by Gail Sheehy
“Can I still see you?”
“From time to time.”
At the airport, he opened his wallet and showed me my picture. “I always carry it with me.” A quick peck on the cheek. I watched from the cab as he disappeared through the glass doors of the BOAC terminal.
CHAPTER 20
Birthing Passages
CLAY AND I WERE SEPARATED, but not really; still crazy in love, but reluctant to make a commitment—oh, so very avant-garde. Much wilder experimentation was going on among women and men in the 1970s—casual sex, communes, open marriages, living together, bachelor mothers, gay and lesbian liaisons, and even some church weddings—leaving the very idea of what constitutes a couple open to question.
My New York magazine article “Can Couples Survive?” had attracted book offers. Sam Cohn, my fabled ICM literary agent, was not your ordinary cigar-chomping salesman. During tense book auctions he chewed paper. He didn’t have to chew very long to win a contract for me with E. P. Dutton for an “untitled work about couples.” My advance was a modest $9,375. When and if the manuscript was accepted, I would get a second payment in the same amount, and a final payment on publication. This would not be an easy birth. Labor pains would probably last for three years. My advance would put me below poverty level. But I was thrilled.
Once I had the advance I went on a spending binge, but not for designer shoes and showy jewelry. I blew a wad on tomes I ordered from Foyle’s, the famed British bookstore, and then slogged through all of Freud, and the antidote, the works of Carl Jung. This launched my lifelong habit of catch-up self-education. Freud, of course, had handed down the assumption that our personality is pretty much determined by the time we reach the age of five. I enjoyed a little shrug of insubordination by dismissing this canon of the twentieth century. Longitudinal studies that I consulted showed that most people did change from one period of adult life to another. Sometimes radically. Historical biographies revealed even more dramatic evidence of people who made a leap of growth from one stage of life to another, or, by contrast, suffered through periods of stagnation or regression.
With the advance, I was able to cast my net more widely for men and women of all ages to interview. My subjects were recommended by friends. I usually met them for our two-hour sessions in cheap, brightly lit Chinese restaurants. Once the first forty interviews were transcribed, I began to see a larger theme emerging. In similar comments made by both women and men in their late thirties and early forties, I heard evidence of a period of disequilibrium:
“I have a hurry-up feeling.”
“Time is running out.”
“Is that all there is?”
Suddenly I had an insight. None of my subjects had actually experienced a life-threatening event or been exposed to an external trauma like Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. Yet I found evidence in every one of them of discontent, ranging all the way from mild to a full-blown crisis. I came across a paper by Elliott Jaques, a Canadian psychoanalyst, which introduced me to a new concept. Dr. Jaques had studied the careers of many artists and composers and found leaps of creativity or declines in productivity between the ages of thirty-five and forty. He coined the term “midlife crisis.”
At the deepest level, a midlife crisis was triggered by the first awareness of mortality. For some among my subjects, it was when they went home after a long absence and were shocked to see that Mom or Dad had crossed over from high speed to low velocity. Oh my God, if it could happen to them, it could happen to me. I’m not going to live forever! Most of the people I interviewed in their forties had to give up some illusions around the dream of their twenties. Some realized they really hated what they were doing or had outgrown their marriage. To give up after all that investment felt a little like a rehearsal of dying. I wrote that it was normal to feel a “little death” at some point in midlife or, for some people, in later middle age. But that was the precursor to growing a new life on the other side, what I would later name our “Second Adulthood.”
The great hope I found in this work was to see that change, which most of us fear, was good. How could I present change in a more positive light? One night in a seafood shack on the Sag Harbor dockside, I found myself staring at a tank full of lobsters of all sizes. One little critter had wriggled out of his shell and was suddenly a pale, translucent, trembly blob. I looked up the evolution of crustaceans. This is how lobsters grow, I learned, by developing and shedding a series of hard, protective shells. Each time it expanded from within, the confining shell was sloughed off. The lobster was left exposed and embryonic again, until it grew stronger and developed a new shell to replace the old.
In that tank was a perfect analogy! We, too, shed an old self as we grow and expand our personalities. For us, a transition may take several years or more. Coming to the end of a transition, we enter a longer and more stable period in which we can expect a sense of equilibrium regained.
It was tempting to tie our transitions to marker events. Graduations, getting or losing a job, marriage, children’s births, divorce, parents’ deaths, and retirement are the concrete happenings of our lives. But a developmental stage was not defined in terms of marker events—it was defined by a change that began from within, whether or not it was accentuated by a marker event.
As I gathered more life histories, I found myself drawn to a subject infinitely more complicated than couples. Not only were there other critical turning points than at midlife, but they came up with some regularity at around the same ages. People would describe feeling unfamiliar stirrings, sometimes surprising changes of perspective, often mysterious dissatisfactions with the course they had been following with enthusiasm only a few years before. Those times were often followed by surges of creativity or accelerated personality growth.
It was an aHa! moment. We didn’t just move from the whirl of adolescence into one long boring plateau until we hit senescence. We continued to grow through stages of development. I began to see turning points, or crises, in adult life that were predictable.
