Daring: My Passages: A Memoir
Written by Gail Sheehy
Narrated by Bernadette Dunne
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
The author of the classic New York Times bestseller Passages returns with her inspiring memoir—a chronicle of her trials and triumphs as a groundbreaking “girl” journalist in the 1960s, to iconic guide for women and men seeking to have it all, to one of the premier political profilers of modern times.
Candid, insightful, and powerful, Daring: My Passages is the story of the unconventional life of a writer who dared . . . to walk New York City streets with hookers and pimps to expose violent prostitution; to march with civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland as British paratroopers opened fire; to seek out Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat when he was targeted for death after making peace with Israel.
Always on the cutting edge of social issues, Gail Sheehy reveals the obstacles and opportunities encountered when she dared to blaze a trail in a “man’s world.” Daring is also a beguiling love story of Sheehy’s tempestuous romance with and eventual happy marriage to Clay Felker, the charismatic creator of New York magazine. As well, Sheehy recounts her audacious pursuit and intimate portraits of many twentieth-century leaders, including Hillary Clinton, Presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush, and the world-altering attraction between Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Sheehy reflects on desire, ambition, and wanting it all—career, love, children, friends, social significance—and lays bare her major life passages: false starts and surprise successes, the shock of failures and inner crises; betrayal in a first marriage; life as a single mother; flings of an ardent, liberated young woman; her adoption of a second daughter from a refugee camp; marriage to the love of her life and their ensuing years of happiness, even in the shadow of illness.
Now stronger than ever, Sheehy speaks from hard-won experience to today’s young women. Her fascinating, no-holds-barred story is a testament to guts, resilience, smarts, and daring, and offers a bold perspective on all of life’s passages.
Gail Sheehy
Gail Sheehy, Ph.D., as author, journalist, and popular lecturer, has changed the way millions of women and men around the world look at their life stages. In her 50-year career, she has written 17 books, including her revolutionary Passages, named one of the ten most influential books of our times. As a literary journalist, she was one of the original contributors to New York Magazine and to Vanity Fair since 1984. A winner of many awards, three honorary doctorates, a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 by Books for a Better Life, she has regularly commented on political figures, including in her acclaimed biography of Hillary Clinton.
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Reviews for Daring
15 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Nope. Read a couple of her PASSAGES books and liked them very much, but DARING, Gail Sheehy's memoir, lacks the personal tone that a good memoir requires. Even in talking about her covering the Beatles' guru, the Maharishi, in India, or Tom Wolfe's coverage of the Black Panthers being feted by Leonard Bernstein and his celebrity friends, or the early days of New York magazine and the "new journalism" she was part of, Sheehy failed to engage my interest. And these are things that SHOULD engage, things I remember and lived through. I don't understand why she couldn't make such stuff sing, come alive. But she didn't. I was bored. A hundred pages was enough, and I gave it up as a bad buy. Blah. Not recommended.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I heard Sheehy talk about this book, and read passages from this book, last fall. I read Passages many years ago. I didn't realize she had written so many other books and articles. This one is quite amazing when you realize all she's done. And yet, with all her successes, she realizes (and shares in this book) that she is a woman and has all of the same fears and foibles that other women do, and that we all go through some of the same passages. So, interwoven with her descriptions of her reporting on the Irish civil war, and interviewing the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Hillary Clinton, is her love story with the man who eventually became her husband, the family they built, and her caregiving through his illnesses. The book is a bit disjointed, because it is organized around themes, and not all chronological, but Sheehy is a very good writer, and lived an amazing life, while struggling with also wanting to make it on her own and be a good mother. She realizes her success is due to her willingness to dare to do things she is afraid to do, or afraid she cannot do. This is a lesson to us all, and something to strive for.