Self-Made Man
by Norah Vincent, Viking 2006
Reviewed by Allycen Quan, July 2008
I am a frightful snob. I remain convinced that there is a special level of hell reserved for people who do things so that they can write books about their experiences. In part this is because I am fundamentally appalled at the amount of hubris necessary to complete such a task, but mostly this is because books like this rarely turn out to be any good. Their experiences almost never seem organic or natural, because they aren't. And, as such, they are hardly worth reading about.
And so it might be said that I did not exactly approach Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man with an open mind.
But gender has recently become a relevant topic of note for me, the pertinent questions of: what makes a woman? What makes a man? Vincent's story of the 18 months she spent posing as a man answers these questions; not as neatly as either one of us had hoped, perhaps, but satisfyingly nonetheless.
Vincent navigates several different venues as a man – a strip club, a monastery, a field sales job, a bowling league, a man's retreat – and reports back. The story begins with the obligatory details, about how she bound her breasts and simulated five o'clock shadow, but it quickly becomes clear that her breasts are not at the heart of the issue. Nor are the various ways in which men and woman talk, walk, and move differently, as interesting as they might be. The real issues are the human ones – the way men relate to each other, and to women, and the ways in which they struggle to be recognized for who they are.
Vincent's story is not smooth – she missteps frequently, unwittingly breaking the male code of behavior. And she ends up scaring herself, badly enough to end up on a psychiatric ward. But Self-Made Man is as organic and unpatronising as they come. Vincent is at her best when describing the lack of difference between the hug a monk gives her when he knows her as a man, and the hug he gives her as a woman; and when a friend hugs her in a parking lot and realizes that it's not so kosher for two men to hug publicly; and when she describes the way a burly man admits to feeling objectified. There is no hubris here, only openness, and therein lies the magic of Self-Made Man