He said, she said

I couldn’t put my finger on what was bothering me about Norah Vincent’s new gender-bending book, “Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back Again,” until I spotted an item about supermodel Tyra Banks dressing up in a fat suit.

Though “used to being stared at,” Banks was surprised by the looks she got when she hid her celery-stick body inside a disguise that made her appear to weigh 350 pounds. When Banks went on three blind dates for an episode of her kitschy TV talk show, she became the first Victoria’s Secret model ever to be rejected for aesthetic reasons.

The show’s payoff moment -- Banks getting her revenge, revealing her inner babe to her disappointed fat-phobic suitors -- helped me identify the central flaw of Vincent’s account of passing as a man. It boils down to this: What worked about Banks’ stunt is that she went from one clearly defined place to another. What doesn’t work about Vincent’s stunt is that she merely pretends to.

“I have always lived as my truest self somewhere on the boundary between masculine and feminine,” Vincent writes early in her book, introducing the idea that her gender has always felt more gray than black or white. In doing so, she appears to be laying the groundwork for something far more original and provocative than the basic Victor-Victoria transformation. But after asserting her androgyny, Vincent largely abandons it, declining to use it as an analytical tool. When she reverts to the simpler “woman’s journey into manhood” trumpeted by her title, the book falters.

Vincent, a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times op-ed page, does the same bait-and-switch with her sexuality. After passing as a man in a bowling league, at a monastery, in a strip club, in the workplace and in the heterosexual dating world, she concludes, “I was beginning to feel happier than ever to be a dyke.” But though she boldly dedicates her book to a woman she calls “my beloved wife,” she shies away from viewing her experience as a “man” through the lens of her lesbianism.

Too often, when Vincent invokes her gayness, she does so as an aside or even a flip punch line. Though she asserts that she is not a transsexual or a transvestite, she fails to paint a full picture of how her sexual identity prior to donning men’s clothing informs her experience in drag.

The result: The book, though at times perceptive, is disappointing. The key to transformative memoir -- and I say this having tried it myself -- lies in bringing all facets of your “before” self to bear on your description of your altered “after” self. Such soul-baring necessarily leaves an author vulnerable. But in its absence, readers are left wanting.

In his 1961 classic, “Black Like Me,” John Howard Griffin, a white Southerner, described his experience posing as an African American. In Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” the upper-middle-class essayist and cultural critic made herself poor, working for minimum wage as a waitress, a cleaning woman and a nursing home assistant.

In “California or Bust,” a piece I wrote four years ago for Los Angeles magazine, I described my own physical metamorphosis. Aided by the costume designer who made Julia Roberts fuller-figured for her Oscar-winning role in “Erin Brockovich” -- it took a “village ... to create that cleavage,” she quipped at the time -- I went from an AA-cup to a double D. Then I walked around Los Angeles and saw the city, and myself, through different eyes.

Quibble if you will about the relative merits of these projects, which ranged from the serious (theirs) to the silly (mine). What is indisputable is that to the extent they succeeded, they each did so because the poseurs not only were transfigured but also were honest about what had driven them to try life on the other side.

In the opening of “Black Like Me,” Griffin, a specialist in race issues, implies that for him, it was the painful realization that scholarship -- a pursuit to which he’d devoted his life -- couldn’t fully reveal how it felt to be discriminated against. For me -- and it took several rewrites before I forced myself to admit it -- the motivation was less pure: While I firmly believed women shouldn’t be valued primarily for their bodies, a part of me envied those who were. As I wrote, “I want to see how the busty half lives.”

It’s not easy to air your fears, insecurities or irrational desires in public. So I’m loath to criticize Vincent too harshly for not fully exploring how being a woman who loves women affected her 18 months as “Ned,” her straight male alter-ego. Still, you don’t have to be well-versed in critical theory on gender and identity to wish that “Ned” had looked more deeply into Norah.

Vincent’s account of how she “became” a man is undeniably fascinating. Anyone who saw Hilary Swank’s girl-to-boy star-turn in the 1999 film “Boys Don’t Cry” won’t be surprised to learn how an ace bandage can make even a buxom woman look flat-chested. But who knew that you could simulate beard stubble by gluing the tiniest hair shavings to your cheeks? Or that, as Vincent’s voice coach tells her, to pass as a man, a woman must strive to speak less, and more slowly. “Women,” the coach says, “tend to bankrupt their own breath.”

Moreover, some of Vincent’s observations about the differences between male and female friendship rituals are startlingly incisive. Meeting the men in her bowling league, for example, she is struck by the “soft pop” and assertive squeeze of her first man-to-man handshake. “It was more affectionate than any handshake I’d ever received from a strange woman,” she writes. “To me, woman-to-woman introductions often seem fake and cold, full of limp gentility.... It’s done out of habit and for appearances, a hollow, even resentful, gesture bred into us and rarely felt.

“This solidarity of sex was something that feminism tried to teach us, and something, it now seemed to me, that men figured out and perfected a long time ago. On some level men didn’t need to learn or remind themselves that brotherhood was powerful. It was just something they seemed to know.”

But less than 75 pages later, in a section on dating, Vincent says she found it easier to meet women as Norah, not Ned, because “even in a dating situation there was always the common bond of womanhood, the common language of females that often makes even strange women able to chat amiably with each other.”

So which is it?

Her withering assessment of men’s emotional limitations, though written in a compassionate I-feel-your-pain voice, also cries out for a more sophisticated approach. Vincent generalizes that “as a guy you get about a three-note emotional range” and sums up the challenges facing men in a neat troika (“the territorial reflex, the blocked emotional responses, and the all-consuming rage”). Because Vincent intentionally chose situations where she felt she’d see macho sensibilities at their worst (a boiler-room work environment straight out of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” a down-on-its heels strip club), her conclusions feel as if they’ve been extrapolated from incomplete data.

Not all men get lap dances. Not all men sum up women, as one of Ned’s drinking buddies does, with “the four F’s”: “Find ‘em. Feel ‘em” -- you can imagine No. 3 -- “and Forget ‘em.” Not all men fantasize, as some of the members of a men’s rights group she attends do, about chopping their wives up with an ax. Vincent makes sure to include this caveat, but it’s not enough.

Then there are the women Ned dates. Chosen, Vincent admits, more for their willingness to go out with her than for their intrinsic appeal (“I didn’t want to sleep with them. They were just another test case”), it’s no wonder that she became, in her words, “a momentary misogynist.” “I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a finger-tip,” she writes. But how does this compare with dating lesbians whom she actually was drawn to? Vincent doesn’t say.

It’s almost as if the book, while insisting that it’s about a woman masquerading as a man, is really about a gay person posing as straight. If Vincent had presented gender and sexuality as inextricably tangled, that would be one thing. Instead, sexuality is given short shrift, even as Ned is repeatedly suspected of being a gay man.

Vincent does lay herself bare, however, on the topic of how guilty she feels deceiving those she meets as Ned. Especially in light of the recent news that James Frey’s memoir “A Million Little Pieces” is really more of a novel, her account of the harrowing toll that lying took on her -- even in the pursuit of a deeper truth -- reveals what a talented writer Vincent is. If only she’d aimed her formidable intellect at herself earlier in the process. *