart? What if some guy quit a safe job to try a bold new career path and wiped out? Or the opposite: one man told me when he read about the Catch-30 transition, he gave up the illusion of rock stardom and was much happier as a record producer. So change could go either way. Nonetheless, I had periodic attacks of the what-ifs. What if a few years down the road, the doorbell rang and there was a line around the block of people shaking my book at me, saying: “I want my old life back! My new life stinks!”
It was time to get out of Dodge.
I COULDN’T BELIEVE MY GOOD FORTUNE when Paris Match offered me an expense-paid trip to France to write a comic story about how the French behave on the northern beaches of Brittany. It was a wonderful chance to take a break with Maura and have fun. We stayed in a small auberge and followed the parade of vacationers as they trudged to the beach, rain or shine, outfitted with umbrellas, short pants, striped socks, pipes, and maybe a homburg. Like Jacques Tati playing Monsieur Hulot, they moved as if in a migratory pattern essential to long life.
Back in Paris, we had a short stay at the Hotel L’Abbaye while I worked with an editor on my story. I took Maura to the Piscine Deligny. She loved doing cartwheels off the diving board as the pool rocked on its barge at the side of the Seine. I remember feeling that this was like rocking on a cloud over the peak of life.
Then it was time to drop out entirely. We pushed on to Italy to connect with my best childhood friend and her children for a holiday weekend in Venice
, planning to wind up in Florence to meet Clay and steep ourselves in Renaissance art. I swore not to give Passages another thought.
Susan Schmedes Dando picked us up at the Venice Marco Polo Airport in her little red Fiat. Crammed in with her nearly six-foot-tall daughter, Holly, Maura’s age, and her towheaded son, Evan, we had a hilarious drive to Venice. We sang along with Evan who was already writing music at age nine, songs destined to make him a rock star with his band, the Lemonheads. We caught a vaporetto across the Venetian lagoon to the island of Lido and planted ourselves by the pool of the fabulous Excelsior Hotel. For two days we alternated between watching the children swim in the pool and in the sea while Susie and I talked ourselves back to our reckless childhood selves. The burden of the book and fears of success were dissolved.
Then came a late-night call from Clay. Would I accept? Dreading the worst news, I closed my eyes as he began to speak: “You better be ready to pick up the International Herald Tribune tomorrow.”
I knew it, another nasty review.
“You’re numero uno in the New York Times Book Review!” he said.
I was dumbstruck. Number one? This was beyond my wildest dreams. I had expected Passages to sink with little trace. It wasn’t written by an academic with an alphabet of letters after his name. I had thought the pleasure of research and completion of writing would be my reward.
That night Susie, the kids, and I put on fancy dress and Venetian masks and found a friendly trattoria where we could celebrate. Italian patrons were curious when they heard these boisterous Americans singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” They chimed in on tangerine trees and marmalade skies. What was the occasion? In my best Berlitz Italian I explained that I was a scrivere whose book was number one in the United States. I bought Prosecco for the house. The title was passed around. A chorus of “Passagi!” rang out and was incorporated into a chorus from Verdi’s Rigoletto. This is what I most love about Italians. Any excuse to turn life into opera.
