In the Darkroom
By Susan Faludi

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
and bestselling author of "Backlash," comes "In the Darkroom," an
astonishing confrontation with the enigma of her father and the larger
riddle of identity consuming our age. In the summer of 2004 I set
out to investigate someone I scarcely knew, my father. The project
began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had
absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful
dodger who had skipped out on so many things obligation, affection,
culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing
discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor
became a witness. So begins Susan Faludi s extraordinary inquiry
into the meaning of identity in the modern world and in her own haunted
family saga. When the feminist writer learned that her 76-year-old
father long estranged and living in Hungary had undergone sex
reassignment surgery, that investigation would turn personal and urgent.
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.
The search for identity that has transfixed our century was proving as
treacherous for nations as for individuals. Faludi s struggle to
come to grips with her father s metamorphosis self 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?"