
In the Darkroom
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Narrated by:
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Laurel Lefkow
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By:
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Susan Faludi
About this listen
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling 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 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?
Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her childhood, and her father's many 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 a thing you can't escape?
©2016 Susan Faludi (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
Not a favorite
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Enjoyable mix of history and family dynamics
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Brilliant
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After a rough start book improved immensely
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Where does In the Darkroom rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
one of the bestWhat did you like best about this story?
the wry tone, intelligent writingWhat does Laurel Lefkow bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
good voice for both Susan and Stephani --- brought Stephani to lifeWas there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Susan Faludi's compassion for her father and steady sense of her own self throughout...Any additional comments?
a masterful psychological analysis in historical contexts ...Intricately insightful study of identity
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Well written & interesting
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A reminder of how hated the Jews were in Europe
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Any additional comments?
The accolades this memoir/history/identity study has garnered are incredibly well-deserved. Susan Faludi, journalist, has beautifully documented her fraught relationship with her father, and his fraught relationship with identity. The book opens with Faludi heading to Budapest to visit her father who, via email, reveals to her that he has undergone a sex reassignment surgery and has transformed from Steven into Stefanie. What follows is part personal memoir of life with her father and part journalistic investigation. On the one hand, Faludi's writes a lovely if conflicted remembrance of her father, his creativity and knack for editing and airbrushing (he was a well known photographer), his violent outbursts, his controlling nature, and his internal struggles. On the other, her father's transformation leaders her to an investigation into gender identity and into Hungary during WWII (her father came of age as a Jew in that nightmarish time). The book is wonderful and sad, confusing and fascinating. Highly recommended.Worthy of the praise
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An astonishing journey of identity
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Overall, the book deftly wove together the story of Steffi with that of Hungary. Aside from a brief golden age, there has been persistent antisemitism and a refusal to take responsibility for Hungary’s role in the persecution of Jews before and during WW2.
Sadly, the Orban era has continued this trend of demonizing those seen as “other”;Jews, Roma, LGBT in order to bolster national identity in a weak country.
Susan patiently unearthed her father’s story over the course of ten years and his many contradictions gradually became more comprehensible. This is also a story of coming to terms with and learning to know a distant and abusive parent.
Fascinating story
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