LOS ANGELES, Jan 4 — On a warm September evening in the Hollywood Hills, guests at a book party for writer Susan Faludi sipped prosecco and munched on lotus root chips in the courtyard of the Spanish-style home of journalist Steve Oney and his wife, interior designer Madeline Stuart. Book people mixed with movie people: Under a dense black acacia tree, writer Amy Wilentz chatted with television producer Nicole Yorkin; historian Ed Larson rubbed elbows with film producer Sean Daniel at the bar.
Just before dusk, Faludi, a slight, almost spectral figure in a black sweater, black slacks and black flats, took her place on a landing overlooking the patio. She introduced the passage she had chosen to read from her new book — a memoir titled In the Darkroom, which, it quickly became clear, explores thematic territory less readily associated with Pulitzer Prizes (one of which she has already earned) than, lately at least, with Golden Globe Awards.
“In the summer of 2004, I received an email from my father with the subject line ‘Changes,'” she began, her soft voice occasionally drowned out by cars racing up the canyon. “My father lived in Hungary, and it was the first communication I’d received from him in many years. He said he had some interesting news for me. He had decided, at the age of 76, that he’d had enough of, quote, impersonating a macho, aggressive man. There was a series of snapshots attached to the message. The first one showed my father standing in a hospital lobby in a sleeveless blouse and red skirt. Beside him were, as he wrote in the note, ‘the other post-op girls’ — two patients who were also making ‘the change.'”
In the Darkroom is a departure for Faludi. While previous works like Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man were essentially polemics, her memoir is deeply personal. It is also a project as high concept as a sitcom pitch: What if a famous feminist author — whose activism was spurred by her father’s bullying machismo — discovered that said phallocrat had become a woman? Complications ensue. But Faludi mines her material less for easy ironies than for insights into the meaning of identity.
Even so, the liveliest exchange in the Q&A session, after Faludi read an excerpt about visiting the building in Budapest where her father, a Holocaust survivor, escaped being shot by the Nazis, centred on the less weighty issue of the author’s use of pronouns in the book — “he” for every reference to her father before his surgery, “she” for every one after. Acknowledging her methodology as “a copy editor’s nightmare,” Faludi said she flubbed it only once.
Such challenges aside, the book received rapturous reviews. “In the Darkroom is an absolute stunner of a memoir,” Jennifer Senior wrote in The New York Times, “probing, steel-nerved, moving in ways you’d never expect.” More recently, it was named one of the “10 Best Books of 2016” by The Times Book Review and won this year’s Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.
“They’re kinder when you write a personal book,” Faludi observed a few weeks after the party in Los Angeles. After several more promotional stops, she was back at her home in Brunswick, Maine, where she is a research associate at Bowdoin College. (Her husband, writer Russ Rymer, teaches in the English department.) On the kind of fall afternoon at which New England colleges excel, scarlet and amber leaves wafted from the oaks surrounding the house — a two-story traditional furnished largely with books and Mission-style pieces. (Having spent 20 years in California, Faludi considers Los Angeles her “psychic home.”)
At 57, she looks much as she did at 32 — russet-haired, angular, watchful — when the success of Backlash landed her, alongside Gloria Steinem, on the cover of Time. She wiped some Windex on the glass table on her back patio and set out lunch — quiche and tabbouleh, edamame and orzo salads from the local gourmet shop — noting that her cooking skills betrayed an ambivalence toward certain tropes of womanhood.
(“Susan is an observer,” said her friend Peggy Orenstein, author of Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. “She’s not what you would call an oversharer. But when she does talk about herself, she can be very funny in a wry, understated way.”)
In one of the stranger twists in a book full of them, Steven Faludi — a tough, even violent presence during Susan Faludi’s childhood in Yorktown Heights, New York — embraced the hoariest stereotypes of femininity when he became Stefánie Faludi. “Here’s my father, whose raw aggressions inspired my feminism,” Faludi said, picking at her edamame. “And the first time I visit him in Hungary, he’s giving me the grand tour of his Marilyn Monroe outfits and cases of makeup.”
The elusiveness of identity is Susan Faludi’s idée fixe. She is suspicious of efforts by her father or anyone else to reduce gender — not to mention sexual, racial or national identity — to an either/or proposition. “All the years she was alive,” she writes of her father, “she’d sought to settle the question of who she was. Jew or Christian? Hungarian or American? Woman or man? So many oppositions.”
A reporter read Faludi this passage, which continues: “There is in the universe only one true divide, one real binary ——” At this point, an oak nut fell, banging loudly off the patio table. “Whether or not you get hit on the head by an acorn,” Faludi deadpanned. “Life and death,” the lines conclude. “Either you are living or you are not. Everything else is molten, malleable.”
Throughout her narrative, Faludi connects the dots between her father’s identity crises and those of his homeland — Hungary’s embrace of fascism and communism as well as the rightist nationalism of today’s Fidesz party, which Stefánie Faludi supported despite the anti-Semitism in its ranks. She also draws parallels between Fidesz and the identity politics that drove the recent U.S. elections: “A national identity based on finding people to demonize and attack for your afflictions — sound familiar?” (Several months ago Susan Faludi wrote a piece for The Baffler comparing Donald Trump to Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, that now reads like a prophecy.)
At her reading in Los Angeles, Faludi made it clear that hers was not a story that ended in “healing and closure.” But the light she shines on her father’s identity illuminates facets of her own. “I realized that so much of what I am is not self-generated,” she said, “that I am also, like my father, a product of external connections” — to her father, for one, as well as to his extended family in Eastern Europe.
“Susan’s relationship with her father was something she had put up a firewall against, and I think tearing that down was wrenching,” said Rymer, who joined Faludi on a number of her trips to Hungary. “But over the course of the book, I think her understanding of a lot of aspects of herself deepened.” ― The New York Times
