In chapter 5, Norah continues taking readers through her journey of experiencing life how any common women couldn’t even imagine. In this chapter, Norah attempts to experience life as a man where no woman is allowed to even enter. To do so, Norah enters a Catholic monk monastery and takes a temporary oath to the church. While living in the monastery, Norah realizes life as a monk isn’t what she believed it would have been. She comes to find out while living among the monks, that they aren’t to different then the guys she’s been around before. Norah finds that these monks are only common men brought together by their religion. Norah is surprised to discover the major tension throughout the population, causing some of the monks to barely tolerate living together. She manages to make some minor connections with the other monks during her time of residency. Although these connections aren’t strong, Norah is still able to share with the monks some personal information, and communicate with them on a level that further teaches her about the way of life in the monastery. Norah learns that sadness is a common trend within the minds of these monks. After communicating to multiple monks and mistakenly causing the other monks to believe she is a gay man (gay men being looked down upon within the church), Norah finally reveals her secret to some of the monks. By revealing her secret, Norah gains greater acceptance in the minds of the monks, despite breaking the gender code.
Norah starts this chapter by explaining her choice of a Christian Monastery. This chapter of the book seemed unnecessarily long. Vincent included a great amount of information about a large amount of monks. Each monk’s story seemed to be very repetitive and cover many common themes. Vincent focused this chapter mostly on the drama amongst the monk population including relationship and sexual tensions.I was surprised to see that Norah didn't discuss much on religion. This may have been a way to make these monk men seem more ordinary.
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