Chapter 5 Life Summarizer - Linda Lee

Chapter 5 Life is about Ned’s experiences with many other monks in a monastery. Vincent explains her reason of choosing a monastery as a place "the least terrifying venue I could think of in which to observe men living together in close quarters without women, and the only one I was likely to infiltrate successfully as Ned.”(132)
Vincent hoped to find out about “male socialization and interaction in an all-male environment” which she felt was quite different from her experience with her “bowling buddies”. Ned’s encounter with life at the abbey was indeed very refreshing but Vincent meets Brother Vergil who had been a novice at his early twenties, and had taken his preliminary vows after completing the novitiate. Ned gets along well with Brother Vergil and in the end Ned becomes infatuated by him. Vincent calls their relationship Ned’s “first true friendship” with a man that taught her the limits of male friendships.
Besides, there is Father Jerome who had entered the religious life at twenty and effectively killed his sexuality there. Ned and Father Jerome discussed about Ned’s feeling towards Brother Vergil and Father Jerome helped Ned realize that. There were also monks who were claimed to take pills for one's depression issue and one real quality that was lacked in that community was openness about emotional sides of a person. Vincent explains that spending time in the recreation room with a bunch of monks taught Ned a fair amount of the monks' ways with each other, "their interpersonal skills of lack thereof" and the monks to each other were just “rigid” and “inept”. In addition, Vincent emphasized that without a little bit of effeminate characters, men are hard to get around with.
There was Father Claude who was opened with Ned easily with Ned's feminie approach. Vincent writes a big deal out of this topic; men's inability to express their feelings. Vincent also wrote that "these guys weren't gay. They just didn't want the emotional demands and constant struggles of navigating the opposite sex."(158)
Esteem was also one of big topics under the lives of monastery where monks were expected to be accepted and respected in a way that is acceptable. The last stage of Ned's stay at the Monastery was the confession Ned made in front of Father Fat, Brother Vergil and Felix who hadn't needed to know that Ned was a woman in order to give the hug.
In the end, Vincent confessed that "abbey was indeed a very hard place to be a woman" and she well explained how hard it is to be a man with feelings in a society where it's just not acceptable.