Fresh Gail

In 1976, Gail Sheehy was a single mother, barely scraping by. She had just finished a book, which she thought "would probably sink without a trace." The book was Passages; it sat on the best-seller list for three years, was published in 12 languages, and has sold more than six million copies. (Gail knows passages: her recent best-seller on menopause, The Silent Passage, which first appeared as an article in Vanity Fair, where she is a contributing editor, was, she says, one of the 10 most shoplifted books in America.) This month, two decades after she published what has been called the bible of the babyboom generation, Sheehy is bringing out the sequel. Well, sort of. "I set out to write a sequel, to pick up where Passages left off and extend my investigation," she says. "But what I found is that there had been a revolution in the life cycle." From her research, which included a database on five generations constructed with the help of the U.S. Census Bureau, she found that middle-class America is taking longer to grow up and much longer to die, thereby shifting all the stages of adulthood—by up to 10 years. "Most baby-boomers don't feel fully grown up until their 40s," she explains. "They reject the idea of middle age, which is pushed into the 50s—if it exists at all. Plus there are whole new passages in the 50s, 60s, and 70s that didn't exist for our parents." The result of these shifts? A "Second Adulthood" beginning in midlife. No wonder "people feel disoriented," as Sheehy puts it, "finding it hard to make sense of the ages and stages of their lives." In New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time (Random House), Sheehy aims to help America relocate.