THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 16, 1995 TAG: 9507130596
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY PATRICIA A. ELLER
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
NEW PASSAGES: MAPPING YOUR LIFE ACROSS TIME, Gail Sheehy, Random House, 498 pp. $25.
A FIFTYSOMETHING retiree undergoes treatment to restore penile prowess. It works too late to save his marriage: His young wife walked out two years before he admitted his problem and sought help.
A 45-year-old filmmaker wants a baby but discovers to her anguish that she postponed pregnancy too long. Medical science cannot rejuvenate the aging eggs in her ovaries.
Welcome to ``second adulthood,'' journalist Gail Sheehy's euphemism for midlife, which she terms a ``brand-new passage.'' It's brand-new because her interviews for this book revealed that ``almost no one in forties or early fifties identifies with. . . middle age.'' They claim a mind-set eight to 10 years younger.
If that sounds like a variation on ``The Emperor's New Clothes,'' no matter. The widespread denial purportedly found in baby boomers and the generation preceding them provides a perfect vehicle for Sheehy to pick up where she left off in Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. That 1976 best seller has been voted one of the 10 most influential books of our time. It contained the notion that we cannot bypass any stage of the maturation process. If we do, through denial or other causes, we pile up trouble for the future.
In New Passages Sheehy discusses the need to change in midlife. Many people, she writes, assume a false self in their youth in order to succeed in upwardly mobile America. And that's fine, within reason; they do what they have to do. But to achieve integrity, she says, the false self must be shed. It no longer serves its purpose. The shedding of illusions in maturity requires courage, and it can leave a person stripped and vulnerable, with an identity crisis as tumultuous as any teenager's.
In the midst of the stormy passage, which can seem like death to a suffering person if there is no emotional support, she or he may ask the despairing question: Is it all downhill from here? The answer, of course, is ``no'' - particularly for those who guard their health. The author, an ebullient 57, states that ``it is a seminal purpose of this book to persuade .
Sheehy supports her optimism with U.S. Census Bureau data and information from medical experts, and she demonstrates how boomers and their elders are pushing back the thresholds of middle and old age. Sheehy's seven-year research included surveys and interviews with a cross-section of people nationwide. Through their words we glimpse how Americans have - or haven't - changed in the past 20 years as they navigate the passage between 45 and 65, which Sheehy calls the ``Age of Mastery.''
She might as readily have labeled it the ``Age of Challenge,'' for this is the stage when people must struggle to ``get it together'' before they sweep on to the ``Age of Integrity.'' As they wrestle with the false self, which refuses to be jettisoned easily, they must decide who they really are, what they can reasonably expect to accomplish and how they really want to live the rest of their lives.
That's a tall order because during this time brain neurons begin to misfire and bodily changes kick in to signify the onset of menopause in women and viropause in men (as it is called by the British). When Sheehy encountered vast ignorance of biological processes in her travels, she interrupted research on New Passages to produce a spin-off that became The Silent Passage: Menopause. She distills and updates that 1992 best seller in a section of New Passages.
While the silent passage may be distressing to some women, all do not rue the passing of fertility, but instead welcome the new freedom that often enhances their sexuality. But Sheehy labels the male climacteric the ``unspeakable passage,'' because the absence of knowledge about viropause coupled with men's characteristic inability to discuss such matters leaves many of them fearful at the first hint of declining potency.
Sheehy performs a valuable public service in presenting her research on these topics along with instructive, nonprurient passages on midlife sexuality that alone might dispel the anxiety that often causes impotence.
Psychological adjustment and sexual repair are not the only subjects of this informative book, but they alone could make it worth the price. MEMO: Patricia A. Eller is a business consultant and book reviewer who
lives in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Gail Sheehy
by CNB