Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog
In the Darkroom
Author: Susan Faludi
Narrated By: Laurel Lefkow
Susan Charlotte Faludi (Author, American feminist, and journalist. Received the Kirkus Prise for “In the Darkroom” in 2016.)
“In the Darkroom” is an interesting exploration of Susan Faludi’s remembrance of her father. Every parent who has a child thinks about what their influence is or will be in their children’s life and memory. Faludi’s memoir shows parents have an immense influence on who our children become.
Faludi shows her father as a chameleon who refuses to be identified as one thing or another.
Susan Faludi’s father was Steven Faludi, a Holocaust survivor who made his living as a professional photographer. “In the Darkroom” Susan Faludi explains her father chose to become a woman at the age of 76 by undergoing sex reassignment surgery in Thailand. Her father became Stefánie Faludi living in Hungary. As an author, Susan recalls her childhood and the volatile relationship her father had with her mother. Steven Faludi was a domineering husband and father who is eventually divorced by Susan’s mother. She recalls a violent incident after the divorce where Steven crashes through their front door to stab her mother’s presumed boyfriend. He is arrested but manages to turn the attack into a rescue of his ex-wife from an intruder to avoid criminal charges.
Despite Steven Faludi’s survival from the Holocaust, he aligned himself with right-wing nationalist politics when he returned to Hungary.
Hungary had a reputation for anti-Semitism and anti-LGBTQ beliefs. Surprisingly, he became xenophobic and anti-Semitic despite being Jewish. Faludi suggests her father may have rejected his Jewish identity as a way of distancing himself from what he had been through. Like his decision to become a woman, he recreated himself. His irrational fears may have made him dislike people from other countries, cultures, or ethnicities. Susan Faludi believes it is his way to defend his self-identity from the Holocaust’ trauma, shame, and loss of people he knew, loved, or cared about. It is impossible to comprehend what it must have been like to survive the Holocaust. Anyone who has visited Auschwitz or a concentration camp site understands how unbelievably horrible that experience must have been. On the other hand, Ms. Faludi interviews grade school friends of her father before the war and notes Steven Faludi was a difficult student with which to be friends.
Susan Faludi is considered among the top 20 influential modern feminist theorists.
Not surprisingly, Susan Faludi becomes a feminist with gender identity being an important experience in her family’s life. She uses her journalistic talent to look at her father’s past and her personal experience. Her memoir looks into the nature of personal identity, how our identity is made, and what we do with it. Not surprisingly, much of who we become is from genetic inheritance and interaction with our parents. Faludi is an investigative journalist which drives her to dig into the details of her family’s past to better understand herself. Faludi’s father is shown to be abusive, controlling, and emotionally distant husband and father, a characteristic not uncommon in this patriarchal world.
“In the Darkroom” is an ironic title to Faludi’s book because much of one’s family life takes place in the “…Darkroom” of one’s mind.
Does one’s identity come from what you choose or is it a consequence of your experience as a child born into a family that is either nurturing or neglectful? Her memoir offers no formulaic answer. She suggests close examination of our family childhood reveals we are witnesses to the strengths and weaknesses of our parents. However, as witnesses we live in a “…Darkroom” of the mind that obscures any truth that explains how children are influenced by parental relationship.
We are not puppets of our parents, but neither are we free.
We choose to become ourselves through acceptance or rejection of up and down experience with parents but that is not the only experience that influences our lives. As we grow, we meet others who impact and change our views of life. Faludi explains she initially rejected her father because of his violence, abuse, and distant behavior but as she learned of his gender confusion and transition, she recognized her father’s pain and reassessed her relationship with him. Our parents experience and growth to adulthood have the same ups and downs of life that every human being experiences. They had their influences and choices just as their children will have in their lives.
Unlike the development of an image in a dark room, one’s life is never fixed by the solution in which it is placed.
Susan Faludi concludes one’s personal identity is not fixed but changes based on our parents’ influence and life experience. Of course, this is a subjective process, and “truth” is hard to pin down. Ignorance or the influence of others often distorts “truth”. Faludi suggests life is shaped by memory, trauma, the stories we tell, and the life we live. The story of her father’s life is the example of one who reconstructed his/her life. Change does not erase the past, but her father’s reinvention of his identity changed Faludi’s feelings about him. Faludi’s memoir shows how life is contradictory and complex.
REVIEWS AND VIEWS OF LIFE 