Lesley Hazleton, a British-born, secular Jewish psychologist turned journalist and author "whose curiosity about faith and religion led her to write biographies of Muhammad, Mary and Jezebel and examine her own passions in books about agnosticism and automobiles," died April 29, the New York Times reported. She was 78.
Hazleton announced her death in an e-mail she had scheduled to be sent to friends after she died. She took her own life, as Washington State's Death with Dignity Act allowed her to do legally, with the assistance of hospice volunteers.
"Yes, this is a goodbye letter," she wrote, "which is difficult for me, because as many of you know, I'm lousy at saying goodbye.... I've been a pro-choice feminist for over six decades, so it should come as no surprise that I'll be exercising choice in this, too. I'm experiencing an unexpected but wonderfully bearable lightness of being. Not a sad feeling of saying goodbye to life, but one of joy and amazement at how great it's been. And of immense gratitude. I truly have had the time of my life. In fact, it sometimes feels like I've managed to live several lives in this one."
Hazleton covered the complex state of feminism in Israel in her first book, Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myths (1977). She left Israel for New York in 1979, six months after the Camp David Accords, "exhausted by the constant high level of tension and drama there," she wrote in the Times in 1986, in the long-running column Hers, to which she was a regular contributor.
She began driving race cars and embarked on a career as a car columnist, first for Lear's magazine and then for the Detroit Free Press. "Perhaps as a writer, I place too much faith in catharsis, in the idea that by describing and exploring the obsession with speed that began that fine spring day in Vermont, I can drive it out of me," she wrote in Confessions of a Fast Woman (1992). "The trouble is, I'm still not sure if I really want to do that."
Describing her as "fearless and irreverent," author Pico Iyer said in an interview. "I felt to a striking degree she held to no orthodoxies. She was full-throated in a liberating way."
Hazleton was deeply affected by her time in the Middle East and wrote often about its complicated ancient history, including the books Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother (2004) and Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen (2007). She explored the roots of the Shia-Sunni branches of Islam in After the Prophet (2009), and Muhammad in The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (2013). She also examined her own beliefs in her last book, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto (2016).
In her 2016 TEDx talk "What's wrong with dying?", Hazleton said, "Our ability to die, our mortality, is a defining part of what it is to be human. We are finite beings within infinity. And if we are alive to this, it sharpens our appreciation of the fact that we exist. Gives new depth to the idea of life as a journey. So my mortality does not negate meaning; it creates meaning. Because it's not how long I live that matters--it's how I live. And I intend to do it well, to the end."