NORAH VINCENT was an American writer who was born on this date (d: 2022); Vincent 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.

Her 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 in April 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 wrote that 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 asserted 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.”

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.

Vincent, a lesbian, was briefly married to Kristen Erickson, but soon divorced. Ms. Vincent is survived by her mother and her brothers, Alex and Edward. From 2000 to 2008, her domestic partner was Lisa McNulty, a theater producer and artistic director.

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.'”

In Voluntary Madness, Vincent details her decade-long history with treatment-resistant depression, saying: “…my brain was never quite the same after I zapped it with that first course of SSRIs.” The mental strain of maintaining a false identity during the making of Self-Made Man ultimately caused a depressive breakdown, leading Vincent to admit herself to a locked psychiatric facility.

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