Simone's Reviews > In the Darkroom

I love Susan Faludi's other books, specifically Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man and The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America so I wanted to read this before I really knew anything about it. It seems almost crazy, a person known for writing long form journalistic books about gender, and who wrote one of the most engaging books I've ever read on American masculinity in the post-war period has a father she hasn't spoken to in 25 years randomly email her and announce that he has undergone sex reassignment surgery and is now living as a woman. This book is part memoir, part history, constructed as Faludi spent the next decade trying to repair her relationship with her father. Her father, Stefanie, is inscrutable and impossible to pin down. Stefanie is also a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust, depending on which story is to be believed, on a combination of luck, daring, bravery and convincing role-playing. Faludi weaves her father's story in with the history of Hungary, especially the Hungarian Jewery, around questions of identity, gender and religion. It is a beautiful and haunting book.