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 he’d undergone gender confirmation surgery in Thailand and was now a woman named Stefánie living in his (now her) native Hungary—a country whose attitudes toward LGBT people, Jews, and refugees immediately bring to mind Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat.
In her recent memoir, In the Darkroom, Faludi sets out to understand the enigma of the person who was István and later becomes Stefánie. 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.