In her bigoted review [Thursday] of Jan Morris's Conundrum, which gets so many facts wrong Germaine Greer describes me as a silent and anguished figu… - Jan Morris

I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual. I believe in its imaginative qualities and its potential as art and literature. I must say that my campaign, which I've been waging for ages now, has borne some fruit because intelligent bookshops nowadays do have a stack called something like travel literature. But what word does one use?

As I grew older, I couldn't come to terms with the fact that Jan wanted to be a "woman" when her view of "women" was totally the opposite of what she was. She wasn't at all maternal; she struggled to even give her own children a hug, stiffening to a board when we tried. She couldn't cook, I never saw her clean anything and she certainly didn't want to stay at home and be with her family. She disliked the very idea of "family". 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.
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.

But I should say I would never use the word change, as in "sex-change" for what happened to me. I did not change sex, I really absorbed one into the other. I'm a bit of each now. I freely admit it. There is obviously all of this debate about it all at the moment, but for me it was never a black and white thing. Never could be. It was a sort of instinct. A question of spirit almost. But that's all in that book I wrote, isn't it?’