Catherine Hollis

NonfictionMemoir

Joyce Carol Oates reflects on her childhood

Review by Catherine Hollis

James Joyce once wished for an “ideal reader with an ideal case of insomnia”; a reader of Joyce Carol Oates similarly needs an ideal insomnia to plow through the 50-plus novels of this legendarily prolific writer. As it turns out, Oates herself suffers from insomnia, and has since she was a girl, using her night hours productively and well. Her new book, The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age, offers an exquisitely rendered glimpse of her own childhood in rural upstate New York.

As in her 2011 memoir, A Widow’s Story, Oates writes tactfully, perhaps even grudgingly, avoiding the over-share, the “too much information” of the contemporary misery memoir. But the opportunity to follow her beautifully subtle stream of consciousness as it revisits the past is not to be missed. Oates sees herself as a ghost revisiting the old farmhouse of her childhood, the one-room schoolhouse she attended and the winding country roads of Sunday drives with her beloved parents. This book is as much a meditation on memory as it is a recollection of a specific time and place.

Composed of separate essays, many previously published, The Lost Landscape can feel a bit repetitive, although never scattered. This makes it a perfect book for readers looking for short, contained “memoir-ish” (Oates’ term) essays. She is particularly good at capturing the post-Depression world of working-class rural life, when finishing high school was a real achievement. Had young Joyce not been bused to a Buffalo suburb for high school, she might never have gone to college or become the eminent American author she is today. And yet, as The Lost Landscape shows, the world of childhood is also the source of her astonishing creativity and genius.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

James Joyce once wished for an “ideal reader with an ideal case of insomnia”; a reader of Joyce Carol Oates similarly needs an ideal insomnia to plow through the 50-plus novels of this legendarily prolific writer. As it turns out, Oates herself suffers from insomnia, and has since she was a girl, using her night hours productively and well. Her new book, The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age, offers an exquisitely rendered glimpse of her own childhood in rural upstate New York.
NonfictionArts & CultureArt

The road to Warhol as we know him

Review by Catherine Hollis

On September 24, 1963, Andy Warhol left New York for a road trip to Hollywood in a black Ford Falcon station wagon. His companions were his assistant and up-and-coming poet Gerard Malanga, antic underground film “superstar” Taylor Mead and Wynn Chamberlain, who owned the car. In Deborah Davis’ impressive recounting of this adventure, The Trip, Warhol’s experiences mark the turning point in his life between “Raggedy Andy” Warhola, a small-town kid from Pittsburgh, and Andy Warhol, filmmaker and pop art impresario.

Davis’ copious research into the flotsam and jetsam of 1963 establishes the mood: She shows us the billboards lining Route 66, takes us into the motels and truck stops and listens to the pop songs on the radio. These details do more than evoke the period; they also show how Warhol’s iconic “multiples”—like his Campbell’s soup cans—emerge from the mass culture of the 1960s. 

Once in Los Angeles, the ragtag adventurers get busy. Warhol has a first art show at the Ferus Gallery; Dennis and Brooke Hopper throw Andy a “real Hollywood party”; Warhol meets his idol Marcel Duchamp; and Warhol and crew shoot a movie called Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort Of, with the impish Mead as Tarzan and Dennis Hopper as his body double. Davis argues that this trip to Hollywood gives birth to the Warhol of the later ’60s, the artist whose silver Factory and entourage of underground divas we remember today.

A good introduction to Warhol for pop art neophytes, The Trip will also appeal to readers eager to learn more about the “Mad Men”–era collision between art and advertising.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On September 24, 1963, Andy Warhol left New York for a road trip to Hollywood in a black Ford Falcon station wagon. His companions were his assistant and up-and-coming poet Gerard Malanga, antic underground film “superstar” Taylor Mead and Wynn Chamberlain, who owned the car. In Deborah Davis’ impressive recounting of this adventure, The Trip, Warhol’s experiences mark the turning point in his life between “Raggedy Andy” Warhola, a small-town kid from Pittsburgh, and Andy Warhol, filmmaker and pop art impresario.
NonfictionMemoir

Turning on the lights

Review by Catherine Hollis

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, July 2015

Ah, alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems (to misquote “The Simpsons”). In Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, Sarah Hepola reveals the ugly side of addiction with humor and honesty. She writes gracefully of blackouts, junk food binges and unnerving sexual encounters. Along the way, she touches on loneliness and cats and hangovers and alternative weeklies. Although she claims that alcohol made her fearless, her true bravery emerges in this memoir’s witty candor.

