But like that word “international”—no one says “expat” anymore—it’s a colonial adventure with a postmodern twist. “Internationals”—the term used by the U.N. and other non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) to describe staff from overseas—are apt to be politically liberal, highly educated and quirky.

Perhaps even a bit nerdy. Kabul is blessedly free of garden-variety neurotics—hypochondriacs and worrywarts don’t even think of coming here—but it’s hard to think of many other capitals where a weekly “quiz night” at a pizzeria is a social highlight, drawing 80 to 100 competitors. (One of the quizzes had a category called “Porn Star or Pony,” where contestants had to guess whether the names belonged to My Little Pony products or second-string porn stars. Heart Throb and Chocolate Delight, in case you were wondering, are ponies.) And one memorable dinner party revolved around a reading of The Taming of the Shrew, reminiscent of the amateur theatricals of 1946 Kabul life as portrayed in James Michener’s Caravans.

Social life in Kabul has evolved with economic development: some say for the better, and some say for the worse. In 2002—the satellite-phone-only, carry-in-all-the-cash-you-need stage—foreigners were a rough-and-ready lot, comprising disarmament and demining experts, well-diggers, road-builders and a few hardy entrepreneurs. They were a transient, overwhelmingly male group whose idea of social life was slinging back beers at the only bar in town (and, rumor had it, frequenting the brothels masquerading as Chinese restaurants). As one young American woman who worked on disarmament said, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

By 2003, the technocrats and diaspora Afghans were arriving, along with mobile-phone service, bank branches, restaurants that weren’t brothels and guesthouses with speedy Internet access. By then, there were enough women to have a party scene—painfully frat-party-like, with a dizzyingly high male-to-female ratio and the objective of getting as drunk as possible while listening to very loud music.

Now, in 2006, businesses of all kinds are thriving in Kabul and a half-dozen provincial cities, many financed by the diaspora Afghans, and life in Kabul can be enough like normal life in the West—with dinner parties, foreign films, an annual golf tournament and even a benefit or two—to attract, well, more normal Westerners.

A recent American arrival is Victoria Longo, a pretty 26-year-old George Washington University graduate working for AISA, Afghanistan’s private-sector investment-promotion organization. “You wouldn’t imagine such a thriving social scene in a place like Kabul, but it exists,” said Ms. Longo. “You meet a lot of adventurous types, and eccentricity is the norm.”

“This is college for eternity,” countered Sarah Takesh, Columbia ’95, a vivacious Iranian-American designer behind the local apparel company Tarsian & Blinkley. “People become addicted to the cozy insularity of life here. They say they’re fed up and they leave—and then they come back six months later.” Ms. Takesh, who is a descendent of the Qajar dynasty of Iran, moved to Afghanistan in July 2003. Her company includes a small semi-couture business aimed at internationals.

Diaspora Afghans—those returned from overseas—are at the top of the heap in the internationals’ Kabul. One prominent local businessman, Saad Mohseni, who describes himself as an “Afghan-Australian,” pointed out that the ministers of finance, communications, commerce, urban development, foreign affairs and defense are all diaspora Afghans, as is the governor of the central bank and the mayor of Kabul.

What’s the difference between a diaspora Afghan and an international?

“An international, to me, is someone who will leave someday,” said Suleman Fatimie, the 26-year-old vice president of AISA. Mr. Fatimie, the holder of an M.B.A. from the United Kingdom, was raised in Egypt, Pakistan and London and returned to Afghanistan in 2003. He considers himself an unhyphenated Afghan, and here to stay.

Afghan nationals without foreign passports are not allowed to drink—think Islamic Republic of Afghanistan—and so, whether they like it or not, they are cut off from the internationals’ restaurant scene, which has thrived while the government turns a blind eye to alcohol sales as long as nationals are not served. The hippest joint in town since it opened in August 2004 is the French-run L’Atmosphere, which sits in a very large garden where bunnies and cats frolic during daylight hours.

On summer nights, as many as a hundred internationals sip French wine or mixed drinks around the pool; in fall or spring, they gather around the fire pit. It’s the most pickup-y place in Kabul, especially on Thursday and Friday nights. (Afghan government and private offices have Fridays off, while some American firms offer Saturday off as well. Sunday is a normal workday for everyone.)

But you never lose the sense that you’re in an Islamic country. For instance, it is not done for women to bare their legs. A cynic might say they don’t need to do so to win male attention, the male-female ratio being what it is. While most international men wear business suits to work, a dress code for international women has evolved: a pants suit with a jacket halfway down to the knees for work and, at night, a long tunic over jeans. Shoes tend toward the basic, given Kabul’s dirty, unpaved streets.

“I started bringing over my real shoe collection—Sigerson Morrison, Marni, Sonia Rykiel and so on,” said Ms. Takesh. “I keep them in little bags in my closet and look at them every once in a while. I wear sad sandals, a $20 tunic and no makeup most days of the week—but it’s comforting to know that they are there.”

A little more skin is shown at dinners and parties in the large private houses rented by groups of foreigners. In Kabul, your house and your job are your social destiny, and the two often overlap. For security reasons, many employers require residence in a designated guesthouse. And because many people’s jobs provide drivers during work hours only, nighttime socializing tends to take place among clusters of housemates.

Naturally, as with college sorority and fraternity houses, there are more and less fashionable houses. Two English-speaking clusters, known for their well-connected residents, are the large compound where Ms. Takesh lives with eight others, and Lisa Pinsley’s five-person house.

A graduate of Deerfield Academy and Harvard (’97) and a quiet, regal beauty, Ms. Pinsley shares a three-story 60’s-style bungalow and its spacious garden with the Australian filmmaker Sophie Barry, often named one of the “coolest girls in Kabul”; the stylish, petite Canadian brunette Kate Khamsi, Harvard ’95, one of Kabul’s most social; and two others.

Ms. Khamsi, a half-Iranian, half-Irish-Canadian lawyer who is a direct descendent of Muhammad on her father’s side, arrived in December 2005 after working for almost two years in East Timor. “In Kabul, I associate with a broader cross-section of society than I do at home,” she said. “In New York, I hang out mainly with other young professionals and Ivy League graduates. I didn’t know anyone in the Army. Here, by necessity, you’re thrown into a more diverse group.”

Diversity is relative, of course. The “international” world is highly artificial, with loads of journalists but almost no artists, musicians or filmmakers; a good number of Ph.D.’s in economics, but few in literature. It’s mainly Caucasian, and skews toward the Ivy League for Americans, and Eton and similar schools for Brits.

But in sharp contrast to social life in New York, personal wealth is less important here than access to other people’s money. Being the Aga Khan’s rep has more social cachet locally than having $50 million of your own, and there are no hedge-fund kings—or hedge funds—here anyway.

