Conundrum: From James to Jan - An Extraordinary Personal Narrative of Transsexualism

by Jan Morris

Hardcover, 1974

Status

Available

Description

The great travel writer Jan Morris was born James Morris. James Morris distinguished himself in the British military, became a successful and physically daring reporter, climbed mountains, crossed deserts, and established a reputation as a historian of the British empire. He was happily married, with several children. To all appearances, he was not only a man, but a man's man. Except that appearances, as James Morris had known from early childhood, can be deeply misleading. James Morris had known all his conscious life that at heart he was a woman. "Conundrum, "one of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality with honesty and without prurience, tells the story of James Morris's hidden life and how he decided to bring it into the open, as he resolved first on a hormone treatment and, second, on risky experimental surgery that would turn him into the woman that he truly was.… (more)

Publication

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1974), Edition: First Edition, 174 pages

Media reviews

Still, a comparison to later works suggests that Morris is perhaps withholding more than just the details of sex. It's almost as though Morris has traveled to some gorgeous jungle and waxed on about the landscape, the flora and fauna, the waterfalls, a chirp of a bird, but has forgotten all about
Show More
the people. And maybe the parallel stays intact here: armchair travel, after all, is not travel itself, and the place in question is never quite at the hands of the reader. In Conundrum, Morris says several times that she imagines her condition as mystical or spiritual, and perhaps what all this irksome withholding is intended to do is retain, amid the candor, some of that mystery for herself.
Show Less
1 more
Both as a man and as a woman the author has always had a remarkable capacity for sexual sublimation, feeling an estheticized "lust" for cities, for landscapes, for sights, sounds and smells. While she says that orgasm is "possible," one gets the impression that sex does not interest her, though she
Show More
is still in her 40's. Obviously, what is an ideal solution for her would not appeal to everyone. "Conundrum" suggest that identity is more important than sex and few reasonable people would argue with this. But even granting that it must be an enormous relief, as well as a positive pleasure, to break through to a clear sense of long-suppressed self, one experiences at this point in the book a feeling of anticlimax.
Show Less

Language

Physical description

174 p.

ISBN

015122563X / 9780151225637

Local notes

Gift from Melinda Swinson
Page: 0.4876 seconds