Norah Vincent

Norah Vincent
Born	(1968-09-20)September 20, 1968 Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
Died	Switzerland
Occupation	Journalist
Alma mater	Williams College
Spouse	Kristen Erickson (m. 2024)

Norah Mary Vincent (September 20, 1968 – July 6, 2022) was an American writer. She was a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a quarterly columnist on politics and culture for the national gay and lesbian news magazine The Advocate. She was a columnist for The Village Voice and Salon.com. Her writing appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, New York Post, The Washington Post and other periodicals. She gained particular attention in 2006 for her book, Self-Made Man, detailing her experiences when she lived as a man for eighteen months.

Early life

Norah Mary Vincent was born in Detroit, and grew up both there and in London, where her father was employed as a lawyer for the Ford Motor Company. She attended Williams College, where she graduated with a BA in philosophy in 1990, before undertaking graduate studies at Boston College. She also worked as an editor for Free Press.

Career

Self-Made Man

Vincent's book Self-Made Man (2006) retells an eighteen-month experiment in the early 2000s in which she disguised herself as a man. This was compared to previous undercover journalism such as Black Like Me. Vincent was interviewed by Juju Chang on the ABC News program 20/20 and talked about the experience in HARDtalk extra on BBC on April 21, 2006, where she described her experiences in male-male and male-female relationships. She joined an all-male bowling club, joined a men's therapy group, went to a strip club, dated women, and used her knowledge as a lapsed Catholic to visit monks in a monastery.

Vincent writes about how the only time she has ever been considered excessively feminine was during her stint as a man. Her alter ego, Ned, was assumed to be gay on several occasions. Features which had been perceived as "butch" when she presented as a woman were perceived as oddly effeminate when she presented as a man. Vincent asserts that, since the experiment, she had more fully realized the benefits of being female and the disadvantages of being male, stating, "I really like being a woman. ... I like it more now because I think it's more of a privilege."

Vincent also stated that she had gained more sympathy and understanding for men and the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."

Voluntary Madness

Vincent's book Voluntary Madness (2008) relates her experiences as an inpatient in three institutions for mentally ill patients: "a ward in a public city hospital, a private Midwestern institution, and a pricey New Age clinic." She criticized doctors who she claimed were inapproachable, noting that too many relied on drugs as therapy, while others addressed only the symptoms instead of their underlying causes.

Vincent's book also addresses the question of pseudopatients and those who remained ill because of their lack of willingness to cooperate in their therapy.

Later work

Vincent later wrote two novels: Thy Neighbor (2012), described by The New York Times as "a dark, comic thriller," and Adeline (2015), which imagines the life of Virginia Woolf from when she wrote To the Lighthouse until her suicide in 1941.

Personal life, views, and death

Vincent, a lesbian, was briefly married to Kristen Erickson, but they soon divorced.

Vincent was described as a libertarian who was critical of postmodernism and multiculturalism. She did not believe that transgender people were the sex they identified as, leading her to be accused of bigotry. In an article for The Village Voice, she wrote: "[Transsexuality] signifies the death of the self, the soul, that good old-fashioned indubitable 'I' so beloved of Descartes, whose great adage 'I think, therefore I am' has become an ontological joke on the order of 'I tinker, and there I am.'"

Vincent died via assisted death at a clinic in Switzerland on July 6, 2022, aged 53. Her death was not reported until August 2022.

Publications

• Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)
• Thy Neighbor (Viking Adult, 2012)
• Voluntary Madness (Viking Adult, 2008)
• Self-Made Man (Viking Adult, 2006)

External links

• Village Voice articles
• Tony Dokoupil: Ann Marlowe, the Memoir, and the Self-Made Man in New Partisan
• ABC News 20/20 Program Segment