Sally Ride was world-famous for being the first American woman in space.

But for all her publicity in that arena, Ride was a private person whose personal life was not widely known until after her death in 2012, said Lynn Sherr, the former ABC News journalist who covered and befriended Ride before her first space flight and recently published the astronaut’s definitive biography, “Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space.”

Sherr spoke Wednesday evening at Kansas University’s Dole Institute of Politics, 2350 Petefish Drive. Her visit was in conjunction with the Lawrence Public Library’s Read Across Lawrence program, which has a space theme this year.

The biography reveals much about Ride that America never saw in previous decades of news reports.

For one, while Ride once told a high school friend she wanted to be a famous scientist, she was never comfortable with the publicity, press conferences, speeches and magazine covers that came with being the first American woman in space.

Ride was shy, an introvert, Sherr said. And her diaries, which Sherr obtained after her death, revealed that she consulted a psychotherapist for the stress.

“She probably did thousands of speeches,” Sherr said. “She had to psych herself up for every single one of them.”

When Ride was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she did not share that, either, Sherr said. She died less than two years later, at the age of 61.

It wasn’t until after Ride’s death — when her partner of 27 years was mentioned in one of the last lines of her obituary — that the world learned she was gay, Sherr said.

Knowing Ride was terminally ill, she and Tam O’Shaughnessy had prepared the obituary in advance and agreed, in it, to make their relationship public, Sherr said. O’Shaughnessy later provided Ride’s diaries and was instrumental in facilitating many interviews for the biography, Sherr said.

Sherr said she’s not sure why it was so important for Ride to keep her relationship and other aspects of her life so private, but she has a guess.

Ride was a master “compartmentalizer,” always good at keeping secrets, from personal ones to classified government information, Sherr said. She also may have feared backlash that would hurt her public and professional image.

But mainly, Sherr guesses, especially having so many labels on her public life, “she needed some private space of her own.”

Being in the public eye might have been a negative result of Ride’s historic 1983 space flight, Sherr said.

However, the positive impact was huge.

“She cared deeply about making sure that door was open to other women,” Sherr said. “She didn’t want to mess up for other women. If she did well it would open the door for other women behind her, and that’s exactly what it did.”

While Ride faced obstacles — not the least of which was being picked from some 8,000 applicants, more than 1,000 of them other women, to take that first space flight — her can-do spirit stemmed from her upbringing.

Even as a small child in the 1950s, Ride’s parents or teachers never told her she couldn’t be anything in the world she wanted, Sherr said.

“She really did believe she could do what she wanted,” Sherr said. “She had people who basically said, ‘You can do and be what you want to be.'”

Ride was a student at Stanford University, where she got her doctorate degree in physics, when she answered an advertisement seeking applicants for the space program.

Sherr said that’s an example of a lesson to be learned from the way Ride lived her life.

“Seize the moment,” Sherr said. “Don’t look back, just move forward.”

Sherr herself met Ride after being assigned to ABC’s special coverage team of the NASA space launches in the 1980s.

Sherr befriended Ride and her then-husband, Steven Hawley, a fellow astronaut who is now a professor in KU’s department of physics and astronomy. Sherr interviewed Ride before and after her first flight and for ensuing NASA stories — including following the 1986 Challenger explosion, as Ride served on the commission that investigated the disaster.

Sherr went on to become a “20/20” correspondent and has written several books in addition to the Ride biography, including “Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words.”