Norah Vincent
Norah Vincent was a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies from its 2001 inception to 2003. As a freelance journalist, Vincent wrote columns for Salon, The Advocate, the Los Angeles Times, and The Village Voice. Her essays, columns and reviews appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, The New York Post, The Washington Post and many more regional newspapers around the country. In 2003 she took a leave from writing her nationally syndicated political opinion columns in order to write her New York Times bestselling book Self-Made Man, the story of a woman living, working and dating in drag as a man.
Vincent held a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Williams College. Prior to her death she lived in New York City.
Vincent died via medically assisted suicide on July 6, 2022 at a clinic in Switzerland.
“You want to be happy? You want to be well? Then put your boots on.”
“... there is a whole hell of a lot of knowledge about the (expletive removed) human condition that we are not ready for.”
“There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.”
“Normal life is nuts. It's a downhill deterioration to death no matter how you spice it along the way, and there's nothing you can do about it. Now, a sane person, when faced when that, would just plunk his ass down at the starting line, or wherever along the way this realization finally came to him, and say, "Are you kidding? I quit. I'll slide the rest of the way or sit here and smoke." It takes a true lunatic, or someone functioning with the critical apparatus of a worker bee, to keep scrabbling up that hill when he knows his destiny is dust. But that us what is required. Go on.”
“...they would have all the same stressors still in place, and they would have no means of lessening them, because, their will, if they had amassed any in their time away, was still weak and always a quick casualty. No match for the horrors of lost chances.”
“Women and men communicate differently, often on entirely different planes. But just as men have failed us, we have failed them. It has been one of our great collective female shortcomings to presume that whatever we do not perceive simply isn't there, or that whatever is not communicated in our language is not intelligible speech.”