Obituary | How Did Norah Vincent Die? Who Chronicled Passing as a Man

In the winter of 2003, Norah Vincent, a 35-year-old journalist, began to practice passing as a man.

With the help of a makeup artist, she learned to simulate stubble by snipping bits of wool and painting them on her chin. She wore her hair, already short, cut in a flattop and bought rectangular framed glasses, to accentuate the angles of her face. She weight-trained to build up the muscles in her chest and back, bound her breasts with a too-small sports bra and wore a jock strap stuffed with a soft prosthetic penis.

She trained for months at the Julliard School in New York with a vocal coach, who taught her to deepen her voice and slow it down, to lean back as she spoke rather than leaning in, and to use her breath more efficiently. Then she ventured out to live as a man for 18 months, calling herself Ned, and to chronicle the experience.

She did so in “Self-Made Man,” and when the book came out in 2006, it was a nearly instant bestseller. It 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.

But the book was no joke. It was a nuanced and thoughtful work. It drew comparisons to “Black Like Me,” 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 Vincent’s book “rich and audacious.”

Vincent died July 6 at a clinic in Switzerland. She was 53. Her death, which was not reported at the time, was confirmed Thursday by Justine Hardy, a friend. The death, she said, was medically assisted, or what is known as a voluntary assisted death.

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. He joined a blue-collar bowling league, although he was a terrible bowler. (His teammates were kind and cheered him on; they thought he was gay, Vincent learned later, because they thought he bowled like a girl.)

He spent weeks in a monastery with cloistered monks. He went to strip clubs and dated women, although he was rebuffed more often than not in singles bars. He worked in sales, hustling coupon books and other low-margin products door-todoor with fellow salesmen who, with their cartoon bravado, seemed drawn from the 1983 David Mamet play “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

Finally, at an Iron John retreat, a therapeutic masculinity workshop – think drum circles and hero archetypes – modeled on the work of men’s movement author Robert Bly, Ned began to lose it. Being Ned had worn Vincent down; she felt alienated and dissociated, and after the retreat she checked herself into a hospital for depression.

She was suffering, she wrote, for the same reason that many of the men she met were suffering: Their assigned gender roles, she found, were suffocating them and alienating them from themselves.

Norah Mary Vincent was born Sept. 20, 1968, in Detroit. Her mother, Juliet (Randall) Ford, was an actor; her father, Robert Vincent, was a lawyer for the Ford Motor Co. The youngest of three, Vincent grew up in Detroit and London, where her father was posted for a while.

She studied philosophy at Williams College in Massachusetts, where at 21 she realized she was a lesbian, she told the Times in 2001, when her contrarian freelance columns began drawing fire. She spent 11 years as a graduate student in philosophy at Boston College and worked as an assistant editor at the Free Press, a publishing house that before it folded in 2012 put out books on religion and social science and had, in the 1980s, a neoconservative bent. Vincent’s first work of fiction was “Thy Neighbor” (2012), a dark, comic thriller about an unemployed alcoholic writer who begins spying on his neighbors while trying to solve the mystery of his parents’ murder-suicide: voyeurism as a means to self-knowledge.

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. A brief marriage to Kristen Erickson ended in divorce.

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