Writer with an eye on fast cars and faith
b September 20, 1945 d April 29, 2024
Lesley Hazleton, a psychologist turned author who cast her perceptive gaze on politics, cars, religion and faith, writing about Israeli society, the transgressive thrills of breaking the speed limit and the lives of the Virgin Mary as well as the prophet Muhammad, died on April 29 at her home, a houseboat on Lake Union in Seattle. She was 78.
A husky-voiced writer who drank grappa from a flask, smoked Philip Morris cigarettes without interruption, earned her pilot’s licence and flew as many hours as her savings would allow, Hazleton charted an independent course to the very end of her life. Her death was announced in a goodbye email that she sent to friends on a time delay, revealing that she had terminal cancer in her bladder and kidneys and had decided to die on her own terms, using a lethal dose of medication permitted under the state’s Death With Dignity Act.
“I’ve been a pro-choice feminist for over six decades,” she wrote, “so it should come as no surprise that I’ll be exercising choice in this too”.
“Now that it’s imminent,” she added, “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.”
Hazleton grew up in England, but started her professional life in Israel, where she trained as a psychologist, and gradually immersed herself in journalism, becoming a stringer for Time magazine and a reporter for the Jerusalem Post.
In the 1970s, she covered the Yom Kippur War.
Hazleton lived in Israel for 13 years before moving to New York, “exhausted by too much tension, too much excitement, too much passion”. She went on to write for publications including Harper’s and the New York Times, as well as the Detroit Free Press, where she had a regular automotive column.
Her fascination with fast cars began one day in 1988, she wrote in Confessions of a Fast Woman, a 1992 essay collection, “when I drove at twice the speed limit. I was in a Porsche 911, and I’d never been in one before. It was a revelation. It was a seduction”.
At the time, she was a rare woman covering the industry, one of only three in the International Motor Press Association, by her account.
As part of her research, Hazleton apprenticed with master mechanics in Vermont, worked on a Saturn assembly line in Tennessee, crunched broken-down jalopies at a junkyard in Texas and learned to drive around a track at more than 320kph.
She filled her books and articles with historical references and allusions to ancient myth, examined the environmental toll of gas-powered cars and explored the liberating effect of driving, which she believed had a special meaning for women.
“While men take for granted the independence that cars bring, women do not. Our own car means freedom. It means control of our own lives. It means, in short, far more to us than it does to most men,” she wrote in her 1995 automotive book, Everything Women Always Wanted to Know about Cars – But Didn’t Know Who to Ask.
By her late 50s, Hazleton had shifted gears once again, becoming an “accidental theologist,” as she put it, while returning to questions of faith and spirituality that she had been asking for years, including as “a Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi, a former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about being a nun, an agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery though no affinity for organised religion”.
Hazleton began blogging about religion and writing books such as Mary (2004), in which she mixed historical research and psychological speculation while attempting to offer a “flesh-and-blood” version of Mary, the mother of Jesus, reflecting Mary’s varied identities as “a peasant, a healer, a nationalist, a mother, a teacher, a leader”.
She later explored the life of another biblical figure in Jezebel (2006), a revisionist portrait of the Phoenician princess whose name came to symbolise decadence and promiscuity, and wrote about the history of Islam in After the Prophet (2009), a study of the faith’s ShiaSunni rift, and The First Muslim (2013), about the prophet Muhammad and the transcendent moments he experienced on a mountain cave, receiving a revelation from the angel Gabriel.
Coming from a British-American woman who was not Muslim, more than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks led to a spike in Islamophobia, the book was met with suspicion by many Muslim readers as well as curiosity by non-believers
The older of two children, Lesley Adele Hazleton was born in Reading, England, on September 20, 1945. Her grandparents had emigrated from Latvia to Ireland, where her parents lived before coming to England. Her father was a general practitioner, her mother a homemaker. Her brother, Ian, is her sole immediate survivor.
Hazleton attended a Catholic convent school, where she said she was ostracised as “the Hebrew girl” because of her Jewish upbringing, and studied psychology at what is now the University of Manchester, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1966.
She moved to Israel that year and received a master’s degree in psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1971.
With her first book, Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myths (1977), Hazleton offered a psychological portrait of the country’s women and their place in Israeli society. After immigrating to the United States, she returned to Israel for a second, much shorter stay that she chronicled in a memoir, Jerusalem, Jerusalem (1986).
Her other books included The Right to Feel Bad: Coming to Terms with Normal Depression (1984), inspired by her struggles with depression and her realisation that the condition, “which made me feel horribly isolated”, was not uncommon. Her last published book, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto (2016), made the case for withholding judgment about existence’s murkiest questions, and making room for science as well as mystery.
“Real faith has no easy answers,” she declared at a TED Talk in 2013.
“It’s difficult, and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continuing question of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand in hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it, and sometimes in conscious defiance of it. And this conscious defiance is why I, as an agnostic, can still have faith” – including, she said, a faith in the possibility of lasting peace in the Middle East, even as she saw few immediate prospects for attaining it.
“Despair is self-fulfilling,” she added. “If we call something impossible, we act in such a way that we make it so. And I for one refuse to live that way.”