Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man

Product Information

I just want to say that this was a book that just didn't work for me. I hoped that I would get into the story, but it never happened. Vincent, Norah (2008). Voluntary madness: my year lost and found in the loony bin. New York: Viking. p.14. ISBN 978-1-440-64103-9. It includes conversations with Yeats, Thomas Elliott and his wife, Vivian, and others that were important to her social circle. Hers was a mind that was not only brilliant but always pondering, musing about many different things. Leonard always worried about her mental state, trying to keep her steady. We know how the story ends and I finished this book feeling so sympathetic to what she had fought through all her life. It also made me want to read many of her other novels, those that were mentioned in this book particularly. Through five states in three regions of the country (all unnamed), Ned Vincent embedded himself in the male landscape: he made buddies, joined a men’s bowling team, went to strip clubs, dated women, joined a monastery, attended a male therapy group and even experienced the brutal realities of a high-pressure sales job.

All the greatest works of art were failures by definition. By design. This was the whole purpose and nature of art, to fail, for art was and could only ever be futile and moribund. That was what made it shine in the darkness.” (p.265) A psychological insight into of the life of author Virginia Woolf. This intimate story of Adeline/Virginia, one of the famed Bloomsbury group, which included great creative minds such as T. S. Eliot and Lytton Strachey, explores her state of mind in the years before her suicide and her relationships with the other members of the Bloomsbury group. Virginia suffered from dark moods, debilitating headaches and painful menstrual symptoms. When “unwell” she shut herself up in her bedroom and had lengthy conversations with her youthful alter ego, Adeline. It is not clear if she was ever diagnosed as being a schizophrenic, but her symptoms certainly give the impression that she was suffering from this mental condition.. A period of sexual abuse during her childhood by a member of her family may have triggered this mental breakdown. Although, it is not certain how much of the abuse was real and how much imagination, as Virginia was given to frequent melodramatic outbursts, it is certain that the abuse precipitated her depression and her fear of sexual intimacy. Written mainly from Virginia’s point of view in the present tense, Vincent has done a good job of allowing the reader a look at how Virginia might have felt at times when she held conversations with her younger self and with friends who had died. The times when mania was setting in are particularly suffocating and uncomfortable. Her novels tended to be based on experiences she or her friends & family had, and writing them was rather painful. In a lot of ways, Virginia Woolf never grew up and she needed people- mostly her husband, Leonard Woolf, and her sister Vanessa (Nessa) Bell – to take care of her even during her good times. Very fragile emotionally, she was treated like a precious egg that could break easily. From this book I get the feeling she never knew a moment’s peace from her demons.I won't quote the entire thing, but here's a slip of it: "We love -- we need to peep through the pinhole in the wall, and not just at anything or anyone, but ourselves" ( 113). Isn't that what we do? Beyond that, I have issues with Vincent’s stylistic choices, her tendency to stay too much within Virginia’s head. There’s too much potential for misinterpretation, for creating thoughts she never had, leading the reader to believe she was a far different person than she was in reality. I’ll admit, I tend to feel protective of Woolf, sensitive to how she’s portrayed. Already feeling distrustful certainly didn’t help. I thought dating was going to be the fun part, the easiest part. Certainly as a man I had romantic access to far more women than I ever did as a lesbian. I could partake at last in the assumption of heterosexuality and ask out any woman I liked without insulting her. Of course, I was in for a mountain of rejections, but to be a guy I had to get out there. Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man is a 2006 book by journalist Norah Vincent, recounting an 18-month experiment in which she disguised herself as a man and then integrated into traditionally male-only venues, such as a bowling league and a monastery. She described this as "a human project" about learning. She states at the beginning that she is a lesbian but not transgender.

Rejection is a staple for guys," said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my seat with a humiliated sigh. "Get used to it." Guardian Book Extracts "Double Agent" ". Book Extracts. London: The Guardian. March 18, 2006. Archived from the original on January 20, 2008 . Retrieved September 27, 2014. Nigel Nicholson found her a lively and amusing visitor, "a favourite aunt who brightened our simple lives with unexpected questions."

