Self-Made Man is a book by American journalist Norah Vincent, who worked as a columnist for different publications. I should say a few words about the author before I start sharing my thoughts regarding the book. She ended her life through assisted suicide in a Swiss clinic in 2022 and I don't know why such an emotionally strong person did that - after all, she described herself as a masculine woman in her book, yet she claimed to be a lesbian. Taking into account that she had a big family and was a happy person, her final decision baffled me. Anyway, rest in peace, Norah Vincent.

I heard about this book while playing GTA: Vice City five years ago. A host on some radio show in the game mentioned an outraged woman disguised as a man who overheard an explicit conversation between two men talking about their wives, while she was working with them on a construction site. It was kind of a social experiment for her to study patriarchy. Afterwards, she wrote a book about her experience. Maybe it was an endorsement on the radio, I don't know, and I wondered if this book really existed. I googled "a woman in disguise as a man" and Norah Vincent's book popped up first. I compared the book's release date with the game's and realized this wasn't the book that was mentioned on the radio because the game was released in 2002 and the book in 2006. Even though Norah Vincent's experiment took place somewhere between 2002 and 2004 and lasted 18 months, the game's writers couldn't possibly have known about her plans to conduct the experiment beforehand. I wrote down the title of book to read it later. Five years later, I finally got my hands on it.

I read this book with great enthusiasm and interest because I wanted to broaden my own horizons regarding the interrelationships between men and women, learn more about the difference in their behaviors, and get someone else's take on it. This book gave me insights into how men and women are perceived in a modern society, what people's expectations in relation to gender are, and what problems men and women face on a daily basis. Some of them resonated with me and confirmed my own observations. I'm pretty sure if the author had been married to a man, she wouldn't have been surprised by the things she learned and later wrote about in her book, and would've learned more about what it's like to be a man and how she should have behaved while disguised as one. It was a good decision to join a man's bowling club and try dating women. It was interesting for me to learn how men live in monasteries with no women around at all, and their reasons for choosing such an ascetic way of life. Overall, reading this book it made me think about a lot of things regarding life, and for that reason alone, I think it's worth reading.