As "Ned," she joined a bowling league, went to strip clubs, entered a monastery ok I want to read that part, dated heterosexual women (and slept with one of them)... all without being discovered. what! that's interesting - she had a sex with a woman who did not in the process learn that her partner had no - ?

My life as a man- Salon review of "Self-Made Man" - Powells page. due Feb06. Viking 0670034665 - see about a galley copy?

does .not. sound like I will actually like what she says: By the end of "Self-Made Man," however, Vincent is flinging suspiciously grand pronouncements around with all the recklessness of the latest love-your-overexamined-life bestseller. ... suggestion that there is no such thing as a human being, "but only male human beings and female human beings, as separate as sects --see, that's about as different a page from mine as you could be on.
...it is striking, and perhaps inadvertently revealing, for a woman who has already told us that she finds her truest self "on the boundary between masculine and feminine" to conclude that the human race is divided into two opposed and incompatible species.

Men tend to meet each other's eyes for a split second and then look away, in a gesture of mutual respect or at least "a disinclination to show disrespect." I think Vincent is being overly dramatic when she suggests that for one man to look another in the face is to invite either conflict or a homosexual encounter, but she's right that those things are under the surface somewhere, and for any male reader it's startling to see one of the most ingrained codes of male public behavior so briskly dissected. ok that 's interesting enough (though I think it is more that I am liking the writing of this review) ...:
Vincent may be a relatively butch lesbian, but as she carefully explains, she is nonetheless a genuine female-type woman, not a transsexual or a "drag king" transvestite. She goes on to say, "This is, therefore, not a confessional memoir. I am not resolving a sexual identity crisis."
To which I say, Hmm. In a publishing world awash with self-indulgent and/or bogus confessional memoirs (frey), it seems churlish to castigate a writer for not writing one. But "Self-Made Man" is self-evidently about one woman's journey into gender bewilderment, and into a neurotic state not far from schizophrenia. As it manfully struggles to avoid the confessional mode, it becomes ever more opaque and unspecific, pretty much strangling itself in the process. And while I'm playing Viennese doctor, let's just say that the statement "I am not resolving a sexual identity crisis" is highly ambiguous. As in: No, you're not, are you? not resolving.

yes this is finely writ: I'm not disputing the validity of Ned/Norah's empirical observations, but Vincent basically threw herself into the most awful shark-tank version of heterosexuality, only to find that the water was full of sharks. Yes, many men find sexual outlet through gruesome strip clubs, dead-eyed hookers and the limitlessly demeaning universe of Internet porn. Yes, the dating pool is full of twice-burned women with barbed-wire defenses. But we didn't need some lesbian with a flattop haircut and a piss-poor bowling game to bring us back these Pop Gender 101 staples; they're found in every daytime chat show and women's magazine.
It's undoubtedly brave and noble that Vincent tried to cross class as well as gender boundaries, but as aware as she is of that issue on the bowling team, I think the former category is more important than she realizes. Beyond the agonizing dating chapter, she never tries to pass for the kind of straight man she might already know, an urban guy with bobo-style, liberal-arts values and inclinations. (For that matter, she also doesn't try to be a gay man.) In that context, I don't think being a man is half as hard as she thinks it is -right, and whatever one thinks about the biochemical basis of sex and gender, the performance of gender roles is a lot more fluid than she depicts.

Being a man, or playacting one, drove Vincent crazy -- I mean that literally -- and this immensely peculiar book documents that slide into madness without ever confronting it head-on. now from that angle -