One of the more chic recent parties was the 30th birthday of Holly Ritchie, a slim, pretty English blonde who works for an N.G.O., at her home. Among the guests sampling the buffet from a local Lebanese restaurant was fellow Brit Rory Stewart, the very thin Old Etonian founder of the local Turquoise Mountain Foundation (preserving traditional Afghan building techniques) and best-selling author of The Places in Between.

Ms. Ritchie, who arrived in Afghanistan in 2004 after receiving a master’s in international development, said: “Ever since I saw Indiana Jones, I wanted to be an archaeologist or do something where I would experience other places and their realities. From 13, I knew I wanted to work in developing countries, and if you are British, Afghanistan above all will always hold a certain challenge and fascination.”

If she’d only known about quiz night.

It used to be that women married for what was called “an establishment” in the 18th century: a house, a coach, staff and a social position. Now that we can get that without marrying, a fair number of “career women” turn out to be interested in being, well, housewives. (A touchy question I won’t get into here is how many women today would prefer to remain single if only they could earn enough to provide their fantasy “establishment.”)

I recognize some of the signs in myself. Without husband or kids, I married my house. By which I mean, a lot of the time that I would spend on wifely duties (other than sex), I devote to maintaining, upgrading and decorating my home.

I’m crazy enough to get the paint retouched every couple of months in the high-traffic rooms. The minute something breaks, it gets fixed. I’ve shipped antique tile from Italy and wood and lamps from Canada to adorn my place, and spent countless hours online sourcing everything from the perfect antique brass sink (only $60 on eBay) to the perfect waterproof patio coating.

My domestic obsession, like that of many of my husbandless or childless friends, is selective. I eat out as much as the next New Yorker, and I don’t do much of my own housework (though I do some of my own construction work; the heavier stuff is good exercise). I garden in the small way that my small outdoor space allows and am approaching self-sufficiency in cilantro, mint and basil. More to the point, the chief incentive in running my small business is to be able to pay for all of this.

Mainly, this is all a good thing. Since I work at home, it’s more important to me to live in a place that I find aesthetically pleasing. And I enjoy the compliments I get on my house, which (I am realizing at 48) will one day have to take the emotional place hitherto gratified by compliments on my looks.

(By the way, lest you wonder, my other domestic-fetishist friends are attractive people, some extremely so, and all started their obsessions with house and garden while still nubile.)

The only part that worries me is that I assume I’m single because I always put my career and adventures first—and precisely because I didn’t want to become a housewife. My late mother interrupted a successful career for 15 years to be a stay-at-home mom, which, she was finally able to admit, made her profoundly unhappy. Besides gardening, I don’t recall her liking much about her daily routine. She never enjoyed cooking, and I always thought she burnt the meat in revenge. Maybe, though, domesticity is another thing entirely when you get to choose it.

And maybe it is also a substitute for the sort of big family that few of us have anymore. Greta and David, friends from college (and married nearly that long), were childless for much of their marriage, until they adopted seven years ago. Now they are like other people and order take-out food frequently. But in their childless days, Greta made fantastic vegetarian meals—not a noun-adjective combo I often use—including, most elaborately, a seven-course vegan Seder. Decades before most of us had heard of microgreens, Greta was growing them at her Berkshires home. She also worked full-time in advertising.

Now she has her own small business, a 7-year-old, no nanny and no time to cook. But she doesn’t seem heartbroken about that.

Although she was single until 45, my friend Jane was the first person I knew who had several types of salt on the table. She’d designed her own exquisite—and huge—loft with the money she made as a film editor. She went to the 26th Street flea market every weekend and bought wonderful objects for her home, adding to collections of several different kinds of 50’s dinnerware and antique glasses. A spur-of-the-moment invitation to dinner meant a three-course meal with a choice of several gelatos or sorbets for dessert.

For a selection of homemade sorbets after every meal, though, you have to go to dinner at Patricia and Paolo’s country house. (Last time the flavors were basil, peanut butter and strawberry.) Patricia tends the enormous garden—30 types of tomatoes alone—while Paolo does the cooking. Every time I visit, I wonder how they do it. Each of the four guest rooms is exquisitely furnished and impeccably clean. Fluffy white terry bathrobes await in the wardrobe; fresh flowers are in the bathroom.

Patricia, a 50-year-old real-estate developer, admits that it’s costly: “It’s because I don’t have kids to send to private school and nannies to pay for that I can have the houses that I do.” But she and her husband and business partner do all the gardening and cooking themselves, and have a housekeeper come in only once a week.

Childless by choice, Paolo and Patricia aren’t building an estate for the next generation. The question is: Is their tending of house and garden and table a way of caring for themselves—maybe analogous to what others seek at spas—or is it more like being house-parents, in the way I sometimes consider myself a house-wife, with a beautiful building substituting for the kids they don’t have? Crudely put, is it a desire to care for themselves, or for something outside the self? Along with other cosseted house-guests, I’d answer that it’s a need to nurture.

Or, more cynically, it may be the reflection of an increasingly common anxiety about parenting. They may be members of a vanguard that prefers the love of a house to the raising of children who would eventually move far away and resent even their weekly phone calls. After all, the house will increase in value, and comfort them in their old age.

Ann Marlowe is the author of two memoirs, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z, and The Book of Trouble: A Romance.

It used to be that women married for what was called “an establishment” in the 18th century: a house, a coach, staff and a social position. Now that we can get that without marrying, a fair number of “career women” turn out to be interested in being, well, housewives. (A touchy question I won’t get into here is how many women today would prefer to remain single if only they could earn enough to provide their fantasy “establishment.”)

I recognize some of the signs in myself. Without husband or kids, I married my house. By which I mean, a lot of the time that I would spend on wifely duties (other than sex), I devote to maintaining, upgrading and decorating my home.

I’m crazy enough to get the paint retouched every couple of months in the high-traffic rooms. The minute something breaks, it gets fixed. I’ve shipped antique tile from Italy and wood and lamps from Canada to adorn my place, and spent countless hours online sourcing everything from the perfect antique brass sink (only $60 on eBay) to the perfect waterproof patio coating.

My domestic obsession, like that of many of my husbandless or childless friends, is selective. I eat out as much as the next New Yorker, and I don’t do much of my own housework (though I do some of my own construction work; the heavier stuff is good exercise). I garden in the small way that my small outdoor space allows and am approaching self-sufficiency in cilantro, mint and basil. More to the point, the chief incentive in running my small business is to be able to pay for all of this.

Mainly, this is all a good thing. Since I work at home, it’s more important to me to live in a place that I find aesthetically pleasing. And I enjoy the compliments I get on my house, which (I am realizing at 48) will one day have to take the emotional place hitherto gratified by compliments on my looks.

