Susan Faludi’s W ciemni (originally In the Darkroom) is a book that begins like a thunderclap and never really lets up. It opens with an email from Faludi’s estranged father, a person she’s feared, avoided, and tried to forget for more than twenty-five years. The message is brief, almost casual: “Dear Susan, 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 the email are photos, her father, now wearing a sleeveless chemise and red skirt, signing off as “Love from your parent, Stefánie.” It’s both shocking and oddly intimate, like a ghost returning not to haunt but to demand recognition. Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and feminist thinker, is suddenly thrust into a story she never expected to write: that of a violent, domineering father who has transitioned into a woman in old age.
The book that follows is not a straightforward memoir or a sentimental reconciliation story. It is an excavation of identity, layered like an archaeological dig where every discovery only leads to another question. Faludi flies to Hungary to meet her newly transitioned father, equipped with tape recorders and reporter’s notebooks, as if bracing herself for an interview rather than a reunion. She finds a woman who insists she is “still your father,” who now wears sundresses and pearl earrings but retains the old authoritarian tone, the same need to control, to shape reality according to her will. The tension between daughter and parent is palpable from the start. Stefánie wants to be seen, adored even, in her new femininity. Susan wants to understand. But understanding, in this case, proves slippery.
Faludi’s strength lies in her refusal to simplify. W ciemni doesn’t slot into the familiar narrative of trans revelation or tidy family healing. Instead, she uses her father’s transition as a lens to explore identity in its most contradictory forms, gender, ethnicity, nationality, even history itself. Her father, born István Friedman, was a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust by pretending to be someone else, even donning a fascist armband to rescue his parents. Later, he reinvented himself in America as Steven Faludi, a successful but tyrannical photographer. Then, after decades of exile and estrangement, he returned to Budapest as Stefánie, a proud Hungarian woman who still flinched from her Jewishness and denied her country’s antisemitism. Reinvention, Faludi suggests, was not just her father’s habit, it was her survival strategy.
Yet W ciemni refuses to leave readers with a cathartic resolution. The bond between Susan and Stefánie remains uneasy, full of affection tangled with resentment. Faludi cannot forget the father who beat her mother and terrorized their home. She cannot entirely forgive the past, even as she marvels at the complexity of the person before her. What emerges is less a redemption story than an intimate reckoning with the limits of change. Can a person truly escape their former self, or do we just keep layering new masks over the same wounds? Faludi keeps returning to this question, probing it from every angle, psychological, political, philosophical, and never settling for a neat answer.
There’s also a deeply ironic thread running through the book. Stefánie claims that as a woman, she is no longer performing, that she has finally become “who I am now.” Yet everything about her, the wigs, the rehearsed gestures, the dramatized femininity, feels like another performance, an echo of her wartime disguises. She tells Susan that during the Holocaust she survived by pretending to be a Nazi: “If you believe you are whoever you pretend to be, you’re halfway saved.” That idea becomes the book’s dark heart. What begins as a personal story of transition expands into a meditation on the human instinct to survive by shape-shifting, by believing our own masks. Faludi sees in her father’s transformations both a tragic and a heroic quality, the desperate creativity of someone who could only live by refusing to be fixed in place.
The writing itself is astonishing. Faludi’s prose is clean, steady, and exacting, yet charged with quiet emotion. She resists the melodrama her story could easily invite. Instead, she builds a narrative out of restraint and intelligence, balancing compassion with skepticism. Her eye for contradiction is razor-sharp: a father who preaches femininity but clings to patriarchal control, a Jew who reveres a fascist leader, a woman who insists on authenticity while constructing herself piece by piece. What makes W ciemni extraordinary is that it’s not just about one family or one transformation, it’s about the meaning of identity in a world obsessed with defining it. Faludi refuses to treat gender, ethnicity, or nationality as stable truths. Each, she shows, is a negotiation between memory and invention, between what we inherit and what we choose. The book ends not with reconciliation but with recognition: a daughter dancing with her father at a transgender disco, two women circling each other awkwardly, finally laughing, finally free, if only for a few minutes, from all the roles they’ve been forced to play.
When Stefánie Faludi died in Budapest in 2015, she left behind a story that defies easy moral judgment. In her, Susan found both the villain of her childhood and the most complex embodiment of survival she’d ever known. W ciemni is her attempt to hold those truths at once, to see her father not as monster or martyr, but as a human being caught, like all of us, in the darkroom where identity is developed, exposed, and never quite finished.
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Photos by Russ Rymer via theguardian.com
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