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Jacket design: James and Ruth McCrea
Blurb: “Jan Morris - CONUNDRUM - It is now public knowledge that James Morris, the author of The World of Venice, The Great Port, Pax Britannica, Heaven's Command, and many other books, has undergone a sex change and is now Miss Jan Morris. This is a most extraordinary example of the phenomenon known as transsexu-alism-the lifelong conviction that one has been born into the wrong sex, and the struggle to escape from it.
A singularly articulate and sensitive observer describes an experience made possible only recently through hormone treatments: the gradual sex change leading over a number of years to the final operation. During this period of transition, Morris became acutely conscious of the specific qualities distinguishing the masculine and feminine structure. The account of the subtle changes experienced psychologically as well as physiologically by a person who has lived as both a man and a woman is uniquely revealing.
Winner of the Heinemann Award for literature in England, and the Polk Memorial Award for Journalism here, James Morris was a celebrated foreign correspondent before moving on to author-ship, and was happily married and the father of four children. As Jan Morris, she maintains that family bond in a condition of what she calls "pas-sionate friendship," but has in almost all respects become a new person.
Nobody could be better qualified to discuss the tangled meanings of transsexualism.
In Conundrum, she movingly evokes the indefinable, inex-orable, and, for most of us, unimaginable force of the instinct that led her, through many years of torment, to the surgeon's clinic in Casablanca and an ambiguous but joyful fulfillment.
Book Club Edition
...born into the wrong body
"I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life... by every standard of logic I was patently a boy. I was James Humphry Morris, male child.
I had a boy's body. I wore a boy's clothes. . ..
As the youngest of three brothers in a family very soon to be fatherless, I was doubtless indulged.
I was not, however, generally thought effeminate.
... If I had announced my self-discovery beneath the piano, my family might not have been shocked ... but would certainly have been astonished." -FROM THE BOOK