Norah Vincent, author.
Her first book, Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man (affiliate link) was about the 18 months she spent passing as a man.
But the book was no joke. It was a nuanced and thoughtful work. It drew comparisons to “Black Like Me,” the white journalist John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book about his experiences passing as a Black man in the segregated Deep South. David Kamp, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Ms. Vincent’s book “rich and audacious.”
Her second book, Voluntary Madness: Lost and Found in the Mental Healthcare System (affiliate link) was about the time she spent in various mental hospitals after suffering a breakdown during her time posing as a man.
…While in treatment, she said, she thought to herself: “Jesus, what a freak show. All I have to do is take notes and I’m Balzac.”
What transpired was less tidy than “Self Made Man,” however. As she toured mental institutions — a Bellevue-like urban one, a high-end facility in the Midwest and finally a New Age clinic — Ms. Vincent found herself increasingly mired in depression and juggling a cocktail of medications. The book’s conclusion did not endear her to reviewers, as she exhorted those in extremis like her to move on and “put your boots on.”
She also wrote Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (affiliate link). During the process of writing the book, she tried to kill herself.
Ms. Vincent was a lesbian. She was not transgender, or gender fluid. She was, however, interested in gender and identity. As a freelance contributor to The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice and The Advocate, she had written essays on those topics that inflamed some readers.
She was a libertarian. She tilted at postmodernism and multiculturalism. She argued for the rights of fetuses and against identity politics, which she saw as infantilizing and irresponsible. She did not believe that transsexuals were members of the opposite sex after they had surgery and had taken hormones, a position that led one writer to label her a bigot. She was a contrarian, and proud of it.
She sounds like someone who would have been interesting to meet. She was 53: according to the obit, she died at a medically assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland.