Full title: "In The Darkroom" by Susan Faludi and Patricia Piolon. The book was published in the following languages: Czech, Dutch, English, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish.
Susan Faludi’s In the Darkroom opens not as a story of transformation, but as an investigation, into a parent, a past, and the shifting meaning of identity itself, unfolding through a tender and unsettling search for who her father, and she herself, really is. It begins with an email that upends everything Faludi thought she knew about her family, about her father, and about herself. “Dear Susan,” the message reads, “I’ve got some interesting news for you. I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.” Attached to that note were photographs: her seventy-six-year-old father, once Steven Faludi, now Stephanie, smiling faintly after gender-affirming surgery. For a daughter who had known him as an authoritarian figure, sometimes violent and always domineering, the revelation was almost incomprehensible.
Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize–winning feminist journalist known for her incisive critiques of gender and power, found herself facing a question she’d never quite been able to escape: what is identity, really? Is it chosen or inherited, built or discovered, imposed or reclaimed? That question drives the book’s labyrinthine narrative, which doubles as a personal reckoning and a political meditation. When Faludi travels to Hungary to meet her newly transitioned parent, she enters not only her father’s strange and cloistered life in Budapest but also a nation wrestling with its own history of denial and reinvention.
The Hungary she encounters is haunted by ghosts of the Holocaust and the corrosive resurgence of right-wing nationalism. Her father, a Jewish émigré who once fled the country as a teenager during the Nazi occupation, has returned to live among those who now romanticize that dark past. In this setting, Faludi finds that her father’s transformation into Stephanie mirrors Hungary’s own obsession with rewriting itself, a country, like a person, seeking to decide which parts of its story to erase. Yet Stephanie’s selective amnesia runs deeper than politics. She has chosen to forget not only the antisemitism of her homeland but also the violence she once inflicted on her family.
Faludi does not sentimentalize this transformation. She resists the easy narrative of rebirth and redemption that might have turned In the Darkroom into a tale of reconciliation. Instead, she interrogates it, turning the lens on her own reactions, biases, and discomforts. Her father’s flamboyant self-presentation, complete with wigs, pearls, and a theatrical house in the Buda hills, feels to her at once comic and heartbreaking. At times Stephanie is playful and vain, basking in her new identity with almost adolescent delight; at others, she is evasive, manipulative, and infuriatingly cryptic. Faludi’s training as a journalist compels her to probe beneath the performance, but the deeper she digs, the more elusive her subject becomes.
The father-daughter dynamic is as riveting as it is unsettling. Faludi approaches her father with suspicion, curiosity, and a faint, unspoken longing. Stephanie welcomes her with a strange mix of hospitality and control, dictating when and how the interviews can take place. The house, full of locks and alarms, feels like a fortress of secrets. Each conversation dances between intimacy and interrogation, affection and accusation. Faludi’s prose, precise and unsparing, captures the awkward humor of their encounters, the 76-year-old father showing off her new dresses, inviting her daughter to help zip them up, insisting, “We’re all women here.”
As the two circle around their shared history, Faludi begins to uncover the multiple reinventions that shaped her father’s life. Born István Friedman to a wealthy Jewish family, he survived the Nazi occupation by passing as a Christian, at one point wearing a fascist armband and pretending to be one of the oppressors. That ability to “get away with it,” as Stephanie later boasts, became both her survival mechanism and her philosophy of life. Whether as Steven the macho patriarch or Stephanie the aging lady of the house, performance was always the path to safety. “If you believe you are whoever you pretend to be,” she tells Susan, “you’re halfway saved.”
The narrative builds toward the extraordinary scene in the Hungarian National Museum, where Stephanie finally confronts the ghosts she’s spent decades avoiding. Surrounded by sanitized exhibits that shift blame for Hungary’s wartime atrocities onto Germany, she grows suddenly furious, railing against her country’s willful blindness. “Let the people of Hungary look at them!” she cries, gesturing toward the portraits of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. For Faludi, this eruption of anger feels almost redemptive. The woman who has denied so much, her past, her violence, her Jewishness, finally speaks truth. Yet even this moment is fleeting; within minutes, Stephanie backtracks, praising the museum’s “praiseworthy” exhibit before slyly noting that the portraits have been relegated to the cellar.
Faludi’s genius lies in refusing to flatten this complexity into a single moral. Her father is at once victim and perpetrator, hero and coward, woman and man, Jew and outsider. The book’s structure mimics the shape of that ambiguity, part memoir, part cultural history, part philosophical inquiry. Faludi moves between her father’s childhood in wartime Budapest, her own feminist coming of age in America, and the political landscape of modern Hungary, where national identity and gender identity are both battlegrounds. Every thread circles back to the central, unanswerable question: who are we when the masks come off, and do they ever really come off at all?
In the Darkroom is unsparing but not cruel, intellectual but deeply emotional. Faludi writes with a clarity that borders on surgical precision, yet beneath it pulses a sorrowful tenderness. The book is, in the end, not only about her father’s transformation but about the complicated love that survives between parent and child after betrayal, distance, and loss. It’s about the way we inherit pain, how we rewrite our families’ stories to survive them, and how, sometimes, the act of looking, really looking, is both the most painful and the most compassionate thing we can do.
When the book closes, Faludi has not solved the mystery of her father, nor of identity itself. What she has done is illuminate the darkness around those questions, showing that identity is not a destination but a lifelong negotiation between what we inherit and what we invent. In the end, her father’s life, with all its disguises and contradictions, becomes a mirror for the age we live in, a time obsessed with the right to self-definition, yet terrified of the fluidity that such freedom demands. In the Darkroom asks us to sit with that discomfort, to resist the easy story, and to remember what happens when forgetting becomes a way of life.
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and theguardian.com and theguardian.com
Photo by Russ Rymer via theguardian.com
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