ERIK ERIKSON HAD LAID OUT the original concept that adulthood continues to proceed by stages of development throughout the life cycle. Each stage, he proposed, was associated with a specific psychological struggle. For example, the struggle of the twenties is between intimacy and isolation. Erikson had laid out eight stages across the life span. He ascribed only three stages to adulthood, sketching them out very loosely, inviting others to fill out the picture.
The budding social scientist in me was thrilled to hear a graying professor of social psychology from Yale, Daniel Levinson, give a symposium on “Normal Crises of the Middle Years.” Dr. Levinson and his team had been studying forty men in different occupations between the ages of eighteen and forty-seven. He proposed that adults, like children and adolescents, continue to develop by periods. Each period engages them in specific tasks. His study found that men only moved on to the next period of development when they began working at a new task and built a new structure for their lives.
I approached Dr. Levinson for guidance on how to work with the biographical method. He generously offered to read some of the biographies I had been collecting. We met several times. “They’re excellent interviews with lots of good quotes,” he told me. “Which means you’re getting the person in his fullness or emptiness.” That gave me confidence. “But when they want to talk about something important, let them go on.” That made me wonder whether I would be a geriatric case before I could transcribe all the tapes.
The rigidity of Dr. Levinson’s thesis bothered me. He proposed that each stage of development had to follow as A to B. One could not jump from A to C, or postpone the tasks of B while dealing with the challenges of C. I argued that most women had to dodge and weave around their husbands’ career paths. And when women had children, they usually put their own development on hold and only later tried to catch up.
“If women are expected to pursue the same linear track that you are laying out for men, wouldn’t that drive both of
them crazy?”
Levinson laughed. “That’s nice—that fits.” He concluded that it probably was not possible for a woman to work out a combination of two careers—domestic and professional—until she was thirty or thirty-five. “The chances are that by the time she has begun to arrive at the integration necessary to do it all, so many other things have gone haywire that she has probably divorced or the family has been impaired in ways that can’t be fully remedied.”
“Thanks a lot!” I exclaimed. “But we can’t just write off the struggle of women to combine roles as leading to divorce or family impairment. Who is studying the developmental patterns of women’s lives?” I asked.
Dr. Levinson shook his head. “Nobody.” He encouraged me to take on that inquiry. His groundbreaking book, Seasons of a Man’s Life, would be published in 1978.
The subject of adult development was only beginning to germinate. When I sought out researchers at Harvard, Berkeley, and UCLA, I was startled to find that almost no cross-pollination had taken place. What little research I found was being done by men who were studying other men.
How could we possibly expect to understand the development of men until we also learned about the women who raised them? The women they love and hate, and depend on, and who are dependent upon them.
The old, closed family structure showed signs of cracking. With the publication in 1971 by the Boston Women’s Collective of the breakthrough book Our Bodies, Ourselves, women were beginning to take control of their anatomy, open their minds, and strike out into unfamiliar territory to pioneer new ways of living in the world.
That led me to wonder: Did men and women go through similar stages at the same time? Obviously not. They were often out of sync. What would that mean for couples? These ideas became a lens through which I saw my friends, my parents, and myself and Clay.
I asked Clay if he hadn’t noticed that men often hit a crisis point in their midforties when they might have to give up the illusion of a grand, youthful dream. He realized that he was seeing it all the time in younger men who worked for him; when their lofty expectations were not met, they hardened into resentment. This predictable period of de-illusioning for men, I proposed, might well coincide with a predictable phase of re-imagining for their wives. With their children semi-independent, women often returned to school in their mid- to late forties to complete their own education and give birth to new dreams. A man’s lapse into stagnation might hit the couple just as his wife is feeling a sense of exhilaration, having finally completed her business degree, and is raring to open a boutique.
This suggested a natural dyssynchrony between men’s and women’s development. If I could make clear that this was normal, it might lead couples out of conflict and toward cooperation. He supports her new dream—she will, in turn, support his. That struck Clay as a premise worth serious investigation. He asked me to write about midlife as a crisis time for couples. I had to smile. He and I were prime suspects.
There was another challenge: how to describe the times of turmoil in between the more stable periods of adult life. They are not always crises. It is in these bumpy transitions that we have the opportunity to make a leap of growth. But what to call them? I tried all kinds of names. It would take another two years before I found the right word.
IN THE MIDST OF ALL THIS YEASTY INTELLECTUAL FERMENT, my wonderful editor, Hal Scharlatt, dropped dead on the tennis court. “He was only forty-three!” bemoaned the shaken publisher of Dutton, Jack Macrae, who called me the same day. Since Macrae was of similar age, this tragedy took on an exaggerated value in his mind. Weeks later, he invited me to lunch and offered to take over as my editor. By now, the book was exploding in my mind and had taken on a theme much larger than the relationship between couples.
“How large?” he asked with a worried frown.
