In the winter of 2003, Norah Vincent, a 35-year-old journalist, began to practice passing as a man.

With the help of a makeup artist, she learned to simulate stubble by snipping bits of wool and painting them on her chin. She wore her hair, already short, cut in a flattop, and bought rectangular framed glasses, to accentuate the angles of her face. She weight-trained to build up the muscles in her chest and back, bound her breasts with a too-small sports bra and wore a jock strap stuffed with a soft prosthetic penis.

She trained for months with a vocal coach at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, who taught her to deepen her voice and slow it down, to lean back as she spoke rather than leaning in, and to use her breath more efficiently. Then she ventured out to live as a man for 18 months, calling herself Ned, and to chronicle the experience.

She did so in “Self-Made Man,” and when the book came out in 2006, it was a nearly instant best seller. It made Ms. Vincent a media darling; she appeared on “20/20” and on “The Colbert Report,” where she and Stephen Colbert teased each other about football and penis size.

But the book was no joke. It was a nuanced and thoughtful work. It drew comparisons to “Black Like Me,” the white journalist John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book about his experiences passing as a Black man in the segregated Deep South. David Kamp, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Ms. Vincent’s book “rich and audacious.”

Ms. Vincent died on July 6 at a clinic in Switzerland. She was 53. Her death, which was not reported at the time, was confirmed on Thursday by Justine Hardy, a friend. The death, she said, was medically assisted, or what is known as a voluntary assisted death.

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