A petite woman who can hold her liquor, Hepola’s drinking life is punctuated by gaps. How did she get home from the bar? Who is this man in bed with her? What did she say to make her friends so angry with her? A blackout is simply the hippocampus shutting down the long-term memory function in a drinker’s brain—which is why your drunk friend repeats the same story six times at the end of a long night. They may still be standing upright, but they won’t remember any of it tomorrow. Hepola proposes a “CSI Blackout” show for piecing together the night before; a junk food wrapper or a missing purse is a clue to the drunkard’s progress through the lost portions of the night. 

While Hepola claims not to enjoy the part in sobriety memoirs where the narrator stops drinking, her own sobriety is as funny and fearless as her drinking days. She’s particularly good on the weirdness of dating while stone-cold sober, and the subtle process of recalibrating her friendships. Hepola is an admirable addition to the distinguished line of “drinkers with writing problems,” and Blackout is a rollicking and raw account of binge-drinking, blacking out and getting sober. 

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ah, alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems (to misquote “The Simpsons”). In Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, Sarah Hepola reveals the ugly side of addiction with humor and honesty. She writes gracefully of blackouts, junk food binges and unnerving sexual encounters. Along the way, she touches on loneliness and cats and hangovers and alternative weeklies. Although she claims that alcohol made her fearless, her true bravery emerges in this memoir’s witty candor.
NonfictionMemoir

Following Dante through the stark reality of mourning

Review by Catherine Hollis

Joseph Luzzi’s new memoir, In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love, transforms unthinkable tragedy into literary gold. In November 2007, while Luzzi was teaching at Bard College, his beloved pregnant wife Katherine was in a car accident: She died later that morning at the hospital, shortly after their daughter Isabel was born. In the space of a single morning, Joseph Luzzi became both a father and widower.

Luzzi’s previous memoir, My Two Italies, sketched the duality between the southern region of Calabria, where the Luzzi family hails from, and Florence, home of the Renaissance. He calls upon his two Italies once again to help him endure the electric anguish he experiences in the wake of Katherine’s death. His return home to Rhode Island and his fierce Calabrian mother Yolanda allows for baby Isabel to be brought up in the bosom of a southern Italian matriarchy, while his reading of Florentine exile Dante helps him journey through the dark woods of grief.

More than counselors or pastors, Dante’s Divine Comedy teaches Luzzi about the stages of mourning. The Inferno is charged and electric, while Katherine’s absence is so raw; stumbling through the Purgatorio is challenging, as Luzzi adjusts with difficulty to becoming a father to Isabel. Eventually, the Paradisio emerges: an adjustment to Katherine’s death, Isabel’s needs and the entrance of new love.

More than simply a memoir of mourning, In a Dark Wood is also a deeply felt reading of the Divine Comedy, with excursions through Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s The Aeneid. Luzzi’s life-experience charges these epic poems with urgency and meaning, taking them from the classroom and into the world. His learned yet accessible discussions of these texts—as they helped him through his grief—will encourage readers to look to these classics with fresh eyes.

In a Dark Wood testifies to the life-giving importance of literature and what it has to teach us.

