Lesley Hazleton, Writer Who Tackled Religion and Fast Cars, Dies at 78

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 on April 29 at her home, a houseboat in Seattle. She was 78.

Ms. Hazleton announced her death herself, in an email that she scheduled to be sent to friends after she died. She had been diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer and chose to take 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,” she said, adding, “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.”

Ms. Hazleton was a formidable figure, with a deep, husky voice — care of Philip Morris, her friend Olivier D’hose said, noting her devotion to its tobacco products — and an appetite for physical and intellectual risk. She moved to Jerusalem in 1966, at age 20, and lived there through two wars and one peace treaty, working as a journalist for The Jerusalem Post and as a stringer for Time magazine.

She covered the complex state of feminism in Israel in her first book, “Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myths,” published in 1977, at which she point she announced that she had no plans to marry and did not want children.

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 New York Times in 1986, in the long-running column Hers, to which she was a regular contributor. “After too many wars — and the ecstatic high of one peace — I hungered for normality.”

But instead she began driving racecars and embarked on a career as a car columnist, first for Lear’s magazine and then for The Detroit Free Press.

She had fallen in love with speed while driving a Porsche 911 on a spring day in Vermont, though her favorite car was her doughty Citroën Deux Chevaux, sometimes known as the Duck, which she had driven in the Middle East, dodging tanks on her way to Mount Hermon and surviving a mined desert track because the car was too light to set them off.

During her years on the car beat, Ms. Hazleton attended racing school (the only woman in a class of 12), apprenticed to a mechanic, worked the assembly line at a Saturn plant in Tennessee and nearly died when she lost control on a track. She also visited the spot near Cholame, Calif., where James Dean met his own end, in a Porsche 550 Spyder.

“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,” a 1992 book about her automobile adventures. “The trouble is, I’m still not sure if I really want to do that.”

Her book, the automobile columnist Marshall Schuon wrote in his review for The Times, “delivers what the title promises, double entendre included, in glorious prose.”

Later, Ms. Hazleton got a pilot’s license and moved to Seattle.

“Fearless and irreverent” is how the author Pico Iyer described Ms. Hazleton, whom he met about a decade ago at a TEDGlobal conference, where both were popular speakers. “I felt to a striking degree she held to no orthodoxies,” he said in an interview. “She was full-throated in a liberating way.”

Fourteen years ago, Ms. Hazleton began writing a blog, Accidental Theologist, about faith and religion. “I never meant for this to happen,” she wrote. “Perhaps the 13 years I lived and worked in Jerusalem have a lot to do with it — a city where politics and religion are at their most incendiary.”

Ms. Hazleton was deeply affected, and unsettled, by her time in the Middle East and wrote often about its complicated ancient history. “Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother,” appeared in 2004, followed by “Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen,” in 2007. She explored the roots of the Shia-Sunni branches of Islam, and how they split, in her 2009 book, “After the Prophet.” Then she tackled Muhammad.

Ms. Hazleton wanted to get a sense of the prophet as “a complex, multidimensional human being,” she said, “instead of the two-dimensional figure created by reverence on the one hand and prejudice on the other.” (She had already given a TEDx talk debunking the many myths about the Quran, including the one about 72 virgins awaiting martyrs in heaven.)

“The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad” (2013) was well-received, and to her delight Ms. Hazleton became a sought-after speaker at cultural events and conferences about Islam.

“In today’s febrile cultural and religious climate, what project could be more fraught than writing a popular biography of Muhammad?” Hari Kunzru wrote in The New York Times Book Review, noting that Ms. Hazleton had handled her subject with “scrupulous respect.”

Ms. Hazleton examined her own beliefs in her last book, “Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto” (2016).

“I stand tall in my agnosticism,” Ms. Hazleton wrote in “Agnostic,” “because the essence of it is not merely not-knowing, but something far more challenging and infinitely more intriguing: the magnificent oxymoron inherent in the concept of unknowability.”

Lesley Adele Hazleton was born on Sept. 20, 1945, in Reading, England. Her parents, Sybil (Silverman) Hazleton and Jessel Hazleton, a general practitioner, raised Lesley and her brother, Ian, her only survivor, in an Orthodox, but not strict, Jewish household. Lesley attended the Roman Catholic St. Joseph’s Convent School (now St. Joseph’s College) in Reading. As the only Jew there, she once wrote, she developed “a deep sense of mystery but no affinity for organized religion.”

She earned her B.A. in psychology at the University of Manchester, where she worked on the student newspaper, and her master’s degree in psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was a counselor and a teacher in an experimental high school there before turning to journalism.

“What’s wrong with dying?” Ms. Hazleton asked in a 2016 TEDx talk in Seattle. She had met a Silicon Valley type who was working on his immortality. (Many, many supplements were involved.) What could be more awful, more boring, she thought, than immortality? The exchange led her to develop the talk, which was her last.

“We need endings,” she said in that talk, “because the most basic ending of all is built into us.”

“Our ability to die, our mortality, is a defining part of what it is to be human,” she added. “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,” she concluded. “And I intend to do it well, to the end.”