(By the way, lest you wonder, my other domestic-fetishist friends are attractive people, some extremely so, and all started their obsessions with house and garden while still nubile.)

The only part that worries me is that I assume I’m single because I always put my career and adventures first—and precisely because I didn’t want to become a housewife. My late mother interrupted a successful career for 15 years to be a stay-at-home mom, which, she was finally able to admit, made her profoundly unhappy. Besides gardening, I don’t recall her liking much about her daily routine. She never enjoyed cooking, and I always thought she burnt the meat in revenge. Maybe, though, domesticity is another thing entirely when you get to choose it.

And maybe it is also a substitute for the sort of big family that few of us have anymore. Greta and David, friends from college (and married nearly that long), were childless for much of their marriage, until they adopted seven years ago. Now they are like other people and order take-out food frequently. But in their childless days, Greta made fantastic vegetarian meals—not a noun-adjective combo I often use—including, most elaborately, a seven-course vegan Seder. Decades before most of us had heard of microgreens, Greta was growing them at her Berkshires home. She also worked full-time in advertising.

Now she has her own small business, a 7-year-old, no nanny and no time to cook. But she doesn’t seem heartbroken about that.

Although she was single until 45, my friend Jane was the first person I knew who had several types of salt on the table. She’d designed her own exquisite—and huge—loft with the money she made as a film editor. She went to the 26th Street flea market every weekend and bought wonderful objects for her home, adding to collections of several different kinds of 50’s dinnerware and antique glasses. A spur-of-the-moment invitation to dinner meant a three-course meal with a choice of several gelatos or sorbets for dessert.

For a selection of homemade sorbets after every meal, though, you have to go to dinner at Patricia and Paolo’s country house. (Last time the flavors were basil, peanut butter and strawberry.) Patricia tends the enormous garden—30 types of tomatoes alone—while Paolo does the cooking. Every time I visit, I wonder how they do it. Each of the four guest rooms is exquisitely furnished and impeccably clean. Fluffy white terry bathrobes await in the wardrobe; fresh flowers are in the bathroom.

Patricia, a 50-year-old real-estate developer, admits that it’s costly: “It’s because I don’t have kids to send to private school and nannies to pay for that I can have the houses that I do.” But she and her husband and business partner do all the gardening and cooking themselves, and have a housekeeper come in only once a week.

Childless by choice, Paolo and Patricia aren’t building an estate for the next generation. The question is: Is their tending of house and garden and table a way of caring for themselves—maybe analogous to what others seek at spas—or is it more like being house-parents, in the way I sometimes consider myself a house-wife, with a beautiful building substituting for the kids they don’t have? Crudely put, is it a desire to care for themselves, or for something outside the self? Along with other cosseted house-guests, I’d answer that it’s a need to nurture.

Or, more cynically, it may be the reflection of an increasingly common anxiety about parenting. They may be members of a vanguard that prefers the love of a house to the raising of children who would eventually move far away and resent even their weekly phone calls. After all, the house will increase in value, and comfort them in their old age.

Ann Marlowe is the author of two memoirs, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z, and The Book of Trouble: A Romance.

This incident occurred a year before Leary took his first psychedelic drugs in August of 1960, when he was nearly 40. But the pattern that would characterize Leary’s next 35 years as the self-proclaimed “high priest” of LSD—unusual receptivity to extreme experiences combined with reckless ambition—was already well established.

LSD was only the excuse Leary found to turn his peculiar blend of charisma, creativity and self-indulgence into a career that changed American culture. Robert Greenfield’s compulsively readable if sometimes choppy book—the first major biography of Leary and the result of 10 years of research—details the amazing variety of famous people Leary met, the drugs he ingested and the women he bedded over the course of an unlikely 75-year lifespan.

It’s also a powerful argument against the inchoate belief shared by many who have used psychedelics—and I was one—that tripping almost automatically makes you a better, more enlightened person. Though Mr. Greenfield maintains an evenhanded tone, the effect of his accumulation of detail is to show that Timothy Leary was a scumbag—a charming, energetic and inventive scumbag—despite decades of taking LSD.

He was also adept at self-sabotage: Although he made much of his status as a martyr (he was imprisoned for marijuana possession), driving while smoking pot can’t be a good idea when you’re a celebrated advocate of recreational drugs. But Leary had an astonishing ability to land on his feet. Shortly after his nervous breakdown in Torremolinos, Leary—who attended Holy Cross, was forced out of West Point for lying and expelled from the University of Alabama before finally making it to graduate school at Berkeley—talked his way into a lecturer’s appointment at Harvard by espousing “existential psychology.” This meant that the psychologist should observe real-life situations “like a naturalist in the field” and actually engage with the patient, scrapping the customary clinical detachment (detachment was never a Leary trait).

Leary’s introduction to mushrooms occurred in Mexico in the summer after his first year at Harvard. He proclaimed that it changed his life: “I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than in all my years as a psychologist.” At the time, a colleague who’d tried mushrooms a few years earlier warned Leary of “the compulsive tendency to run around explaining to everyone about these amazing events.” But Leary was no more able than most people to resist the urge.

What separated Leary from many others who were using psychedelics at the same time was his simpleminded and single-minded advocacy. He supplied the sound bite—“tune in, turn on and drop out”—that the media needed to talk about the new drugs. And Leary never decided that he’d learned what he needed to learn from psychedelics; he never moved on. He tripped regularly for decades, sometimes daily, and also consumed other drugs in great quantity, including alcohol.

He had little interest in research on psychedelics, preferring just to turn on as many people as possible with the notion that the world would somehow right itself once everyone was tripping. He was fired from Harvard not for giving LSD to grad students and prison inmates “to accelerate behavior change” (that was fine by the administration), but for abandoning his classes in March and going to Hollywood.

More importantly for those who believed psychedelics could have great potential in psychotherapy, the Leary circus created a hysteria around LSD that lead to Congress making it illegal and effectively shutting down further research. Aldous Huxley himself worried that Leary’s unqualified support for psychedelics would harm the cause (“I am very fond of Tim—but why, oh why, does he have to be such an ass?”). At this remove, Leary’s irresponsibility is, well, mind-blowing: Some of the kids living on the Millbrook, N.Y., estate where he set up his headquarters in 1963 were dosed with acid weekly; his own son, Jack, was taking enormous doses at 16; and Leary thought nothing of driving on acid.

