Norah Vincent

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 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, She attended Williams College, where she graduated with a BA in philosophy in 1990, before undertaking graduate studies at Boston College. This was compared to previous undercover journalism such as Black Like Me. 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, 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." She criticized doctors who she claimed were unapproachable, noting that too many relied on drugs as therapy, while others addressed only 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 Woolf's suicide in 1941 .

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." Due to her experience as a man during the making of Self-Made Man she ultimately had a depressive breakdown, leading Vincent to admit herself to a locked psychiatric facility, stating it was the high price she paid for "the burden of deception" of a separate identity and for trying to hold two gender identities in her mind.

Vincent died via assisted suicide at a clinic in Switzerland on July 6, 2022, aged 53. Her death was reported in August 2022. Voluntary Madness (Viking Adult, 2008) Thy Neighbor (Viking Adult, 2012) Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)