Joseph Luzzi’s new memoir, In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love, transforms unthinkable tragedy into literary gold. In November 2007, while Luzzi was teaching at Bard College, his beloved pregnant wife Katherine was in a car accident: She died later that morning at the hospital, shortly after their daughter Isabel was born. In the space of a single morning, Joseph Luzzi became both a father and widower.
Nonfiction

Solitude and the single woman

Review by Catherine Hollis

More people live alone in America and more American women identify as single than ever before. Kate Bolick’s blockbuster 2011 Atlantic cover story, “All the Single Ladies,” ignited a conversation about how unmarried women are changing contemporary culture. In her thoughtful follow-up to that article, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, Bolick considers the deeper questions emerging from the statistics on single women. How do women (like Bolick, like this reviewer) who are working, living and aging alone construct meaningful, loving lives? How do we negotiate between solitude and community?

Spinster addresses these questions through a lively mixture of memoir and biography. Like many young bookish women, Bolick migrates to New York and journalism. In the aftermath of her mother’s early death, she finds female role models in a group of women she calls her “awakeners”: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Neith Boyce, Maeve Brennan, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Each of these women struggled to become a writer, a struggle that sometimes felt like a stark choice between being professionally successful and being married. If the choice is less stark these days, the stakes are still high.

While the stereotypes of spinsters are mostly unflattering—cue the cat lady, the bag lady and Grey Gardens—Bolick’s Spinster offers a corrective through nuanced portraits of women who love and are loved, and who choose to place their work and their friends at the center of their lives. Engaging and informative, Spinster offers a decidedly non-“Sex and the City” portrait of the challenges and opportunities of single life.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Bolick about Spinster.

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

More people live alone in America and more American women identify as single than ever before. Kate Bolick’s blockbuster 2011 Atlantic cover story, “All the Single Ladies,” ignited a conversation about how unmarried women are changing contemporary culture. In her thoughtful follow-up to that article, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, Bolick considers the deeper questions emerging from the statistics on single women. How do women (like Bolick, like this reviewer) who are working, living and aging alone construct meaningful, loving lives? How do we negotiate between solitude and community?
NonfictionMemoir

The changing experience of time

Review by Catherine Hollis

The Folded Clock, as crafted by novelist Heidi Julavits, is intricate and delicately worked. Time doesn’t flow linearly in this memoir as we might expect. What at first glance appears to be the diary of a writer in her 40s living an enviable life—an apartment in Manhattan, a house in Maine, sabbaticals in Europe—turns into a structure more complex, like an origami crane. Meditations on marriage and friendship appear and reappear. Diary entries might skip six months, or jump back a year. Julavits arranges the raw material of her diary in such a way as to provoke insight across the units of time that we normally experience: the day, the week and the month.

Once the reader understands that this is no ordinary diary in which life is sliced into manageable chunks, the fun begins. Julavits opens her book by telling us about her middle school diary, how it accounts for the days but not for the self who experiences them. (But whose middle school diary manages that?) She makes the canny observation that a day is a piece of time too small for a middle-aged working mom to contemplate; a week is the smallest unit of time she experiences, or even a month—life measured out in bills due.

The magic of The Folded Clock is the way it recaptures time, slowing and bending it, to create something new: art from life. There’s plenty of life here: swimming in the open ocean, writing in the library, drinking beer in the afternoon, a first husband, a second husband, therapy, girl crushes and more. By connecting these units of daily life, Julavits transforms her diary into an exceptional work of art.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Folded Clock, as crafted by novelist Heidi Julavits, is intricate and delicately worked. Time doesn’t flow linearly in this memoir as we might expect. What at first glance appears to be the diary of a writer in her 40s living an enviable life—an apartment in Manhattan, a house in Maine, sabbaticals in Europe—turns into a structure more complex, like an origami crane. Meditations on marriage and friendship appear and reappear. Diary entries might skip six months, or jump back a year. Julavits arranges the raw material of her diary in such a way as to provoke insight across the units of time that we normally experience: the day, the week and the month.
NonfictionMemoir

A difficult pilgrimage

Review by Catherine Hollis

In St. Augustine’s Confessions (one of the first spiritual memoirs), he famously prayed “Lord, make me good, but not yet.” In his powerful, visceral new memoir, celebrity journalist Kevin Sessums, like a modern St. Augustine, testifies to the life-threatening pull between carnality and spirituality in his own life.