Media Reviews

Adeline was her real first name and in this book Adeline is her alter ego. When Virginia is having one of her so called spells, it is Adenine to whom she talks. Such an amazing look at the inner workings of Virginia's mind, some of her past that she can't let go of, her thought process as she wrote her novels, her fears and her marriage. I very soon began to wonder whether this writer was not going through an early obsession with Virginia Woolf, as do some fans of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. It leads many to complete Jane's unfinished novels; or write an account of how on one of Charlotte's visits to London she witnessed a murder which led to adventure and a romance !!! Ludicrouus ? YES ! so far. I tried to listen to this once and gave up, lost in a sea of words and impressions that seemed to me to strain too much towards an imitation of Woolf's lyricism without her tightly girded understructure. The second time, it took better, and I found parts of it interesting and moving. It is a professional book, in the sense that the author has for the most part done her research. At times, as in the scene btw Woolf and Strachey when they discuss Elizabeth and Essex, Vincent is able to synthesize a great deal of material quite deftly in a way that suggests real insight. However, I found the last couple of chapters increasingly annoying. For one thing, Vincent seems to need to transpose her fangirl appreciation of Yeats onto Virginia, and for me the idea that Woolf was constantly mulling over her status in relation to Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce seems more of an excuse to work in salient quotations from "great men" than to really honor Woolf's concerns. Yes, she did occasionally compare herself to Eliot and resent the Olympian authority with which he held forth in his criticism, but she was some ten years older than he was, and the diaries show that she saw through him psychologically in quite a sensitive way. The idea that she was agonizing over her literary reputation as she was writing her suicide notes is, in fact, quite nauseating. Ward, Kate (December 10, 2008). "Voluntary Madness". EW.com. Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on November 24, 2020 . Retrieved August 19, 2022. Adeline has been meticulously researched, and its prose is both beautiful and intelligent. The turns of phrase are deftly created: ‘The world seemed to be speeding up and slowing down, going liquid and solid at the same time, and me with it’. The literary techniques which Vincent has used – Woolf talking to her child self, for example – work so well, as does the way in which the story follows both Virginia and Leonard. The Bloomsbury Group, intrinsic as it was in the lives of the Woolfs, has been considered too: ‘Their life, their bond, their work and their circle of closely kept friends are about one thing: maintenance of the necessary illusion’. So many ideas can be found within the story, and one really gets a feel for Woolf’s world.

If someone had told me when I first started reading this novel that I would end of giving it five stars, I would have thought they were crazy. I had a hard time in the beginning but then I realized that this was a book that once you got into the rhythm of the prose you just needed to keep reading, just this book, it wanted all my attention sort of like Virginia herself wanted or needed.. I unfortunately never read just one book at a time but I really wanted to read this book, so I started over and just read it through. It was brilliant. Norah Vincent has read the journals, letters and autobiographical works of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, as well as the letters of Lytton Strachey and T.S.Eliot;

Retailers:

The women I met wanted a man to be confident. They wanted in many ways to defer to him. I could feel that on many dates, the unspoken desire to be held up and led, whether in conversation or even in physical space, and at times it made me feel quite small in my costume, like a young man must feel when he's just coming of age and he's suddenly expected to carry the world under his arm like a football. And some women did find Ned too small physically to be attractive. They wanted someone, they said, who could pin them to the bed or, as one woman put it, "someone who can drive the bus". Ned was too willowy for that. I began to understand from the inside why Robert Crumb draws his women so big and his diminutive self begging at their heels or riding them around the room. Bob chimed in, "Yeah. Count me in on that. I'm definitely up for that." This sparked a short discussion of titty bars and how the married man negotiated them. The ski trip would offer one of the few opportunities for the boys to be boys, since their wives weren't coming along. This had to be taken advantage of, since it was clear that at least Bob's and Jim's wives had expressly forbidden them to go to strip clubs. The degree of difficulty involved in writing Adeline must have been great. I can’t imagine how long Vincent spent reading bios about Woolf, her letters and diaries. I’m deeply impressed by the breadth of scholarship involved. In her notes, she cites her sources, which are extensive, if not complete. Then again, a complete bibliography of books about Woolf is a life’s worth of reading, much less time spent interpreting all the facts, forming them into a work of fiction. Or “faction,” maybe. Has anyone used that term to refer to fiction disguised as fact? Let’s say they haven’t and that I’m breaking new ground. No one else will care but I like the thought I’ve CREATED SOMETHING, unlikely as it is. You find yourself suddenly in a situation where all the social rules are different,” Vincent says by phone from Manhattan. “I likened it to suddenly hearing sounds that only dogs can hear.” Case in point: when Norah would walk through her neighborhood, the guys hanging outside the bodegas would ogle her; when Ned walked by, they would completely ignore him. a b c "Nora Vincent". Lyceum Agency. Archived from the original on April 10, 2015 . Retrieved July 19, 2021.