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| Norah Vincent | |
Norah Vincent, whose 2006 book, Self-Made Man, made her "a media darling" but "cost her psychologically," died July 6, the New York Times reported. She was 53. Her death, which was not reported at the time, was confirmed recently by Justine Hardy, a friend who said it was a voluntary assisted death.
In the winter of 2003, as a 35-year-old journalist, Vincent "began to practice passing as a man.... Then she ventured out to live as a man for 18 months, calling herself Ned, and to chronicle the experience. The resulting book, Self-Made Man, was a nearly instant bestseller and made Vincent "a media darling; she appeared on 20/20 and on The Colbert Report, where she and Stephen Colbert teased each other about football and penis size," the Times wrote. "But the book was no joke. It was a nuanced and thoughtful work.... 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."
In her year and a half living as Ned, Vincent put him in a number of stereotypical, hypermasculine situations until, at an Iron John retreat, "Ned began to lose it. Being Ned had worn Ms. Vincent down; she felt alienated and disassociated, and after the retreat she checked herself into a hospital for depression," the Times noted.
The idea for Vincent's next book, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (2008), came to her after the Iron John unraveling, when she had committed herself to the hospital as a suicide risk. In another attempt at immersive journalism, she subsequently toured mental institutions and "found herself increasingly mired in depression and juggling a cocktail of medications," the Times wrote.
In 2013, Vincent began a new novel, Adeline, in which she imagined the inner life of Virginia Woolf from the moment Woolf conceived her novel To the Lighthouse to the morning in 1941 when she walked into the river near her home, with pockets full of stones, and drowned. As Vincent was working on the book, she tried to kill herself. Adeline, she wrote later, was "not just a work of fiction, or an act of literary ventriloquism. It was my suicide note."