The record of betrayals is equally astonishing: The same man who had punched his second wife in the face tried to turn in his third wife (who’d helped spring him from his first prison term and who was at the time a fugitive) to the U.S. government in order to get himself out of jail. The same man who in 1970 advocated shooting “a genocidal robot policeman” to pay back the Weather Underground for helping him escape from prison, turned state’s evidence against his devoted defense lawyer four years later. What was that about which way the wind blows?

Leary’s record as a father is abysmal. His daughter Susan died by her own hand shortly after shooting her boyfriend in the head. In his teens and 20’s, Leary’s son Jack was often so drugged as to be incapable of speech.

Fittingly, Leary’s last days (he died of prostate cancer in 1996) were passed in a drugged stupor among strangers seeking to piggyback on his notoriety.

MORE INSPIRING POSSIBILITIES FOR PSYCHEDELIC drug use are suggested by the writer B.H. (Bernard) Friedman’s slim memoir, Tripping. Mr. Friedman and his late wife tripped in the early 60’s with pharmaceutical psilocybin provided by Timothy Leary. The Friedmans were part of a set of New York artists, musicians and haute bohemians Leary was anxious to turn on so that they would spread his message—and for a short time afterward, Mr. Friedman was as obsessed with psychedelics as Leary, scamming as much psilocybin as he could for “research.”

Mr. Friedman credits psychedelics for giving him the insight and imagination to drop out of the rat race—in his case, an immensely lucrative slot in his family’s real-estate business (his mother was a Uris)—to become a prolific author, most notably of biographies (among his subjects are Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and his friend Jackson Pollock). Though Mr. Friedman stopped using psychedelics, he’s no puritan about these and other drugs. Unlike Leary, Mr. Friedman isn’t a household name, and unlike Leary, he seems a happy old man.

For his account of his trips, he relied on the “session reports” he submitted to Leary, reports written a day or two after each event. Fresh at a distance of 40 years, his descriptions are the most accurate evocations of the psychedelic experience I’ve ever read. They suggest that the sensationalizing of psychedelics (for which we have Timothy Leary to thank), and the criminalization that resulted, is an American tragedy.

Ann Marlowe’s The Book of Trouble: A Romance (Harcourt) was published in February; her first book was How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z (Anchor).

This incident occurred a year before Leary took his first psychedelic drugs in August of 1960, when he was nearly 40. But the pattern that would characterize Leary’s next 35 years as the self-proclaimed “high priest” of LSD—unusual receptivity to extreme experiences combined with reckless ambition—was already well established.

LSD was only the excuse Leary found to turn his peculiar blend of charisma, creativity and self-indulgence into a career that changed American culture. Robert Greenfield’s compulsively readable if sometimes choppy book—the first major biography of Leary and the result of 10 years of research—details the amazing variety of famous people Leary met, the drugs he ingested and the women he bedded over the course of an unlikely 75-year lifespan.

It’s also a powerful argument against the inchoate belief shared by many who have used psychedelics—and I was one—that tripping almost automatically makes you a better, more enlightened person. Though Mr. Greenfield maintains an evenhanded tone, the effect of his accumulation of detail is to show that Timothy Leary was a scumbag—a charming, energetic and inventive scumbag—despite decades of taking LSD.

He was also adept at self-sabotage: Although he made much of his status as a martyr (he was imprisoned for marijuana possession), driving while smoking pot can’t be a good idea when you’re a celebrated advocate of recreational drugs. But Leary had an astonishing ability to land on his feet. Shortly after his nervous breakdown in Torremolinos, Leary—who attended Holy Cross, was forced out of West Point for lying and expelled from the University of Alabama before finally making it to graduate school at Berkeley—talked his way into a lecturer’s appointment at Harvard by espousing “existential psychology.” This meant that the psychologist should observe real-life situations “like a naturalist in the field” and actually engage with the patient, scrapping the customary clinical detachment (detachment was never a Leary trait).

Leary’s introduction to mushrooms occurred in Mexico in the summer after his first year at Harvard. He proclaimed that it changed his life: “I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than in all my years as a psychologist.” At the time, a colleague who’d tried mushrooms a few years earlier warned Leary of “the compulsive tendency to run around explaining to everyone about these amazing events.” But Leary was no more able than most people to resist the urge.

What separated Leary from many others who were using psychedelics at the same time was his simpleminded and single-minded advocacy. He supplied the sound bite—“tune in, turn on and drop out”—that the media needed to talk about the new drugs. And Leary never decided that he’d learned what he needed to learn from psychedelics; he never moved on. He tripped regularly for decades, sometimes daily, and also consumed other drugs in great quantity, including alcohol.

He had little interest in research on psychedelics, preferring just to turn on as many people as possible with the notion that the world would somehow right itself once everyone was tripping. He was fired from Harvard not for giving LSD to grad students and prison inmates “to accelerate behavior change” (that was fine by the administration), but for abandoning his classes in March and going to Hollywood.

More importantly for those who believed psychedelics could have great potential in psychotherapy, the Leary circus created a hysteria around LSD that lead to Congress making it illegal and effectively shutting down further research. Aldous Huxley himself worried that Leary’s unqualified support for psychedelics would harm the cause (“I am very fond of Tim—but why, oh why, does he have to be such an ass?”). At this remove, Leary’s irresponsibility is, well, mind-blowing: Some of the kids living on the Millbrook, N.Y., estate where he set up his headquarters in 1963 were dosed with acid weekly; his own son, Jack, was taking enormous doses at 16; and Leary thought nothing of driving on acid.

The record of betrayals is equally astonishing: The same man who had punched his second wife in the face tried to turn in his third wife (who’d helped spring him from his first prison term and who was at the time a fugitive) to the U.S. government in order to get himself out of jail. The same man who in 1970 advocated shooting “a genocidal robot policeman” to pay back the Weather Underground for helping him escape from prison, turned state’s evidence against his devoted defense lawyer four years later. What was that about which way the wind blows?

Leary’s record as a father is abysmal. His daughter Susan died by her own hand shortly after shooting her boyfriend in the head. In his teens and 20’s, Leary’s son Jack was often so drugged as to be incapable of speech.

Fittingly, Leary’s last days (he died of prostate cancer in 1996) were passed in a drugged stupor among strangers seeking to piggyback on his notoriety.

MORE INSPIRING POSSIBILITIES FOR PSYCHEDELIC drug use are suggested by the writer B.H. (Bernard) Friedman’s slim memoir, Tripping. Mr. Friedman and his late wife tripped in the early 60’s with pharmaceutical psilocybin provided by Timothy Leary. The Friedmans were part of a set of New York artists, musicians and haute bohemians Leary was anxious to turn on so that they would spread his message—and for a short time afterward, Mr. Friedman was as obsessed with psychedelics as Leary, scamming as much psilocybin as he could for “research.”

