Authors: Gail Sheehy

Daring (59 page)

BOOK: Daring

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Gail reporting in a Cambodian refugee camp.
Courtesy of the author

Clay's seventeen-year-delayed proposal, 1984.
Courtesy of the author

Mohm
(right)
, twelve, meets her new sister, Maura, eighteen, a freshman at Brown University, 1982.
Courtesy of the author

“Familymoon” in Egypt. (
Left to right:)
Mohm, Gail, Maura, Clay.
Courtesy of the author

Gail with Hillary Clinton, 1992.
Courtesy of the author

Gail with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, 1989.
Courtesy of the author

Gail and Clay at Literary Lions gala, New York Public Library, 1992.
Â©2014 Bill Cunningham

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WRITING A MEMOIR WAS LIKE
nothing I have ever done before. To be sure, I have written hundreds of thousands of words, maybe millions in articles and books, but always the focus was on others. Seldom had I closely observed myself. After some false starts, I came to understand that memoir is a wholly independent genre. It is an act of imagination suggested by things that really happened.

To learn from a master, I took a course in memoir given by Roger Rosenblatt in the Stony Brook Southampton M.F.A. program. He tried to mute the journalist in me and release the novelist's sensibility. Yes, my memoir would be about the world I have observed and the literary circle that shaped me, but that was only the container. “All that lies outside you is inside you,” Roger told us. “In that fortune-cookie truth, I think, you will find your memoir.”

I riffled hungrily through the daily planners that I kept from the 1960s to the early 2000s. They segmented time into neatly uniform units. But memory is a timeless pump of feelings, a surge here, a drizzle there. A year dissolves into a placid lake; a moment inflates into a soap bubble and tempts capture; a day can be an eternity. Feelings, I discovered, believe longer than knowing remembers.

Fortunately, I had often jotted notes about vivid experiences and fragments of dialogue in those Day-Timers, and from those scraps it was possible to reconstruct the architecture of a passage. Dozens of journals evoked my feelings during times of transition and acts of daring. My younger sister, Pat Henion Klein, was a brave excavator into the family drama we lived through in different acts.

Colleagues who were generous in offering recollections include Gloria Steinem, Tom Wolfe, Milton Glaser, Walter Bernard, Ken Auletta, Amanda Urban, Richard Reeves, Barbara Goldsmith, Aaron Latham, Tina Brown, Michael Kramer, Steven Brill, Ken Fadner, Jane Maxwell, Cyndi Stivers, and Dr. Pat Allen. I also thank my trusted readers: Deirdre English, Clay's successor as director of the Felker Magazine program at Berkeley; Kim Barnes, an accomplished memoirist and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Muriel Bedrick, Melanie Horn, Sherrye Henry, Mary Howard, and Priscilla Tucker.

In scraping the sugar coating off my guts, I found the raw desires, the fears and frustrations, the shame and self-loathing that we all feel. Side by side were splurges of creativity, longing rewarded by love, and the laughter that saves us from taking ourselves too seriously. Dredging all this up forces the memoirist to question her choices, only to find the one right answer still elusive, but acceptance easier. I hope my story eases the minds of those who demand of themselves perfection. Everything God makes has cracks in it.

I was fortunate to have as my literary agent Richard Pine, partner at Inkwell Management, a Hall of Famer in publishing Books for a Better Life. My brilliant editor at William Morrow, Jennifer Brehl, sustained me over two years with unwavering enthusiasm and thoughtful critiques. It was my good fortune to be assisted by two remarkable graduates of the M.F.A. program at Stony Brook Southampton, Elaine Rooney, an incisive reader and researcher, and Genevieve Crane, a skillful organizer and doorkeeper against interruptions. We were kept in coffee and comfort by Yolanda Ormaza.

A month before my deadline, as I stared at a mountain of pages knowing that I still had another twenty years to write about, I fell asleep at the wheel of my life. Literally. One day on a hot summer Sunday afternoon, stone sober, I dozed off and swerved across a crowded turnpike. It was what I call a God doing, because I hurt nobody including myself, but it woke me up to reach out and ask for help. I turned to Lou Ann Walker, an accomplished editor and memoirist who teaches a highly prized course on memoir writing in the Stony Brook Southampton M.F.A. program. She identified the underlying theme of my memoir, “daring,” and worked tirelessly with me to flesh out the heart of the book and snip out the rest.

I am eternally grateful to Robert Emmett Ginna Jr., my navigator and my rock from start to finish.

INDEX

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader's search tools.

NOTE: GS refers to Gail Sheehy. Bold numbers refer to picture captions.

Aaron, Chloe,
415

Aaron, David,
415

AARP (American Association for Retired People), 450

ABC Entertainment, 149

abortion: of GS, 34â35; GS stories about, 6

adoption; of Cambodian children, 282â83; of Mohm, 292, 293, 294â96, 312

The Advertiser
, 270

Adweek
, Maura at, 312

Afghanistan War, 328

alcohol: GS's problems with, 430â33, 451; Henion's (Lillian) problems with, 21, 42, 43, 108, 134, 232, 433

Alexander, Shana, 183, 279