In The Darkroom

“In the summer of 2004 I set out to investigate someone I scarcely knew, my father. The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things – obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness…” So begins Susan Faludi’s extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of identity in the modern world and her own haunted family saga.

When the feminist writer learned that her 76-year-old father – long estranged and living in Hungary – had undergone sex reassignment surgery, that investigation would turn personal and urgent. How was this new parent who claimed to be ‘a complete woman now’ connect to the silent, explosive and ultimately violent father that she had known, the photographer who’d built his career on the alteration of images? Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood and her father’s many previous incarnations: American dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest.

When the author travels to Hungary to reunite with her father, she drops into a labyrinth of dark histories and dangerous politics in a country hell-bent on repressing its past and constructing a fanciful – and virulent – nationhood. The search for identity that has transfixed our century was proving as treacherous for nations as for individuals. Faludi’s struggle to come to grips with her father’s reinvented self takes her across borders – historical, political, religious, sexual – to bring her face to face with the question of the age: Is identity something you ‘choose’ or is it the very thing that you can’t escape?

About the Author

Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and theauthor of ‘The Terror Dream’, ‘Stiffed’, and ‘Backlash’, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, she has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, and The Baffler, among other publications.

Review by Caroline Baum

I noticed Susan Faludi's Backlash, her 1991 Pulitzer winning feminist manifesto, on my shelf just the other day and wondered what had become of her, as it's been a while...and now here she is, back with a very different kind of book: a revealing memoir about her relationship with her long estranged father whom she has recently tracked down living in Hungary, as a woman.

I really felt for Faludi as she attempted to lead her father towards honesty, after years of ducking and weaving. Her father is a maddening contrarian, infuriatingly self-centred. Faludi is infinitely patient and forgiving (her father was violent in her youth), sympathetic in her sensitivity, delicately tiptoeing into no-go areas that will be familiar to anyone whose family has concealed painful truths.

But that's just the beginning of an utterly intriguing exploration of identity, played out against the backdrop of Hungary, a country still coming to terms with its role during the Nazi era, and its post-Communist self. It is all so complicated, and layered in trauma, shame and secrecy. As the title suggests, there is something hidden here, something that may or may not be revealed when exposed to contemporary sunlight.

As someone who has grappled with big issues and ideas, she deploys her considerable journalistic and scholarly talents to weave the history of Hungary and its Jews, its rulers and citizens together with a story that is painfully personal. The result is intense, haunting, uncomfortable, sometimes shocking, but never less than gripping.