By Soledad Santiago
Terri Jerry didn't get married until she was 45.
"I didn't see much use for marriage before," said Jerry, who was among more than 100 Santa Fe, N.M., women who gathered recently to hear author Gail Sheehy talk about her book, Sex and the Seasoned Woman: Pursuing the Passionate Life (Random House, 2006).
"I always thought it was more about ownership than pleasure," Jerry said of marriage.
Dressed in jeans and cowboy boots, Jerry joined the crowd of mostly middle-aged women who listened to the best-selling writer of guides for female baby boomers to ease through life's stages.
As cameras recorded the event for an as-yet-unscheduled broadcast on NBC's "Today" show, Sheehy told them women in their 50s are experiencing the fullness of life, cultivating new dreams and going after them with the same fierce determination they once applied to nurturing children or pleasing men.
Near the end of the session, Jerry shared her own experience.
"I'm very happily married now," she said. "And I'm also among the 10 percent of women who survive Stage 4 breast cancer. The kind of chemo I had took my body from a juicy 50-year-old to about 78 in three months' time."
With a chuckle, she added, "Sex is different now. Happily, though, things happen to men as they age, too. We find pleasure in different ways."
The event, sponsored by a local group called Women's Voices, was held at the SITE Santa Fe gallery space in the Santa Fe, N.M., railyard.
"Santa Fe women are the stars of my book," Sheehy said. "They're feisty, independent and sexy. And they taught me a lot about how to be a spicy woman."
Sheehy hit the national stage in 1976 with Passages (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing, 1984), which remained on the best-seller list for three years and was translated into 28 languages. The book looked at the way women met life's various challenges at different ages. Subsequent works include The Silent Passage (Simon & Schuster, 1998), New Passages (Random House, 1996) and Understanding Men's Passages (Random House, 1999). Sheehy has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine since 1984 and is known as a cultural observer with a knack for integrating pop psychology and reporting.
Sheehy began her talk recently by acknowledging that her new book is about more than sex: "Titles are meant to get readers into the tent, but the subject is really in the subtitle."
The juices generated by passionate commitment to personal goals, she told her audience, create the potential for the rebirth of erotic energy even after hormones wane at menopause.
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