Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man

by Norah Vincent

Atlantic £9.99, pp304

Not many women could get away with successfully impersonating a man over a long period, but then, not many men have the balls Norah Vincent has. The Los Angeles Times columnist spent a year and a half as her male alter ego, Ned, and inveigled herself into all sorts of largely inadvisable situations. Ned joins a bowling league, spends time in a monastery, hangs out in lap-dancing clubs, dates as many women as possible and attempts to discover his inner Neanderthal on a male-bonding camping weekend, where, at one point, he believes he will be found out, stripped of his all-flattening sports bra and beaten to a pulp.

For the first half of the book, you wonder how Vincent pulled it off. I repeatedly broke away from the narrative to stare at the cover image of Norah as a (rather beautiful) woman next to Ned, an equally attractive (and plausible) man.

Ned chose his clothes carefully, worked out to build muscle tone, meticulously glued stubble to his face and took voice coaching. He learned quickly from his mistakes, such as the time at the bowling alley when he found himself 'swaggering just a little too wide and looking like I had a load in my pants'.

For the entire 18 months, Ned went unchallenged, living and working in several US states. In fact, Ned is so successful that when Norah reveals herself, in the late stages of some of her experiments, many of Ned's new friends and colleagues refuse to believe that he is a woman: 'Hey, great joke, buddy!' When the penny finally drops, only a few admit they were worried that Ned was, well, a bit gay.

This is an addictive, enthralling read: each chapter is progressively more fascinating as Ned becomes more ensconced in his new life. He tries to identify with his new bowling friends' all-encompassing sexual urges, but can only fake it. There is much discussion of how married men can get away with visiting girlie bars without their wives realising and how 'no vacation would be quite as relaxing without a little skin in it'.

Even when you take sex out of a man's world, it's a mess, Ned concludes. At the monastery, the inmates are imprisoned, rather than liberated, by a single-gender environment. The place is 'steeped in commonplace masculine angst'. The fear that Ned is gay is at its height here, so everyone gives him a wide berth.

The dating adventures are the most breathtaking. Ned is on the receiving end of women's boring, self-pitying monologues and endless tirades about what bastards men are. His dates all suspect he is as bad as the rest of them: 'They made every man they met into a wolf, even when that man was a woman.'

The dates are when the deceit hits Norah. Her project to experience life as a man turns into a personal nightmare. A feminist and a lesbian, Vincent expects that, as a convincing Ned, she will finally have a life of privilege and entitlement. But men have their own unpleasant codes, Ned discovers. Don't hold anyone's gaze too long. Don't show too much enthusiasm. Don't be apologetic about anything. Show no weakness. This - and the essential deceit - brings Vincent to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Instead of feeling powerful and dominating, Ned finds being a man depressing and exhausting. You have to put on a constant show of 'maleness'.

This feeling isn't just about being a woman trapped in a man's body. Most men, Vincent claims, feel this way. They are constantly having to fight to assert their identity, hide their emotions, to be the Man. Vincent hates to admit it initially, but men, too, have their cross to bear. They're all faking it to some extent. The disguise of being a man, she notes at her last all-men bonding session, 'was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room'.