Sunday Times article by Jan Morris’s daughter

[BalooLikeYou]

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There is an absolutely coruscating review of Conundrum by Nora Ephron. I can't find it online but I do commend it to you.

Here's a blog including a quote from it (and several others): zagria.blogspot.com/2013/11/jan-morris-1926-part-3-travel-writer.html#.Y5T5x33P02w

And, if you CBA to click on it, here's the Ephron quote (which reminds me somehow of Dylan Mulvaney....):

"I always wanted to be a girl, too. I, too, felt that I was born into the wrong body, a body that refused, in spite of every imprecation and exercise I could manage, to become anything but the boyish, lean thing it was... I wanted more than anything to be something I will never be – Feminine and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft-spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand I am not half bad at being a woman. In contrast Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is precisely what James Morris wanted to become all those years ago. A girl. And worse, a forty-seven-year-old girl. And worst of all, a forty-seven-year-old Cosmopolitan girl."

I think it's fair to say after reading that article that her father was a twat.

That Ephron quote is AMAZING.

Thanks for the share. The bit that leapt out at me was this:

"The honest fact is that she didn’t want to be a woman, at least not the way she saw women. And still I couldn’t talk to her about it all; I just got shut down."

Excellent article. Confirms Jan Morris was exactly like I thought Jan Morris would be.

What a great article

The way Suki describes her childhood makes me so angry on her behalf

I get the feeling there is more to come from Suki. What a horrible man and so emotionally abusive.

"What did she want to be? I believe she wanted to be someone totally different from anyone else, a woman who was the centre of attention because of her difference. She was no ordinary woman, as she believed the rest of us were. She was always talked about, always put on some pedestal. Her ego was massive, with people constantly rubbing it. She was a woman who enjoyed being in a man’s world because she stood out." (my underlining)

ouch!

As does the fact she still thinks she's not good enough. Which from that writing quite obviously isn't the case.

Great way of putting it. Poor kid.

I’d love to know what caused JM to move Suki repeatedly from school to school. It was a deliberate act of cruelty - purely an isolation technique; but perhaps also an attempt to thwart her educational attainments & prevent her from being able to take any of the limelight? No room in that family for another successful &/or famous woman, clearly.

Defiantly selfish and cruel to his own child.

Is that typical of the ilk?

Suki should write a whole book. I’d buy it.

Funny that. I thought exactly the same.

NitroNine · Today 22:39
I’d love to know what caused JM to move Suki repeatedly from school to school. It was a deliberate act of cruelty - purely an isolation technique; but perhaps also an attempt to thwart her educational attainments & prevent her from being able to take any of the limelight? No ro in that family for another successful &/or famous woman, clearly.

J M May have enjoyed controlling her and the headmistresses too.

I too found this one of the most concerning aspects of JM’s mistreatment of Suki.

It is good that Morris finally gets exposed. A cold and calculating person who enjoyed inflicting cruelty on others, and yet so many fawned over him.

There's one who not only made the announcement of an intention to live as a woman during a teenage daughter's school exams, but did it the night before one paper. (I can't remember whether GCSEs or A-levels.)

Actually, I think that more than one individual has disrupted a teenage daughter's exam revision with such an announcement. There is a second I've read of.

My assumption, as wrong as it may be, was that the boys went to boarding school and she went wherever as they moved around.

The boys presumably did board at their 'finest schools in England', but if she had to change school because of moving that would have been an obvious reason why, so she would not have written I was sent to six schools, constantly moving from one to another, not ever being told why. I just accepted it; it was what Jan had said I had to do.

@NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision that was Jane Fae. The main transition announcement just before the daughter's A-levels, which she then didn't do well in. (The daughter herself says she is happier with the different path she then went down, tbf). There couldn't be a clearer example of someone regarding the women of their family as shadowy bit-players in the fascinating feminine drama of their own life.

Absolutely!
Poor Suki - and her poor mother, too.

What an awful man.

Everything in that article is shocking, but the bit where he asked her to proofread his will in his presence and she realised she wasn't in it is absolutely sickening.

I saw her on twitter when the book of Morris's life came out earlier in the year.

She wanted to tell her own story, and I am so glad she has because everything that has been put out before is so glossy and shiny, with fine words, but it misses out what that actual life was.

It’s like he blamed Suki for doing something he never could by being born female and being a girl, and then spent all of time and a lot of his effort in punishing her every chance he got.

I guess she was a constant reminder that she excelled at something he could only ape.

Defiantly selfish and cruel to his own child.

Is that typical of the ilk?

Yes. See childrenoftransitioners.org/