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In the Darkroom
Hardcover
About the author
Susan Faludi
23 books396 followersSusan C. Faludi (born April 18, 1959) is an American humanist, journalist and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee commended for depicting the "human costs of high finance".
Faludi was born to a Jewish family in Queens, New York in 1959 and grew up in Yorktown Heights, New York. Her mother was a homemaker and journalist and is a long-time New York University student. Her father is a photographer who had emigrated from Hungary, a survivor of the Holocaust. Susan graduated from Harvard University in 1981, where she wrote for The Harvard Crimson, and became a journalist, writing for The New York Times, Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal Constitution, San Jose Mercury News, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Throughout the eighties she wrote several articles on feminism and the apparent resistance to the movement. Seeing a pattern emerge, Faludi wrote Backlash, which was released in late 1991. In 2008-2009, Faludi was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with fellow author Russ Rymer. Since January 2013, Faludi has been a contributing editor at The Baffler magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
(from Wikipedia)
Faludi was born to a Jewish family in Queens, New York in 1959 and grew up in Yorktown Heights, New York. Her mother was a homemaker and journalist and is a long-time New York University student. Her father is a photographer who had emigrated from Hungary, a survivor of the Holocaust. Susan graduated from Harvard University in 1981, where she wrote for The Harvard Crimson, and became a journalist, writing for The New York Times, Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal Constitution, San Jose Mercury News, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Throughout the eighties she wrote several articles on feminism and the apparent resistance to the movement. Seeing a pattern emerge, Faludi wrote Backlash, which was released in late 1991. In 2008-2009, Faludi was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with fellow author Russ Rymer. Since January 2013, Faludi has been a contributing editor at The Baffler magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 18, 2023
What an extraordinary read. In the Dark Room covers so many layers in this father/daughter memoir of identity, laundered pasts, trans-sexuality, family, Mitteleuropa and slipping between the cracks. This is a haunting enough narrative yet it is also a comprehensive history of Hungary (and its Jewish population) from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, through the World Wars, Communism to the current right wing nationalism.
A violent estranged father, Steven, contacts his daughter (the journalist author) to tell her that he has undergone gender reassignment surgery and is now Steffi. Almost 25 years of separation precedes this message. So, this unravelling begins. There is little love lost between the two parties, yet a need to engage with the past by larger than life Steffi and her control over the information Susan wants revealed. It is circuitous in the way family stories are, riddled with false memory and barely believable truths.
It is hard to condense the strata of this intense story. For such an emotional history it reads as non-biased journalism and yet we do see connections, irritations, behaviour that consolidate and enhance the telling.
A violent estranged father, Steven, contacts his daughter (the journalist author) to tell her that he has undergone gender reassignment surgery and is now Steffi. Almost 25 years of separation precedes this message. So, this unravelling begins. There is little love lost between the two parties, yet a need to engage with the past by larger than life Steffi and her control over the information Susan wants revealed. It is circuitous in the way family stories are, riddled with false memory and barely believable truths.
It is hard to condense the strata of this intense story. For such an emotional history it reads as non-biased journalism and yet we do see connections, irritations, behaviour that consolidate and enhance the telling.
Displaying 1 of 1 review