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?
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In the Darkroom
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?
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?
Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of The Terror Dream, Stiffed, and Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s, and The Baffler, among other publications.
Table of Contents
Preface: In Pursuit
PART I 1. Returns and Departures 2. Rear Window 3. The Original from the Copy 4. Home Insecurity 5. The Person You Were Meant to Be 6. It’s Not Me Anymore 7. His Body into Pieces. Hers. 8. On the Altar of the Homeland 9. Ráday 9
PART II 10. Something More and Something Other 11. A Lady Is a Lady Whatever the Case May Be 12. The Mind Is a Black Box 13. Learn to Forget 14. Some Kind of Psychic Disturbance 15. The Grand Hotel Royal 16. Smitten in the Hinder Parts 17. The Subtle Poison of Adjustment 18. You’re Out of the Woods 19. The Transformation of the Patient Is Without a Doubt
PART III 20. Pity, O God, the Hungarian 21. All the Female Steps 22. Paid Up 23. Getting Away with It 24. The Pregnancy of the World 25. Escape