Norah Vincent spent a year disguised as a man for her last book but the experience put her in a mental institution… cue follow-up

Published on Friday 23 January 2009 15:00

FOR HER first book, Norah Vincent disguised herself as a man for a year. She called herself Ned, painstakingly applied some five o'clock shadow every day, and infiltrated a men's therapy group, a monastery, a bowling club, lapdancing bars and more. And she dated a lot of women. The results made for a fascinating study of American masculinity and the book, Self Made Man, became a New York Times bestseller. But pretending to be someone else, and someone of the opposite sex to boot, took it

"Interestingly, it was the opposite of losing my identity," she says, as she explains what brought on the breakdown that would inspire her second book, Voluntary Madness. "I was too much myself. I wasn't able to become Ned so there were two people inside me at war. My femaleness was so stubbornly there and so offended by my desire to wrench it out that the discord tore me apart. Then you throw into the mix that I already had proclivities towards depression and that's where I ended up."

So she ended up in a mental institution, or "the bin" as she calls it, for four days. While she was there "wondering how the hell I was going to talk my way out of that zombie parlour", she had the idea for her next book. She would lie her way into three different psychiatric facilities and then write about what happened to her; her observations, the people she met, the whole ugly experience. Considering her own history of depression – Vincent had been taking "Vitamin P" (better known as Prozac) for years – she anticipated her mental health might suffer, but that would be part of the project, a necessary risk of immersion journalism. Besides, so much of psychiatry was just a stab in the dark, she reasoned, an attempt to diagnose people based solely on how they say they feel.

It's the type of decision that seems both brave and bordering on stupid. But Vincent, who started out as a political columnist, is fiercely smart and doesn't seem the reckless type. What made her do it? "Every time I do this I'm a different person by the end, which is the privilege and the oddity of it," she admits. "With Self Made Man I started out an idiot. The bliss of ignorance was the only reason I was able to do it. I was so excited with that thrill of passing (as Ned] and then I found myself knee deep in the mud. After that, I knew enough to be able to say this is what I do. I go into the muck of myself and the ugly little parts of our culture's margins and do what other people don't want to do."

She puts her desire for wanting to explore such extremities down to a feeling of alienation. "Initially, that came from my gender identity," says Vincent, a lesbian whose sexuality and androgynous appearance drew her to the idea for Self Made Man. Just as she wouldn't have become Ned without these experiences, she would never have committed herself to the bin without a history of depression. "Being an androgynous person… that's been a painful theme throughout, and also being a so-called mentally ill person. Both experiences are alienating, but maybe I can make a silk purse out of them. Plus, it's the Oscar Wilde idea – give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth."

When Vincent committed herself to the first institution, a public inner city ward, she wasn't depressed. She lied and said she felt suicidal, and was immediately admitted for 10 days. "I really was very scared, especially that first night when I realised what I had done and that I didn't know how long it would take to get out," she tells me. "Yes, I had certain resources – a publisher and agent who could call and send letters – but even so, it's a hermetic environment and you lost perspective quickly."

Vincent spent the time scribbling notes with a Crayola (she wasn't allowed a pen because it's classed as dangerous), craving the air outside, and peeling oranges in the bathroom to mask the acid stench of urine. The doctors gave her pills that they couldn't answer basic questions about and which she would spit out in secret. She noticed that while she fooled the doctors, the patients could tell she wasn't one of them. She also noticed that as her independence and will were eroded, she became depressed. "It was a grim place," she recalls, "a revolving door for people in a very bad way. Essentially the policy was lock them in, medicate the bejesus out of them, dump them back on the street." Vincent entered the system well and left depressed, which is about the most damning indictment there is.

The project takes an unexpected turn when Vincent decides to come off her medication, to get depressed for real. When she commits herself to the second facility, a small private Catholic hospital, she isn't lying any more. "It was frightening because in the past when I'd come off my meds I had been surprised at the depths to which I'd plunged, deeper than I'd ever experienced prior to taking psychotropic drugs," she says. "So I knew what to expect, and that was scary. But that was part of the task. I really wanted to describe depression in real time." Which she gets the opportunity to do, as the book turns inward in the second half until, by the third institution, she has a breakthrough and discloses that she was abused as a child.

"I really had a crisis of confidence with the intensity of those disclosures," she says, and I can tell she is sensitive about people faulting the book for becoming a vanity project. The personal does end up overtaking the social in Voluntary Madness, but she would argue that this is part and parcel of immersion journalism. It could also, however, be construed as a danger. "I thought, do I want people to know this much about my inner life? I didn't want it to be a kind of masturbation, but I did want to talk about what molestation does to your mind. And I wanted to avoid the pity train."

She does acknowledge that, more and more, she is becoming the focus of the project. As a result, Vincent is wary of referring to herself as an immersion journalist. She says the terms "method actor" or "performance artist" are a better fit for her purpose. And Voluntary Madness has certainly had a profound effect on her. Since finishing the book, she has come off her medication successfully and at times she speaks with the earnest zeal of someone who has found herself in therapy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her next book is about mysticism.

But Vincent seems too self-aware and is enough of a doer to not want to waste time gazing at her own navel. "My style is to jump in and make it personal," she says. "In that sense, it's no longer an immersion because this is my entire life now. It's about my life actually being my work." v

Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost And Found In The Loony Bin by Norah Vincent, Chatto & Windus, 12.99