‘The Definition of Possibility Was Inadequate’

Jan Morris’s memoir ‘Conundrum’

Tucker Lieberman
12 min readMay 30, 2022

A person with shoulder-length blonde hair, wearing a denim jacket and a skirt, standing alone in a field of long grass.
Photo by Margarita Kochneva from Pixabay

The writer Jan Morris (1926–2020) is most famous for her memoir of her gender transition, Conundrum, published in 1974. It’s good to read first-person narratives by trans people because what they find important to say (or not say) about their own lives is often different than what someone else might have tried to extract from them…