Readers of his best-selling 2007 memoir Mississippi Sissy will recall Sessums’ Southern Gothic origins: growing up gay in the Civil Rights era, the death of both parents by the time he was 9 and molestation by a trusted preacher. Lurking behind that story, however, is the one Sessums documents in I Left It on the Mountain. Even as he interviews celebrities like Hugh Jackman and Daniel Radcliffe, Sessums descends into the hell of crystal meth addiction.

His new memoir chronicles how the twin strands of bodily addiction and spiritual transcendence shape his life. But the path toward healing, both physical and spiritual, is neither smooth nor linear. He climbs Mt. Kilimanjaro, only to return to New York and the temptations of drugs and anonymous sex. Desperate to escape his addiction, he turns to a spiritual pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.

His descriptions of the angels and devils he encounters on the Camino are transporting and hallucinogenic, as mystic visions must be. But even with powerful goodness surrounding him, Sessums boomerangs from the visionary to the squalid as he hits bottom with drug use and its consequences.

Ultimately a story of redemption and grace, I Left It on the Mountain is a spiritual memoir—albeit one with appearances by Courtney Love and Jessica Lange, earthly angels who walk by Sessums’ side.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with author Kevin Sessums.

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In St. Augustine’s Confessions (one of the first spiritual memoirs), he famously prayed “Lord, make me good, but not yet.” In his powerful, visceral new memoir, celebrity journalist Kevin Sessums, like a modern St. Augustine, testifies to the life-threatening pull between carnality and spirituality in his own life.
NonfictionMemoir

Too far from home

Review by Catherine Hollis

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, February 2015

Alexandra Fuller’s hardscrabble African lyricism returns in her third memoir, which focuses on the push-pull of her marriage to American adventurer Charlie Ross. Although much of Leaving Before the Rains Come is set in Wyoming, where Fuller settles uncomfortably into American domesticity, her war-torn childhood in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the drunken pragmatism of her parents continue to shape her worldview.

When Fuller meets her future husband at a polo club in Zambia, he seems the perfect blend of adventure and restraint. He runs a river guiding service on the Zambezi, and takes clients up Kilimanjaro—safely, with Range Rovers to collect them at the end of the adventure. It’s unlike Fuller’s own African childhood, which was filled with random acts of catastrophe and violence. Charlie’s appeal is undeniable, but so is the simmering tension between his perspective and hers.

The “sacred terror and beauty” of Africa is lost to Fuller in the mountain subdivisions of Jackson Hole, where Charlie becomes a real estate agent and frets over columns of numbers. They have three children, and the weight of American materialism displaces adventure in their relationship. The financial crisis of 2008 hits their marriage hard, as does Fuller’s heartbroken realization that she is not African anymore.

Turning to the example of her father and her English and Scottish ancestors, Fuller’s work in this memoir is to patch together her own identity and—in a profound sense—to retrieve her soul. Her father’s life lessons are what save her: among them, fearlessness, endurance and dressing for dinner. Also: humor, gin and tonics and Epsom salts. “Loss is a part of the game,” he tells Fuller, and “regret’s a waste of bloody time.”

Fuller’s blend of wry honesty and heartfelt environmental consciousness will resonate with both new readers and longtime admirers of her distinctive style.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Alexandra Fuller’s hardscrabble African lyricism returns in her third memoir, which focuses on the push-pull of her marriage to American adventurer Charlie Ross. Although much of Leaving Before the Rains Come is set in Wyoming, where Fuller settles uncomfortably into American domesticity, her war-torn childhood in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the drunken pragmatism of her parents continue to shape her worldview.
NonfictionHistory

A new look at the complex Cromwell

Review by Catherine Hollis

Thomas Cromwell and the Tudor Court have had something of a resurgence in popular culture. While Showtime’s melodramatic “The Tudors” focused on Henry VIII and his six wives, Hilary Mantel’s Booker-Prize winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies dramatized the political rise of Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. Tracy Borman’s vivid new biography, Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, is a timely addition to histories of the era.

