Conundrum [Paperback]

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. Her woman is shockingly conventional, yet to read this great travel writer’s account of transition is to understand the word 'journey' truly.” —Eileen Myles, T: The New York Times Style Magazine

“[Conundrumis] a brilliant piece of writing—to my mind, it should be part of the established canon of great literature.” —Tom Hooper, director of The Danish Girl, Vogue

“A very good writer telling a profoundly poetic story...In fact, it is the author's extreme subjectivity that makes the book as good as it is...After reading this most charming of all Cinderella stories, one feels that sex is just as much a conundrum as ever, which is to say, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, 'a riddle in which a fanciful question is answered by a pun,' or 'a problem admitting of no satisfactory solution.'” —The New York Times

“Conundrumremains an exquisite read — a rare gift of empathic insight into an experience which most of l“G