Interesting memoir by bestselling author Gail Sheehy author of a great number of bestselling books and culture-defining articles. A bonus for publishing historians is the inside look at the height of new journalism and the age of the magazine through her relationship with Clay Felker.

I read this book for the second time to update and expand the terrible Wikipedia article on Sheehy. She is important and deserved better coverage. I hope I've fixed that now.
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Nope. 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 ( )

I 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. ( )