In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi
A review of Susan Faludi’s In the Darkroom
“The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.”
Susan Faludi’s In the Darkroom. Published by Metropolitan/Henry Holt. 2016.
For context, I did not pick this book up on my own, as it is extremely out of the content zone I typically read in. This last semester of college, I took a memoir class as my honors pick, and because of that, I’m reading a lot of different types of books from people I never would’ve imagined I’d be reading from. I had no idea who Susan Faludi was before picking this book up, nor did I even know what this book was about.
All in all, it’s a decent memoir. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and I can see why. It tackles issues that are very relevant today in society, and the writing is very-to-the-point. I personally wasn’t as much as a fan as I should’ve been, perhaps because I wasn’t into the writing style nor the subject matter. It was interesting, but it became a grind to get through because I didn’t like her father at all in the beginning, especially after he nearly murders her mother’s boyfriend.
I haven’t reviewed nonfiction yet, so time to switch up my formatting!
Blurb
“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?
Content
I hate that for nonfiction I’m creating a section for content, but here we are! The book is recollecting Faludi’s experiences with her father, who is no longer her father. He has become she. She still refers to her father as her father, but switches the gender (he to she), which is an interesting contrast for someone not used to reading this in their literature. We need more trans narratives, that’s for sure.
Basically, Faludi’s father is a Hungarian Holocaust survivor that randomly got a sex reassignment surgery while in Thailand. She moves back to Hungary, where Faludi visits, discovering that her father is obsessed with the notion of womanhood; she no longer leaves the house, puts on nice dresses, reads self-insert trans fanfiction, and seemingly is very into a sexualized version of what it means to be a woman. Faludi doesn’t paint her in the best way in the first half, that’s for sure.
The father is an interesting character, that’s for sure. While Faludi is in Hungary to visit and work on her story, her father keeps her under house arrest. When she asks to go outside, she responds with the past is dead. She no longer wants to revisit a world where she isn’t a woman, until a week in she relents and they go outside. Upon visiting the apartment her family grew up in until the Nazis seized their property, she goes into a rage, claiming that the current owners should give it back.
I think we’re meant to sympathize with Faludi, who sees femininity in a different way from her father. Her father leans towards the very traditional modes of what it means to be a woman, but that’s because she had her surgery when she was 76 years old. It seems fitting that someone born in the late 1920s/early 1930s has the viewpoints that she has. We also see him (pre-transition using her pronouns as this) as a very violent man, one who smashes through the door with a baseball bat and stabs her mother’s new boyfriend almost to death. Then, when she has become her true identity as a woman, she buys gendered Swiss Pocket Knives, ones that have things to have sharpen your nail cuticles.
The book is kind of questioning how we can purge our previous identity, even when we change it so drastically. For a father that wouldn’t let his wife work, to becoming a woman, is such a drastically different experience than what one had originally. I think, at the end of the day, we see this most with Mel. Mel regrets the thousands of dollars they spend on the reassignment surgery, because they are no longer seen as competent in society. Women have a harder time getting a job, and now Mel wants out of being a woman after three years. That’s a pretty short amount of time.
Writing
Faludi writes in this in a very journalistic style, which I personally could not get into. As a journalist and writer myself, I just don’t like reading this for fun, which explains why I’m so biased about it. It’s good writing, just not for me.
Overall Thoughts
I wouldn’t read this memoir for pleasure. Instead, I’d use it for research, about gender and identity. This might be someone’s cup of tea, however, and if this is content you’re interested in, I say go for it. I think part of the problem is that I actually prefer memoirs in the style of a memoir-in-essays, rather than a complete memoir, which is why I’m like bleehhh. In this memoir class, I’ve been struggling with this concept of a complete memoir quite a bit, since it’s just not my style of doing things. Does it mean it’s bad? Nah. But my taste is different.
