Susan Faludi’s In de donkere kamer (the Dutch edition of In the Darkroom, co-authored with Patricia Piolon) is one of those rare, unsettling books that quietly detonates everything you think you know about identity, memory, and family. It begins, as many reckonings do, with an email. In 2004, the Pulitzer-winning journalist receives a message from her estranged father, a man she has barely spoken to in more than two decades. The subject line reads “Changes.” Inside is a note that is both casual and world-altering: “I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.” Attached are photographs of her 76-year-old parent, newly christened Stefánie, smiling shyly in a red skirt and sleeveless blouse after gender-affirming surgery in Thailand.
From that moment, Faludi’s story unfurls with the precision of an investigative reporter and the aching vulnerability of a daughter trying to understand the most enigmatic person in her life. The book follows Susan as she travels to Budapest to meet her father, who has returned to her homeland after the fall of communism. In a house perched high in the Buda hills, the two women begin an awkward, often excruciating process of reacquaintance. Stefánie greets her daughter in a sundress, asks her to zip up her gown, insists they are “all women here.” The tension between them is almost tactile. For Susan, this is not just the father who has transitioned into a woman; this is also the man who once terrorized her family, who was violent and domineering, who once broke into their house and attacked her mother’s new partner with a knife. How do you reconcile a past like that with a new identity that demands empathy and acceptance?
Faludi, being a journalist before all else, refuses easy narratives. She doesn’t write a sentimental reconciliation story or a therapeutic memoir. Instead, In de donkere kamer becomes an inquiry into what identity really means when every part of it, gender, ethnicity, nationality, even memory, is contested ground. Stefánie’s life is a labyrinth of roles: a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust by pretending to be a fascist, a man who lived as an American patriarch, and finally, a woman reinventing herself in the same country that once sought to erase her family. The book’s brilliance lies in its refusal to decide which of these selves is the “real” one. Faludi keeps asking, again and again, what it means to reinvent yourself without erasing what came before.
What Faludi captures so masterfully is the tension between denial and revelation, performance and authenticity. Her father’s transition is not framed as a metaphor for rebirth or liberation. Instead, it’s another act in a lifelong theatre of self-construction, one that overlaps uneasily with her wartime masquerade as a Nazi youth and her later attempts to pass as a respectable American man. Yet Faludi never mocks or pathologizes her. Instead, she allows the contradictions to stand. “If you believe you are whoever you pretend to be, you’re halfway saved,” Stefánie once says, recalling how she survived by pretending to be one of her persecutors. In that single sentence, the line between survival and deception, between identity and disguise, begins to blur beyond recognition.
The book is filled with moments that are simultaneously absurd and heartbreaking. Stefánie plays her surgery video for her horrified daughter, complete with cheerful Thai pop soundtrack. She argues about fish soup recipes and flirts with waiters who call her “madam.” She attends a transgender disco and insists she is not role-playing anymore, even as she twirls beneath the strobe lights like someone auditioning for her own new life. There are times when Susan recoils, when she cannot forgive, when she cannot forget the man who once raised a hand against her. But there are also moments when she sees her father not as an imposter, but as a human being trying, against all odds, to make herself whole.In de donkere kamer is, at its core, an exploration of the blurry border between reinvention and self-erasure. Faludi understands that identity is not a clean narrative of progress or authenticity, but a set of fictions we tell ourselves in order to survive. Her father’s story is extreme, but it mirrors the collective amnesia of nations, the myths that people and countries construct to hide their own violence. Hungary’s denial of its Holocaust past becomes a metaphor for all the ways we bury our shame under layers of reinvention.
What makes the book unforgettable is Faludi’s refusal to settle for catharsis. She never pretends that love resolves everything. When Stefánie declares, “Now I am not role-playing anymore,” we understand the fragility of that statement. And yet, there is also grace in it. Faludi’s gaze is unsparing, but not cruel. By the end, the reader feels both the pain and the strange tenderness of a relationship that is too fractured to mend yet too human to discard.
When Stefánie dies in Budapest in 2015, at the age of 87, the story closes not with reconciliation, but with a kind of haunted understanding. Her life, like the book itself, refuses to fit into any single frame. Faludi gives us not closure, but clarity: that identity, whether personal or national, is never fixed. It is a darkroom, a space of exposure and development, where light and shadow mingle, and where truth is always half in focus.
In de donkere kamer stands as one of the most profound meditations on identity in modern literature. It asks what it means to know someone, really know them, when the person keeps shifting shape, and when, perhaps, we do too.
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