Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man

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Yeah. I don’t know if you can print this, but I certainly held on to a piece of his balls (laughs). As Hamlet would say, probably the strongest remaining male advantage is ‘thinking makes it so.’ It’s that feeling that, when I’m feeling afraid of something I have to do or I’m feeling unequal to it, I say to myself, just do it. Don’t think about it, just get up and do it. There is a way in which that is a gift that men have that compensates for all the things they don’t have.” That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man's world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball. Eventually I realised that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room. It was hard being a guy. The only thing which let the novel down for me are the Americanisms which sometimes creep into the text. The use of the word ‘gotten’ is rather jarring, and its historical inaccuracy with relation to England during the 1920s and 1930s pulls the novel from its otherwise excellent historical grounding.

Virginia Woolf is one of the icons of twentieth century British literature. She and her fellow writers of the Bloomsbury Group are some of the most influential authors of the previous century and every student of English Literature has been assigned at least one of their works to read for class. As was I. As it was, I liked some of the Bloomsbury Set’s works, and those of their contemporaries, I had to read better than I did others—couldn't get through Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, really enjoyed Eliot's The Waste Land and Woolf's Into the Lighthouse, and adored E.M. Forster's A Room with a View and Howard's End. So when I discovered that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was publishing Adeline by Norah Vincent, a historical novel about Virginia Woolf focusing on her mental state and the events that drove her to choose her final journey into the Ouse, I was intrigued to read it and when I was offered a review copy I happily accepted. A far cry from the Bloomsberries who had a reputation for speaking and writing with great simplicity ....it is their lives which are regarded as highly complicated !!! Adeline was an engaging narrative, but not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination. Putting characterisation and thoughts on the reliability of the various points of view to one side, the writing and voice of the book alone required some serious acclimatisation. Vincent's prose is interesting, especially since it reminded me a lot of Woolf’s phrasing. Bearing in mind that I haven’t read any of Woolf's work since university and only Into the Lighthouse at that, Adeline's prose reminded me of those works from the era I've read and the tone was very well done. Nonetheless, it did take some getting used to it, before I managed to get immersed in the story. This isn't helped by the fact that from the start the book takes leaps in time and none of the viewpoint characters come across as particularly reliable, whether due to circumstance or mental health issues. when most people DON'T listen and most conversations from the Mobile Broadcasters has me fleeing train or bus rather than missing my stop to find out 'What Happened Next',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) We met for dinner at her house. During dinner I told her right out, in the blurted way our conversations tended to go, that there was something I wasn't telling her about myself, and that I couldn't tell her what it was. I told her that if we were going to go to bed together she would have to be willing to accept the untold thing and the physical constraints it required. She took this well. She was curious. Not frightened. She didn't need to know, she said. 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 did enjoy the snippets of conversation between Virginia and her devout husband Leonard as well as those with the poet W.B Yeats. It was also astonishing how cruel the Bloomsbury Group of "friends" could be to one another - was it a by-product of being so bright or just too much time spent intellectualizing everything? I admired how even in the face of such biting remarks they could still admire the intelligence behind the insults. In such a dour novel these brief moment of humor were a relief. 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; a b c d e f g h i j k l Green, Penelope (August 18, 2022). "Norah Vincent, Who Chronicled Passing as a Man, Is Dead at 53". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on August 18, 2022 . Retrieved August 18, 2022. Everything was out and above board with these guys. If they were pissed at you, you'd know it. They were glad enough to see me, but not glad enough to miss me if I didn't show. They were coming from long, wearying workdays and they didn't have the energy for pretence. Allen was a construction worker, Bob a plumber. Jim was working in the repair department of an appliance company. 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." [5]

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Nigel Nicholson found her a lively and amusing visitor, "a favourite aunt who brightened our simple lives with unexpected questions." Not only was dating one of the hardest of Ned's experiences, it was also the most fraught with deception. I decided I would out myself to anyone with whom I had more than a passing, unsuccessful, date or two. To most of the women I dated, even the odd date meant a lot, especially women who had been out roaming the singles scene for years in their mid-30s, trying to find a mate amid the serial daters.