Daddy dearest

In the Darkroom. By Susan Faludi. Metropolitan Books; 417 pages; $32. William Collins; £16.99.

SUSAN FALUDI had been estranged from her father for 25 years when she received an e-mail announcing “interesting news”. “I’ve had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside,” her father wrote. Several pictures were attached. One featured her father in a platinum wig and ruffled blouse. Another showed her parent with fellow “post-op girls” in a Thai hospital. Ms Faludi’s father, who had been Istvan Friedman as a persecuted Jew in Budapest, then Steven Faludi as an “imperious patriarch” in America, was now Stefánie, a coquettish septuagenarian with a taste for frilly aprons, glittery heels and male attention.

“Write my story,” Ms Faludi’s father asked (“or rather, dared”) when they reconnected in 2004. Stefánie’s choice of biographer was inspired. As the bestselling author of several books about gender, sex and power, Ms Faludi was well placed to meditate on the meaning of her father’s transformation. “In the Darkroom” is a fascinating chronicle of a decade spent trying to understand a parent who had always been inscrutable.

Having hoped her father’s transition would offer a glimpse of “the real Steven”, Ms Faludi is disappointed to find Stefánie no less hot-tempered, long-winded, enigmatic and uninterested in the past as Steven had been. “It’s not my life anymore,” Stefánie says dismissively about her childhood. Although Steven had returned to live in Budapest after his marriage collapsed, Stefánie never wishes to revisit her youth and rarely leaves the house. Instead of disclosures, Stefánie prefers superficial exposures, proudly parading before her daughter in negligees and barely tied robes. With frustration, Ms Faludi finds that the sex-change “had only added a barricade, another false front to hide behind”.

But as a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist, Ms Faludi has made a career of stripping away artifice. She pores over old letters and documents and patiently tracks down family members and schoolmates. The person who emerges is often just as overbearing and oppressive as the father she grew up with, even after the transition. “Stefánie had this very dominating style, like a hammer coming down,” recalls a transgender woman who runs an inn for post-operative trans women in Thailand. Yet Ms Faludi also learns that her father was a hero, having masqueraded as a Nazi sympathiser in order to save his parents during the war.

As a feminist, Ms Faludi is startled to find Stefánie embracing a “florid femininity” that she herself had rejected. The author is discomfited by the stereotypically girlish memoirs of trans women, who thrill to become “the exact sort of girl I’d always thought of as false”. And she pointedly wonders why trans people claim to be flouting the binary system of sexes even as they confess “a desire to be one sex only, the one that they had an operation to become, which was always the binary opposite of the one they’d been.”

Budapest is an odd place for a Jewish trans woman. Although Hungary passed anti-discrimination laws in order to join the European Union, legal tolerance is undercut by prejudice and intensifying anti-Semitism. Intriguingly, Ms Faludi compares her father’s “rebirth” in old age to Hungary’s own revisionism. She finds the country keen to scrub away any evidence of the “shrapnel scars on seemingly every building and on my father’s character”. Two-thirds of the country’s 825,000 Jews were sent to their deaths during the war, but there is little mention of this in its history books or museums. Hungarians, including her father, prefer to lament their fate at the hand of the Soviets. Ms Faludi questions whether her father’s sex-change had anything to do with the emasculations of Hungarian Jews during the war. But an old schoolmate of her father’s cautions against pat conclusions. “In the end, the mind is a black box”.

Ultimately this book is an act of love, a way to get close to a parent who had always been remote. Months before dying in 2015, the elder Faludi read a draft. “I’m glad,” Stefánie said. “You know more about my life than I do.”