Mr. Friedman credits psychedelics for giving him the insight and imagination to drop out of the rat race—in his case, an immensely lucrative slot in his family’s real-estate business (his mother was a Uris)—to become a prolific author, most notably of biographies (among his subjects are Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and his friend Jackson Pollock). Though Mr. Friedman stopped using psychedelics, he’s no puritan about these and other drugs. Unlike Leary, Mr. Friedman isn’t a household name, and unlike Leary, he seems a happy old man.

For his account of his trips, he relied on the “session reports” he submitted to Leary, reports written a day or two after each event. Fresh at a distance of 40 years, his descriptions are the most accurate evocations of the psychedelic experience I’ve ever read. They suggest that the sensationalizing of psychedelics (for which we have Timothy Leary to thank), and the criminalization that resulted, is an American tragedy.

Ann Marlowe’s The Book of Trouble: A Romance (Harcourt) was published in February; her first book was How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z (Anchor).

They looked puzzled. The eldest answered, “Fight them? But we are not soldiers. I am an engineer, my brother is a doctor, my cousins are businessmen.”

“In America,” I explained, “if we were invaded, everyone would fight.” And I thought with some pride about my father and uncles, who had enlisted in World War II and returned with decorations.

A year later, in Baghdad, I met impressive young U.S. soldiers, including reservists with arty regular jobs and guys who’d enlisted because it was “the right thing to do.” American culture, I told myself, was built on the idea of the citizen-soldier.

Lately, I’m less sure about my boast, and reading AWOL has made me worried. This passionate collaboration between a Marine wife and a Marine father sharpened the sense I’ve been getting of a growing divide between civilian and military values, a divide symbolized by the controversy over the ROTC on elite campuses. Wasn’t the alleged reason for student opposition—the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy—a screen for deeper, less admirable feelings? After all, how many openly gay executives are there at the corporations that recruit freely on these same campuses? And how many of the campus protesters would be comfortable with bunkmates who flirted with each other? How many really cared about gay rights at all?

What the opposition to ROTC is really about may be something that AWOL co-author Kathy Roth-Douquet points out: In current civilian culture, “feelings matter most, our personal choices and beliefs are sacrosanct …. Military people don’t—can’t—make personal choice central.” And hand in hand with this division between civilian and military morality goes the disappearance of the concepts—and practice—of honor and duty in civilian life. A growing number of people from “good” families—maybe especially people from them—seem to have no restraint on their behavior, no acts they would shrink from because, well, they’re dishonorable, and no acts they would undertake, unpleasant as they may be, because duty requires it. The authors of AWOL have a phrase for it: “the underdevelopment of character in the upper classes.”

As Ms. Roth-Douquet points out, members of the military don’t fight because they relish combat, but because service is “a gift to the country, to fellow soldiers, an attempt to use your training to fulfill a task that the country has asked you to do.” The popular idea that career soldiers enjoy fighting is doubly false, because it “makes it okay for other people not to do it.” It’s about duty, not fun. Frank Schaeffer’s son John wrote home from boot camp that “by the end of his training, the Marine next to you is more important than you are.” That spirit of intense camaraderie is not fostered by, say, a two-year internship in investment banking, which is how many of our brightest graduates begin their professional life.

AWOL’s co-authors come from the media elite: Frank Schaeffer is a professional writer and veteran of the film industry, and Kathy Roth-Douquet, a Bryn Mawr grad and lawyer, has worked as an advance woman for Democratic Presidential candidates and in the Clinton White House. Both are whole-heartedly infatuated with military culture. Mr. Schaeffer was dragged kicking and screaming into military life when one of his sons surprised him by enlisting after high school. (In the last five years, he has published two successful books about his dialogue with his son, Keeping Faith and Faith of Our Sons.) Ms. Roth-Douquet married a Marine pilot on active combat duty.

Together, the authors write fervently about the need to address the widening gap between civilian and military values, which they believe stems from the avoidance of military service by the American elite. While our elites pay lip service to the “important job” enlisted men are doing, they never imagine their own children joining them. “If present statistical trends continue, we are fast approaching the day when no one in Congress … will have served or have any children serving.”

Prior to Vietnam, many if not most members of the upper middle class served in the military. “In 1956, 400 out of 750 in Princeton’s graduating class went into the military …. [I]n 2004, 9 members of Princeton’s graduating class entered the services, and they led the Ivy League in numbers!” Today, it’s hard to find policymakers whose children serve; once, it was the rule rather than the exception. Once, heroism in war was eagerly covered by the media; as AWOL points out, there’s a deafening silence about the bravery of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The authors take issue with the view of many in the career military that the volunteer army is the most efficient, and that class imbalances in the military are no different from class imbalances in Congress or in Ivy League schools. They also find the Army’s emphasis on material incentives wrongheaded. “The idea of reducing patriotic duty to a matter of personal choice, job options, and perks on the one hand, while tacitly writing off Americans who can afford to ignore the bribes on the other, seems to us to spell trouble.” The recruitment incentives cheapen what was always going to be a bad bargain. Military service shouldn’t, in fact, be seen as a bargain: It’s a sacrifice. Honoring selflessness is the way to get more people to be selfless.

AWOL offers some solutions to the problem. For example, the government should make efforts to recruit from elite colleges; should make ROTC a floating scholarship; and should even offer soldiers a full scholarship to any private or public institution that they can get into after four years’ service. Mr. Schaeffer and Ms. Roth-Douquet also recognize that the media could have a big impact in encouraging the privileged to serve, simply by what they choose to cover and how they cover it.

The authors present an imaginary rewrite of a New York Times editorial lambasting the volunteer army. The mock editorial ends with this:

“The all-volunteer force is not serving our country well. It is allowing the most privileged Americans to do in our country what Europeans have been accused by Americans of doing for the last fifty years: hiding behind the American military while profiting from it, yet contributing little to our common defense …. In that spirit, the New York Times has invited recruiters to meet with those of us at the paper who are physically and age-qualified to serve.”

Can you imagine?

Ann Marlowe’s The Book of Trouble: A Romance (Harcourt) was published in February.

They looked puzzled. The eldest answered, “Fight them? But we are not soldiers. I am an engineer, my brother is a doctor, my cousins are businessmen.”

“In America,” I explained, “if we were invaded, everyone would fight.” And I thought with some pride about my father and uncles, who had enlisted in World War II and returned with decorations.

A year later, in Baghdad, I met impressive young U.S. soldiers, including reservists with arty regular jobs and guys who’d enlisted because it was “the right thing to do.” American culture, I told myself, was built on the idea of the citizen-soldier.