“As large as adulthood itself,” I said, smiling as if I were joking. Before I explained, I had to get him into the tent. So I interviewed him about his life. That intrigued him. Then I spelled out three objectives for the book. The first was to locate the individual’s inner changes in a world in which most of us are preoccupied with externals. The second aim was to compare the developmental patterns of women with those of men. It was a natural progression to the third objective: What, then, were the predictable crises for couples? He was hooked.
As I began turning in chapters, Macrae handed them off to someone I had never met. He said she was an offsite copy editor who would ultimately save us time while I continued to write. But customarily, a copy editor is not involved until the editor has finished working over the manuscript with the writer—for structure, tone, voice, and where to cut—all the elements that make the real difference in quality of the work. Copy editing is about grammar and continuity. My early chapters were coming back badly bruised with the copy editor’s blue pencil marks; I called her the Blue Meanie.
The very first section, which described my brush with mortality in Northern Ireland and my breakdown of nerve, was crossed out completely. “They’ll think you’re crazy” was the Blue Meanie’s comment. I asked Macrae if I could at least talk to this copy editor. He declined, advising that it was better to keep the relationship strictly professional. I held my ground on the first chapter, pointing out that my personal experience with a traumatic passage was the foundation of my credibility. After I rewrote that chapter at least twenty times and showed it to Macrae himself, he accepted my argument.
I began to suspect that the Blue Meanie was not an offsite copy editor but an in-house editor, smart and prickly with her own point of view. Over my chapter about women’s life patterns she had scrawled, “All your women are wimps! You need some hotshot younger women.”
With a slightly devious plan in mind, I waited one day until the occupants of Dutton’s editorial offices spilled out for what was the leisurely two-martini lunch, typical of those times. Cruising in and out of offices, I scanned for handwriting that matched the Blue Meanie’s. There it was—at the desk of a junior editor. After lunch, playing dumb, I told Macrae that I needed to find a trailblazing young woman to flesh out my interviews. Would he have anybody like that on his staff?
That is how I met Laurie Colwin. I asked to interview her for the book. Peppery with a sharply angled face softened by a corona of dark curls, this was a woman in her early thirties who had many passions—for writing the great American novel, for cooking, for love. At nineteen she had made a jailbreak from her possessive family, dropped out of college, left the older man with whom she had been living, and found a job as an editorial assistant.
Where did this confidence come from? I asked.
It wasn’t confidence, Colwin said. It was determining clearly what she didn’t want to be. “I wasn’t going to end up like the kids I knew in the suburbs.”
She sold her first short story to The New Yorker at twenty-five and ran off with another man, believing it was a blazing love, and hit the ground rather hard when it fell apart—a typical Catch-30 passage. Now thirty-two, she had fallen in love again. Her first novel was receiving good reviews. But for all her boldness and persistence in pursuing a singular career path, Colwin wrestled with the same conflict that bedeviled me and legions of other women who wanted to make something of ourselves. All along she wondered, “Why couldn’t I have been the sort of person who just settles down and doesn’t give anyone a moment’s trouble, meaning, have a baby and the whole thing.” She kicked off a shoe as if in exasperation with herself. “I didn’t want it! But I felt I should have.”
At her happiest, she disregarded “the shoulds” that I had written come from the imprint of one’s peers. She had pursued her own dream. “In my most unhappy moments, I would say, ‘Well, it’s clear you’re just nuts and no one will ever have you.’ But I was always very smart, cold, clear and uncomplicated about my own work. I love to write. I want to have everything. And I don’t see why I can’t.”
I saw in Laurie Colwin a harbinger of the New Woman. She built a devoted audience throug
h her five novels, married an editor at thirty-eight, and found the courage to open her heart to the risk of intimacy. She had a baby after forty, which in the days before the reproductive revolution was considered just short of magic. Entering midlife, she found a way to balance mature love with creative success and family.
TOWARD THE END OF MY RESEARCH in the second year, I flew to Los Angeles to interview a psychiatrist, Roger Gould, who had done a preliminary study of white, middle-class people, including women from ages sixteen to sixty. He invited me to talk at his home in Beverly Hills. Once I described my thesis to him and the broad research I was doing, he became keenly interested. He proposed that we collaborate on the book. I was startled. For more than ten years I had been an independent writer.
The psychiatrist was relentless. He insisted that I needed him because no one would take me seriously. “You’re just a journalist,” he said with undisguised scorn. Those words were lifted right out of the mind chatter in my brain. The psychiatrist had no trouble locating my weak spot; he struck at the vulnerability all writers feel. But a voice inside me shouted, No!
I politely dismissed the idea of collaborating. To soften this rejection, I foolishly agreed to allow Dr. Gould to read some of the case histories I was collecting. He sent me some of his interpretations.
In my third year of work, I ran out of money. The Alicia Patterson Foundation came to my rescue with a $10,000 fellowship to enable me to write the book. My obligation for the fellowship was to write for its free newsletter, the APF Reporter. In an article about several academic researchers, I quoted Dr. Gould. New York magazine reprinted my pro bono article. The psychiatrist then resumed his campaign to convince me to take him on as a collaborator. His threat rang in my ears: No one will take you seriously—you’re just a journalist.