Cromwell was born a commoner and rose to power through a blend of native intelligence and dogged workaholism. This aspect of Cromwell is what we see in Mantel’s novels, rendering him a sympathetic figure. The importance of Borman’s biography of Cromwell is that she creates a more balanced portrait of a contradictory and ruthless man.

Borman, who is chief curator of Britain’s royal palaces, blends the private and the public Cromwell, so we glimpse his personal generosity (he was always kind to widows and orphans) as well as his single-minded Machiavellian statesmanship. Torture and executions were tools for Cromwell to maintain his importance to the king, but they were tools that could also be turned against him.

Thomas Cromwell is a readable portrait of a complex man and the violent history he made.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Thomas Cromwell and the Tudor Court have had something of a resurgence in popular culture. While Showtime’s melodramatic “The Tudors” focused on Henry VIII and his six wives, Hilary Mantel’s Booker-Prize winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies dramatized the political rise of Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. Tracy Borman’s vivid new biography, Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, is a timely addition to histories of the era.
NonfictionMemoir

A complicated mother-daughter relationship

Review by Catherine Hollis

For women of a certain age, Brooke Shields was our more perfect sister. In 1980, I didn’t understand what “nothing comes between me and my Calvins” meant any more than Brooke herself did. But I knew I needed a pair of those jeans.

Central to the Brooke Shields mystique was her mother, Teri Shields, who became the focus of nasty speculation after allowing 12-year-old Brooke to be cast as a child prostitute in the 1978 film Pretty Baby. In fact, the motivation for Brooke to write her new memoir was the character-assassinating obituary the New York Times published on Teri after her death in 2012.

There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me offers readers Brooke’s own perspective on this complicated and co-dependent relationship. Teri’s alcoholism and its effects on her only child form the nucleus of the story. From an early age, Brooke felt responsible for tending to her mother’s emotional needs, rather than the other way around. This story of Brooke’s career as a model and actress unfolds from the perspective of an adult child of an alcoholic.

Her voice in this memoir is unguarded and raw and deals head-on with the damage alcohol causes in intimate relationships. For a celebrity of her stature to write so honestly and intelligently about emotional wounds is a refreshing change.

The book will appeal not only to Shields fans, but also to readers who seek out memoirs about surviving dysfunctional families. Brooke Shields is still our sister, just more real and imperfect.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

For women of a certain age, Brooke Shields was our more perfect sister. In 1980, I didn’t understand what “nothing comes between me and my Calvins” meant any more than Brooke herself did. But I knew I needed a pair of those jeans.
NonfictionMemoir

A sister speaks out

Review by Catherine Hollis

A few years ago, I taught Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild in a college freshman writing class. I thought the story of Chris McCandless, who turned his back on civilization to hike into the Alaskan wilderness, would resonate with undergraduates. Chris’ tragic journey may have ended with his death, but his quest for purity and adventure was inspirational. Or so I thought.

Apart from one lone hippie idealist, the other students condemned Chris for his selfishness: How could he turn his back on his parents after all they had done for him? As it turns out, many other readers felt the same way. But they didn’t know the whole story of the violent dysfunction that Chris was escaping in his bid for freedom. Now his sister, Carine McCandless, has written a brave and sensitive memoir that fills in the gaps.

In The Wild Truth, Carine depicts their father, Walt, as a violent, controlling abuser. While still married to his first wife, Marcia, he began an affair with Chris and Carine’s mother, Billie. Marcia had six children, and Billie had two—Chris and Carine were technically illegitimate. None of this was explained to Chris and Carine as children, though they spent time with their half-siblings.

But their father’s violence and their mother’s denial of it were perfectly clear. Although Chris tried to protect his little sister, there was no denying the level of physical, emotional and verbal abuse and manipulation in the house. Carine’s description of this dynamic is even-handed and the more horrific for it. And the manipulation continued after Chris’ death in the way Billie and Walt handled his revenue-generating afterlife.