Lately, I’m less sure about my boast, and reading AWOL has made me worried. This passionate collaboration between a Marine wife and a Marine father sharpened the sense I’ve been getting of a growing divide between civilian and military values, a divide symbolized by the controversy over the ROTC on elite campuses. Wasn’t the alleged reason for student opposition—the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy—a screen for deeper, less admirable feelings? After all, how many openly gay executives are there at the corporations that recruit freely on these same campuses? And how many of the campus protesters would be comfortable with bunkmates who flirted with each other? How many really cared about gay rights at all?

What the opposition to ROTC is really about may be something that AWOL co-author Kathy Roth-Douquet points out: In current civilian culture, “feelings matter most, our personal choices and beliefs are sacrosanct …. Military people don’t—can’t—make personal choice central.” And hand in hand with this division between civilian and military morality goes the disappearance of the concepts—and practice—of honor and duty in civilian life. A growing number of people from “good” families—maybe especially people from them—seem to have no restraint on their behavior, no acts they would shrink from because, well, they’re dishonorable, and no acts they would undertake, unpleasant as they may be, because duty requires it. The authors of AWOL have a phrase for it: “the underdevelopment of character in the upper classes.”

As Ms. Roth-Douquet points out, members of the military don’t fight because they relish combat, but because service is “a gift to the country, to fellow soldiers, an attempt to use your training to fulfill a task that the country has asked you to do.” The popular idea that career soldiers enjoy fighting is doubly false, because it “makes it okay for other people not to do it.” It’s about duty, not fun. Frank Schaeffer’s son John wrote home from boot camp that “by the end of his training, the Marine next to you is more important than you are.” That spirit of intense camaraderie is not fostered by, say, a two-year internship in investment banking, which is how many of our brightest graduates begin their professional life.

AWOL’s co-authors come from the media elite: Frank Schaeffer is a professional writer and veteran of the film industry, and Kathy Roth-Douquet, a Bryn Mawr grad and lawyer, has worked as an advance woman for Democratic Presidential candidates and in the Clinton White House. Both are whole-heartedly infatuated with military culture. Mr. Schaeffer was dragged kicking and screaming into military life when one of his sons surprised him by enlisting after high school. (In the last five years, he has published two successful books about his dialogue with his son, Keeping Faith and Faith of Our Sons.) Ms. Roth-Douquet married a Marine pilot on active combat duty.

Together, the authors write fervently about the need to address the widening gap between civilian and military values, which they believe stems from the avoidance of military service by the American elite. While our elites pay lip service to the “important job” enlisted men are doing, they never imagine their own children joining them. “If present statistical trends continue, we are fast approaching the day when no one in Congress … will have served or have any children serving.”

Prior to Vietnam, many if not most members of the upper middle class served in the military. “In 1956, 400 out of 750 in Princeton’s graduating class went into the military …. [I]n 2004, 9 members of Princeton’s graduating class entered the services, and they led the Ivy League in numbers!” Today, it’s hard to find policymakers whose children serve; once, it was the rule rather than the exception. Once, heroism in war was eagerly covered by the media; as AWOL points out, there’s a deafening silence about the bravery of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The authors take issue with the view of many in the career military that the volunteer army is the most efficient, and that class imbalances in the military are no different from class imbalances in Congress or in Ivy League schools. They also find the Army’s emphasis on material incentives wrongheaded. “The idea of reducing patriotic duty to a matter of personal choice, job options, and perks on the one hand, while tacitly writing off Americans who can afford to ignore the bribes on the other, seems to us to spell trouble.” The recruitment incentives cheapen what was always going to be a bad bargain. Military service shouldn’t, in fact, be seen as a bargain: It’s a sacrifice. Honoring selflessness is the way to get more people to be selfless.

AWOL offers some solutions to the problem. For example, the government should make efforts to recruit from elite colleges; should make ROTC a floating scholarship; and should even offer soldiers a full scholarship to any private or public institution that they can get into after four years’ service. Mr. Schaeffer and Ms. Roth-Douquet also recognize that the media could have a big impact in encouraging the privileged to serve, simply by what they choose to cover and how they cover it.

The authors present an imaginary rewrite of a New York Times editorial lambasting the volunteer army. The mock editorial ends with this:

“The all-volunteer force is not serving our country well. It is allowing the most privileged Americans to do in our country what Europeans have been accused by Americans of doing for the last fifty years: hiding behind the American military while profiting from it, yet contributing little to our common defense …. In that spirit, the New York Times has invited recruiters to meet with those of us at the paper who are physically and age-qualified to serve.”

Can you imagine?

Ann Marlowe’s The Book of Trouble: A Romance (Harcourt) was published in February.

They are not sex workers, or undertakers, or even criminals.

They are in finance. The higher their real or perceived income, the greater their bashfulness. Commercial bankers admit it outright; investment bankers lower their voices. And those in private equity or hedge funds are the most reticent.

“Well, I work on Wall Street. Finance.” (Nervous laugh.) “It’s boring.”

“Where?”

“Oh, it’s a small place—you wouldn’t have heard of it. Private equity.”

In my 25 years’ experience of New York life, there’s always been a bit of this profession evasion—but as the incomes of Wall Streeters have soared, bashfulness has too. For 18 months in 1980 to ’82, I worked as a lowly analyst in corporate finance at a second-tier investment bank. When I met other people in banking, there might have been a bit of mutual hesitation to ’fess up. But less than now. It’s possible that this was because, at that time, I still hung out mainly with other recent Harvard grads, who tended to go into banking, law or medicine.

This bashfulness, come to think of it, reminds me of the famous reticence of Harvard students and grads. When I entered Harvard in the fall of 1975, I quickly learned to tell outsiders that I went to school “near Boston.” Harvard students didn’t put Harvard stickers on their cars (not that having a car was even remotely an option for me), or wear Harvard T-shirts or athletic clothes in the outside world. And as even a hick from provincial New Jersey like myself realized, this reticence was pure snobbery.

As is the Shame of Finance. The job mumble is really a signal, like a trendy watch or a country home, that the man in question is very important: No man expresses faux shame about status indicators that don’t matter to him.

Guys who simper about having gone to high school “in New Hampshire” drive me especially crazy—this was high school, after all. If he’s over 40 (as, regrettably, he sometimes is), I snap: “Which one? My brother went to Exeter.” As with Wall Street, the only way to get the revelation is to mention one’s own insider status. I’m less and less eager to do that with the Harvard connection, because it means revealing my antediluvian graduation year. But I can usually get away with: “I used to work on Wall Street myself—you can tell me what you do!”

At first, I thought that these men—and the faux-shame people are almost always men—were reacting to my being a woman. Maybe they were trying to impress me. Or maybe they were afraid that I might be a gold-digger. I decided to ask my friend John, a managing director in corporate finance and a man about town.

