PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING feminist writer Susan Faludi had been estranged from her difficult and domineering father for a quarter of a century when he reached out to her. Via email, he announced that heâd undergone gender confirmation surgery in Thailand and was now a woman named StefĂĄnie living in his (now her) native Hungaryâa country whose attitudes toward LGBT people, Jews, and refugees immediately bring to mind Sacha Baron Cohenâs Borat.
In her recent memoir, In the Darkroom, Faludi sets out to understand the enigma of the person who was IstvĂĄn and later becomes StefĂĄnie. Her theme, broadly, is identity, but what makes this book utterly absorbing and emotionally compelling is its incisive examination of all the stories and histories in which Faludi locates her father: the perplexing and troubling Hungarian nationalism, the legacy of World War I and atrocities of World War II, his Judaism, antisemitism in Europe, recent transgender history, and transgender memoirs and literature. Amid all of this, In the Darkroom is also about a daughter seeking to know and love her father.
Faludiâs journalistic instincts are what she falls back on, âseeking safety in a familiar role,â and initially her relentless attempts to get her father to open up amount to what she calls a âcat and mouseâ game. StefĂĄnie asks Faludi to write about her, but then shuts Faludi out with characteristic bullish behavior. Faludi flies to Budapest, where she feels trapped in her fatherâs house. Subjected to home movies of high school reunions and slideshows of StefĂĄnie photoshopped into various outfits, Faludi is a captive witness to her fatherâs strange exhibitionism. Further, Faludi finds herself bridling at her fatherâs embodiment of regressive clichĂ©s like feminine helplessness and purity. She remarks, âevery road to the interior was blocked by a cardboard cutout of florid femininity, a happy housewife who couldnât wait to get âback to the kitchen,â a peasant girl doing the two-step in a Photoshopped dirndl.â Faludi uses her reporterâs notebooks and questions to get past her fatherâs walls, but StĂ©fanie is a master of disguise.
Faludi is sensitive to the uncanny coincidences of the factual and the figurative, and she explores these intelligently. The darkroom of the title refers to her fatherâs work as a photographerâhe was in demand for his photo manipulation skills, dodging and burning in the darkroom before the days of Photoshop. The title also references the inaccessibility of her fatherâs mind. Another more protracted and complicated set of intersections involves her fatherâs experience in the war. A friend of Faludiâs father tells her, âI have the feeling you want to find a connection between your father and the Holocaust. But I donât think the Holocaust can make someoneââ he trails off. Faludi answers, âOtto, Iâm not saying the Holocaust explains my fatherâs sex change.â
She does examine how her father survived the war by passing as a non-Jew, even saving his family by impersonating a Nazi. She considers how, even with the forged papers he had, if an officer demanded he pull down his pants, his circumcised penis would have been his undoing. Later, when he has the operation, his lack of foreskin makes the vaginoplasty more complicated because there is not enough skin for a skin graft. What does this all amount to? Is there a connection? What does it mean? Faludi canât answer, only ask. Her sensitivity to these connections and her doggedness in exploring the questions about her fatherâs harrowing past donât solve the mystery, but they do forge a genuine relationship between father and daughter, and the way Faludi represents this development is skillful and moving.
In The Darkroom
by Susan Faludi
(Metropolitan Books)