In the Thick of It

“Daring: My Passages”

Gail Sheehy

William Morrow, $29.99

Just as I was finishing Gail Sheehy’s “Daring: My Passages,” I noticed the headline of a story on the New York Times business page: “After a Year Under Bezos, Last Graham to Leave Post.” Katharine Weymouth, the granddaughter of Katharine Graham, the longtime Washington Post publisher, was stepping down. Her departure would bring down the curtain on 80 years of the Graham family’s connection to the prestigious newspaper that reported Watergate.

I mention this not only because the event marks the end of a certain kind of family relationship to print journalism that Ms. Sheehy portrays vividly in her compelling “memoir,” but also because Katharine Graham figures prominently among the dynamic characters who populate her pages — along with Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Anwar Sadat, David Frost, Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Geraldine Ferraro, Edie Beale, Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Rupert Murdoch (hiss).

I could go on, but let’s get to Clay Felker, the innovative, obsessive, charismatic editor of New York magazine whom she falls in love with and weds after an on again, off again courtship that dates from Bobby Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency (they share their first kiss over the piece she’s written about Kennedy) to Mr. Felker’s proposal 16 years later. Their story doesn’t end there but threads its way through their marriage and Mr. Felker’s eventual poignant death from cancer.

If you are of a certain age and most likely of urban persuasion this book will resonate with you. Its familiarity captivates. You may have put the late ’60s and ’70s behind you, but Ms. Sheehy brings those days back again — a memory refresher so alive and abundant with detail you’ll live it again in a heartbeat. “Remember how avidly we read New York magazine?” a friend reminded me.

Remember Tom Wolfe’s article on “Radical Chic,” Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s party for the Black Panthers? Recall “Click” by Jane O’Reilly — the moment of recognition when a woman becomes a feminist? How about the early days of “women’s lib,” the dinner party debates over gender roles, the birth of NOW, Betty Friedan’s National Organization of Women, the genesis of Ms. magazine (the first issue was an insert in New York magazine)? And there was the development of “New Journalism” — the art of telling a news story using the techniques of the fiction writer — dialogue, description, imagery, inner monologue. Under Mr. Felker New York magazine pioneered that writing style along with tantalizing graphics, political and social gossip, and thought-mongering articles designed to make you question your own lifestyle.

Gail Sheehy (the name Sheehy belonged to her first husband, a student in Rochester whom she supported through medical school) came to that maelstrom first as a reporter in the women’s department of The New York Herald Tribune. In what she describes as “the longest walk of her life,” she gathered up her nerve one day, left the female precincts (unheard of), and made her way through the male bastion of the newspaper (past Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin clacking away at their typewriters) to pitch a story on group houses on Fire Island to the editor of the Sunday supplement — Clay Felker.

Her boldness paid off — he not only took her story but ultimately took her on as a writer when he left the Tribune to start New York magazine. He also encouraged her to write “Love Sounds of a Wife.” Her first book, it detailed in disguised form the end of her marriage to her first husband, who had been unfaithful.

On her own, with a child, a little girl, she took only child support and made her way as a single mother.

She wrote for Cosmopolitan. She wrote for New York magazine. She wrote about culture and specifically about the culture of women and couples. Inspired by Margaret Mead, with whom she studied under a fellowship at Columbia, she wrote a series on the “Fractured Family,” “Bachelor Mothers,” and women who were choosing to be “Childless by Choice.” “Can Couples Survive?” she asked in another article. She wrote about prostitution, embedding herself in the life to do it. In hot pants and go-go boots she went out on the street and cultivated doormen and hookers. She wrote about Edie Beale and her mother and Grey Gardens in East Hampton, the derelict mansion where those relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis lived with an army of cats.

Ms. Sheehy’s breakthrough came of course with “Passages,” her exploration of the developmental channels that men and women must navigate on their way to personal change and growth. An assignment in 1972 to cover the women involved in the Irish civil rights movement took her to Northern Ireland, where one sunny afternoon after a peaceful demonstration she watched a young man alongside her have his head ripped apart by a bullet. That look into the face of death on “Bloody Sunday” sent her spiraling into a breakdown. She questioned her place in the world.

“Passages” came out of the upheaval. The book — offering readers a window into self-knowledge — was a wild success. It spent three years on the best-seller list and changed Ms. Sheehy’s life, establishing her as a celebrity author and making her a very rich woman.

“Daring: My Passages” is a big book — 460 pages, and that’s not counting the acknowledgments or the index. Some of the most moving writing is devoted to the romance with Mr. Felker. In his iconic essay about New York, E.B. White writes of the three New Yorks: the city of the native who is born here, the city of the commuter, and the city of the man or woman who comes from somewhere else “in quest of something.” Of these three, the greatest is the last, he tells us. For that city “accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.”

Clay Felker, from Webster Groves, Mo., was a banner citizen of the third city. He culled the essence of Manhattan and funneled it into New York magazine, a publication that at once spoke to its time, created a distinctly Manhattan persona, and predicted the direction in which the city was headed. Ms. Sheehy, when she fell for him, was an innocent, she tells us, living on the Lower East Side (he had an East 57th Street duplex), trying to catch up with each month’s bills, get her daughter to school, make her deadlines. Early on she sewed her own dresses.

Moving in with him and being his lover and his hostess was more than she could add to the mix. And Mr. Felker adored not only the city, but its women as well. She left — but not forever. Their connection endured, even as her career rose and his plummeted. She was with him through Rupert Murdoch’s devastating, and for Mr. Felker heartbreaking, takeover of New York magazine, and at his side when he died of cancer.

“Daring: My Passages” is billed as a memoir and by some lights I suppose you might call it that, though it would be more accurate to call it biography or history. Ms. Sheehy is an accomplished journalist, meticulous and often passionate. The book is a thorough remembrance of her life . . . her entire life. And she’s had a big life. Along the way she adopted a Cambodian refugee, collected a batch of awards, and rubbed elbows with heads of state. I’m betting that what she didn’t recall or record she researched.

But a true memoir is more minute in scope and explores an issue or question central to the writer’s existence. Often, though not always, it offers a kernel of insight or resolution, something the reader can take away — even if it’s only an image.

It might have been illuminating to understand the sources of Ms. Sheehy’s supersized ambition and tenacity, the persistent will that built her career. In this context I harkened back to an early chapter; whenever she lost a swim meet, her father made her pull off a switch from their forsythia bush and swatted her soundly across her legs.

As an adult there seems to be no problem she can’t solve with an action. During his final illness, with a feeding tube in his abdomen, she takes the depressed Mr. Felker to Paris and persuades a high-end bistro to puree a French meal, which she pours into him as she eats. At the end of his life, when she begins to drink heavily, she lands in A.A. and, after a few spills, sobers up.

This is a life that bursts with solutions. Therapists, psychologists, doctors, psychiatrists, dear friends, meditation experts, and A.A. at the ready to offer fixes. None of these resources take her to an inner life. The inner landscape isn’t where she’s traveling, but problem solvers like Ms. Sheehy lead exciting lives, lives worth reading about. I’d say go for it.

Phyllis Raphael, formerly of Amagansett, is the author of the memoir “Off the King’s Road: Lost and Found in London,” now available as an e-book from Roadswell Editions.

Gail Sheehy had a house in East Hampton for many years and now lives in Sag Harbor.