“Maybe we feel very conscious about doing something which is very lucrative but which will not appear sexy to a woman,” John said. “You don’t want to appear boring.”

But aren’t interesting people found in all kinds of occupations?

“People in capital markets really are boring,” he said. “The guys who are hunched over a computer screen all day looking for market inefficiencies are not the best conversation in town. People who do M&A work have better people skills.” (John does M&A.)

I wanted to know what the reaction of most women was when they found out John’s little secret.

“They’re quite happy, because they know you can take them out to dinner!”

How cagey is John when he meets another guy socially whom he suspects might be in finance? In my experience, there is nothing quite like the mutual embarrassment of two men who discover—especially on a beach or in an unlikely overseas destination—that they are both in private equity.

“It depends,” he said. “You can usually sense that they’re in finance. I don’t know how this is, because lawyers and bankers, for example, don’t dress that differently. Maybe it’s in the body language. And you want to be careful how you present yourself, because the man you’re meeting might turn out to be the head of investment banking at Goldman.”

“Someone who’s a financial success has an ego which is easily recognizable,” a young hedge-fund V.P. says. “Although today in New York, what’s so different from saying, ‘I am in production or film?’ But let’s not fool ourselves—people in production and film conjure up sexy images for the girls and are inherently attractive.”

The shame is false, but sometimes there is real guilt underneath—guilt about not doing very much to justify one’s enormous income. Or so the close cousins of these bankers—corporate lawyers—seem to think.

“These people are not necessarily very smart,” one female lawyer I know observed. “What they earn is out of proportion to the effort or risk they take.” Another, herself at the top of her profession, was more acid. “Snobbery, perhaps, for those that convince themselves they’re actually worth all the Monopoly money they’re paid,” she said. “But for some, there’s also a certain discomfort with trumpeting oneself as Willy Loman writ large. I find that the dumber they are, the more sure they are they’re worth every penny, while the smarter ones—especially the women—are embarrassed about what they earn.” (That raises a lot of other issues: For women, it’s not necessarily sexy to be perceived as very high-earning.)

A much older male friend offered what might be the best explanation for the dance of the managing directors. “The evasion is meant to motivate you to ask the next question,” he said. “And they don’t take that long to get to the point. If you don’t recognize the name of the firm when they finally spill the beans, it means you’re not worth talking to—you don’t know who they are.”

So, gamesmen to the core, they play a not very lengthy game to see if you will be impressed enough with their earning power to do whatever it is they want you to do. It’s one of those maneuvers that work best when you start training for it young, like telling people you went to boarding school “in New England.”

Ann Marlowe is the author of two memoirs, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z and The Book of Trouble: A Romance, which was published in February.

They are not sex workers, or undertakers, or even criminals.

They are in finance. The higher their real or perceived income, the greater their bashfulness. Commercial bankers admit it outright; investment bankers lower their voices. And those in private equity or hedge funds are the most reticent.

“Well, I work on Wall Street. Finance.” (Nervous laugh.) “It’s boring.”

“Where?”

“Oh, it’s a small place—you wouldn’t have heard of it. Private equity.”

In my 25 years’ experience of New York life, there’s always been a bit of this profession evasion—but as the incomes of Wall Streeters have soared, bashfulness has too. For 18 months in 1980 to ’82, I worked as a lowly analyst in corporate finance at a second-tier investment bank. When I met other people in banking, there might have been a bit of mutual hesitation to ’fess up. But less than now. It’s possible that this was because, at that time, I still hung out mainly with other recent Harvard grads, who tended to go into banking, law or medicine.

This bashfulness, come to think of it, reminds me of the famous reticence of Harvard students and grads. When I entered Harvard in the fall of 1975, I quickly learned to tell outsiders that I went to school “near Boston.” Harvard students didn’t put Harvard stickers on their cars (not that having a car was even remotely an option for me), or wear Harvard T-shirts or athletic clothes in the outside world. And as even a hick from provincial New Jersey like myself realized, this reticence was pure snobbery.

As is the Shame of Finance. The job mumble is really a signal, like a trendy watch or a country home, that the man in question is very important: No man expresses faux shame about status indicators that don’t matter to him.

Guys who simper about having gone to high school “in New Hampshire” drive me especially crazy—this was high school, after all. If he’s over 40 (as, regrettably, he sometimes is), I snap: “Which one? My brother went to Exeter.” As with Wall Street, the only way to get the revelation is to mention one’s own insider status. I’m less and less eager to do that with the Harvard connection, because it means revealing my antediluvian graduation year. But I can usually get away with: “I used to work on Wall Street myself—you can tell me what you do!”

At first, I thought that these men—and the faux-shame people are almost always men—were reacting to my being a woman. Maybe they were trying to impress me. Or maybe they were afraid that I might be a gold-digger. I decided to ask my friend John, a managing director in corporate finance and a man about town.

“Maybe we feel very conscious about doing something which is very lucrative but which will not appear sexy to a woman,” John said. “You don’t want to appear boring.”

But aren’t interesting people found in all kinds of occupations?

“People in capital markets really are boring,” he said. “The guys who are hunched over a computer screen all day looking for market inefficiencies are not the best conversation in town. People who do M&A work have better people skills.” (John does M&A.)

I wanted to know what the reaction of most women was when they found out John’s little secret.

“They’re quite happy, because they know you can take them out to dinner!”

How cagey is John when he meets another guy socially whom he suspects might be in finance? In my experience, there is nothing quite like the mutual embarrassment of two men who discover—especially on a beach or in an unlikely overseas destination—that they are both in private equity.

“It depends,” he said. “You can usually sense that they’re in finance. I don’t know how this is, because lawyers and bankers, for example, don’t dress that differently. Maybe it’s in the body language. And you want to be careful how you present yourself, because the man you’re meeting might turn out to be the head of investment banking at Goldman.”

“Someone who’s a financial success has an ego which is easily recognizable,” a young hedge-fund V.P. says. “Although today in New York, what’s so different from saying, ‘I am in production or film?’ But let’s not fool ourselves—people in production and film conjure up sexy images for the girls and are inherently attractive.”

The shame is false, but sometimes there is real guilt underneath—guilt about not doing very much to justify one’s enormous income. Or so the close cousins of these bankers—corporate lawyers—seem to think.

“These people are not necessarily very smart,” one female lawyer I know observed. “What they earn is out of proportion to the effort or risk they take.” Another, herself at the top of her profession, was more acid. “Snobbery, perhaps, for those that convince themselves they’re actually worth all the Monopoly money they’re paid,” she said. “But for some, there’s also a certain discomfort with trumpeting oneself as Willy Loman writ large. I find that the dumber they are, the more sure they are they’re worth every penny, while the smarter ones—especially the women—are embarrassed about what they earn.” (That raises a lot of other issues: For women, it’s not necessarily sexy to be perceived as very high-earning.)