Carine, writing with the full support of her siblings and Krakauer, has succeeded in bringing grace and truth back to her brother’s story.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A few years ago, I taught Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild in a college freshman writing class. I thought the story of Chris McCandless, who turned his back on civilization to hike into the Alaskan wilderness, would resonate with undergraduates. Chris’ tragic journey may have ended with his death, but his quest for purity and adventure was inspirational. Or so I thought.
NonfictionMemoir

A journalist’s stunning, searing memoir

Review by Catherine Hollis

Fire Shut Up in My Bones is a stunning coming-of-age story that tracks New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow’s rise from a poverty-stricken childhood in Louisiana to the respected journalist he is today. An introspective and poetic memoir about race, masculinity and sexuality, it also reckons with the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the core of his identity.

The youngest of four sons, Blow is devoted to his mother, who struggles to support the boys on her salary as a home economics teacher. Her commitment to education and newspaper reading is a positive influence on young Blow, a corrective to his father’s drinking and emotional manipulation. The summer Blow is 7, his older cousin comes to stay with the family, and offers at first the attention the child is hungry for, an attention that swiftly turns abusive.

Blow’s portrait of the psychic and spiritual aftermath of that abuse is intensely honest. He describes the severing of body and spirit, the self-blame and self-doubt. As he grows older, he shows how the experience lay behind his drive to become invincible, a popular boy. But the legacy of abuse is subtle and pernicious, and in his role as fraternity president at college, Blow presides over hazing rituals, which are no less sadistic for being traditional. The moral conflict he experiences and choices he makes offer him a first step toward untangling his childhood experiences and moving into his future.

Blow nests his story within the life stories of other men and boys he knew, gay African Americans who challenged the culture of masculinity and bravado simply by existing, and who were met with community rejection or violence. Their untold stories, reflected in Blow’s, make Fire Shut Up in My Bones an essential work of autobiography.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fire Shut Up in My Bones is a stunning coming-of-age story that tracks New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow’s rise from a poverty-stricken childhood in Louisiana to the respected journalist he is today. An introspective and poetic memoir about race, masculinity and sexuality, it also reckons with the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the core of his identity.
NonfictionMemoir

A fearless pioneer on charting her own course

Review by Catherine Hollis

Pioneering journalist Gail Sheehy has lived a life jam-packed with work, love, politics and writing. Best-selling author of 1976’s Passages, which revolutionized the way Americans thought about the phases of their adult lives, Sheehy has spent a lifetime documenting American culture. Now in her 70s, she casts a retrospective eye on the chapters of her own life in an absorbing new memoir.

Daring: My Passages is a “life and times” memoir: It’s as much about journalism, politics and culture as it is about her life. Sheehy had a career-long knack for capturing the zeitgeist in what we now call long-form journalism. Back in the late 1960s at New York magazine, they were calling it “the new journalism,” as famously practiced by Tom Wolfe. For New York, Sheehy put on hot pants and walked the streets with prostitutes in the early ’70s; she wrote about divorce and the Black Panthers; she found herself in the middle of the shooting in Belfast on Bloody Sunday. But she really hit her stride with Passages, which touched a nerve with readers and has been the template for many of her subsequent books.

Sheehy’s on-again, off-again romance with Clay Felker, legendary editor and founder of New York, is the emotional center of this memoir as it was of her life. A powerful and influential figure, Felker was an early mentor for Sheehy, before becoming her lover and, after many years, her husband. Her decade spent caring for Felker at the end of his life offers an unforgettable portrait of the evolution of love over a lifetime.

Sheehy’s theme for her memoir is “daring”; she suggests that the way to thrive is to dare to make changes as we move through adulthood. This fascinating memoir also suggests that our lives mirror our times, and that we flourish by looking outward as well as inward.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Pioneering journalist Gail Sheehy has lived a life jam-packed with work, love, politics and writing. Best-selling author of 1976’s Passages, which revolutionized the way Americans thought about the phases of their adult lives, Sheehy has spent a lifetime documenting American culture. Now in her 70s, she casts a retrospective eye on the chapters of her own life in an absorbing new memoir.

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