In the Darkroom [B1936]

2017 PB, clean with minor cover wear. PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST. One Of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year. Winner of the Kirkus Prize. When feminist writer Susan Faludi learned that her seventy-six-year-old father-long estranged and living in Hungary-had undergone sex reassignment surgery, the revelation would launch her on an extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of identity in the modern world and in her own haunted family saga. How was this new parent who identified as "a complete woman now" connected to the silent, explosive, and ultimately violent father she had known, the photographer who'd built his career on the alteration of images?

Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood and her father's many previous incarnations: American dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest. When the author travels to Hungary to reunite with her father, she drops into a labyrinth of dark histories and dangerous politics in a country hell-bent on repressing its past and constructing a fanciful-and virulent-nationhood. Faludi's struggle to come to grips with her father's metamorphosis takes her across borders-historical, political, religious, sexual-to bring her face to face with the question of the age: Is identity something you "choose," or is it the very thing you can't escape?

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "A raw and intimate memoir and deeply moving exploration of identity."; "Steven/Stephanie Faludi comes across as an extremely frustrating person to have as a father, but we slowly discover the layers of his/her life history, along with the author, and at the end of the book I was in tears. I think there should be more books like this about trans people: books that don't seek to further a particular pro-trans or anti-trans agenda, but just tell the story of a particular individual, and tell it with wit and integrity, as Susan Faludi has done."; "In telling her father's story, Faludi goes into depth about transsexual issues and transsexual surgery, the history of Hungary and the Hungarian Jewish community beginning with its Magyarization in the later part of the 19th century, the rapid growth of antisemitism in Hungary in the 20s and the holocaust in Hungary during the last two years of World War II. The book also tells us a lot about the politics of contemporary Hungary and anti-semitism in Hungary today."; "So complex, strange and beautiful"; "There's a lot here . . . it's a great story from a gender perspective, from a Holocaust survival perspective, and as an example of how to write a family history memoir."