A much older male friend offered what might be the best explanation for the dance of the managing directors. “The evasion is meant to motivate you to ask the next question,” he said. “And they don’t take that long to get to the point. If you don’t recognize the name of the firm when they finally spill the beans, it means you’re not worth talking to—you don’t know who they are.”

So, gamesmen to the core, they play a not very lengthy game to see if you will be impressed enough with their earning power to do whatever it is they want you to do. It’s one of those maneuvers that work best when you start training for it young, like telling people you went to boarding school “in New England.”

Ann Marlowe is the author of two memoirs, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z and The Book of Trouble: A Romance, which was published in February.

Ms. Hughes’ quip is a useful gloss on Self-Made Man, Norah Vincent’s brave, intelligent and endlessly problematic book about her 18 months living as a man—“Ned”—in anonymous parts of America. Ms. Vincent is a lesbian, and her heart isn’t as engaged in the masquerade of Ned’s life among men as a straight woman’s would be: She isn’t burdened by all that anger and resentment and neediness. And yet I suspect that the audience for this book is straight women. (Since when are men curious about themselves?)

Ms. Vincent is too ready to buy into the idea that men behave badly because they have to maintain a culturally mandated tough-guy front; she’s too quick to let them off the hook. The word that pops up over and over again is “sympathy”—as in feeling sympathy for men. Whereas in her chapter on dating women, we sense the real rancor of someone who’s had her heart broken.

Her own attitude toward sex (she doesn’t think it’s such a big deal) inevitably colors her view of male lust: She finds it base and assumes they’re bound to be ashamed of it. Perhaps this is part of her Catholic upbringing—one of the few details of her background she reveals. One of the subtlest, most artful chapters in Self-Made Man is about Ms. Vincent’s stay in a monastery. I could have read a whole book about the sad, hidden world she brings to light.

Self-Made Man is cool at the core. There are too many places where the author tells us that something is heartbreaking without breaking our hearts. Though she’s constantly mourning men’s lack of emotional expressivity, Ms. Vincent has ruthlessly kept her personality, her background and all of her tastes—fashion excepted—out of her book.

This may be the moment to mention that, about two years ago, I met Norah Vincent. She answered an ad I had placed on Craigslist—I was looking for women who’d played college tennis to play with a co-ed group at my club. Her e-mail response mentioned that she was gay; I was a little taken aback, mentioned that I was straight and let it go at that. On the court, she was unremarkably pleasant, a fine, controlled, unemotional tennis player. She’s as tall and almost as big-boned as an average man, maybe six feet and 160 pounds—not unusual for a woman varsity athlete. And yet, the receptionist at the club asked me conspiratorially if the new player was a man or a woman.

So I can vouch for her when she claims that while she was working on her book, even when she went out dressed as a woman, people almost invariably mistook her for a man. And yet, once she’d finished—once she’d “detoxed” from Ned—she was recognized as a woman even when dressed in mannish clothes. I’d have liked more about what she thought and felt about this and how she attempted, or didn’t attempt, to manage these responses. Pretty scary to discover that one’s perceived gender is all in one’s attitude, no? But Ms. Vincent is as neutral as ever.

Her writing in Self-Made Man is just like her tennis: smart, able, perfectly trained, but without the éclat that her obvious intelligence would have you hope for. Just when you think she’s edging towards catharsis, she goes all reasonable on you.

So it’s a shock when, on page 268, a few dozen pages from the end, Ms. Vincent casually mentions that when she finished impersonating Ned, she checked herself into a locked psychiatric ward. Her therapist told her she was “passively suicidal.” The strain of being an imposter had made Ms. Vincent “buckle” under Ned’s weight.

She seems unaware that her collapse might have something to do with what she’s done and where she’s gone as Ned: hanging out in all-nude strip clubs; secluding herself in a monastery; going door-to-door as a salesman. I wanted to hear more about her breakdown—and about why she was on antidepressants from the start. But she doesn’t want to go there, and her reluctance seems … well, very traditionally Anglo-Saxon and masculine.

What’s paradoxical—and very interesting—is that this is precisely the part of masculinity that Ms. Vincent dislikes: The last two chapters of Self-Made Man are full of calls for “healing” the wounds of male stereotypes and encouraging men to express their emotions. (I’m not sure I agree. Today’s young men are far too quick to whine; they could use some of the stoicism of their fathers—or of Norah Vincent.)

Whatever one’s taste in men, Ms. Vincent’s exhortations are based on a narrow demographic. When she deplores the “three-note emotional range” of men, she’s forgetting the diverse attitudes toward male emotion in the rainbow coalition of subcultures here in the United States (including my own American Jewish culture), and most of the rest of the world.

Men from parts of the Third World do plenty of the hugging that Ms. Vincent wishes American men would do more of. But their unabashed delight in playing with their children, singing soppy love songs, reading poems and putting stuffed animals on their dashboards flourishes in the same soil that nourishes honor killings and repressive social codes. In Afghanistan, men are free to hold hands with other men and write poetry because their society does not doubt for a moment the worth of manhood and its superiority to womanhood.

Let’s count our blessings. I saw Transamerica while reading Ms. Vincent’s book, and while the situation of Felicity Huffman’s male-to-female transsexual character is in no way the same as Ned’s, they both suggest the same moral: Gender dysphoria is a variety of human dysphoria. Ms. Vincent makes much of how hard it was for her to be a man and how hard it is for men to be men (“I passed in a man’s world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball”); and many feminist writers have told us how hard it is to be a woman. But the works of art that endure—and I think Transamerica has a greater shot than Self-Made Man—speak to how hard it is to be human.

Ms. Vincent tells us: “But, of course, getting inside men’s heads and out of my own was what this project was all about.” I wonder if she’ll still think so in a year. (Note to writers: Question twice any statement you preface with “of course.”) How many men, straight or gay, are interested in finding out what a lesbian has to tell them about their inner wounds? Aren’t they more interested in what she has to tell them about her inner wounds? As a serial memoirist, I have some stake in the matter, but when in doubt, go with Montaigne:

“It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside.”

Ms. Vincent claims not to have written “a confessional memoir. I am not resolving a sexual identity crisis.” But aren’t we all resolving an ongoing sexual crisis? Ms. Vincent sometimes seems pre-Freudian, which is charming, but it deprives her of insights she could use. She’s written a fascinating book, one that will echo in many lives—not because she’s escaped herself, but because she hasn’t.

Ann Marlowe’s second memoir, The Book of Trouble: A Romance, has just been published by Harcourt.