Susan Faludi,. _In the Darkroom_

SUSAN FALUDI'S FATHER had a late-life sex-change operation and seems to have thought that his daughter Susan, a highly successful journalist and author, was just the person to write a book about her experience.

There were obstacles, however. Faludi's parents divorced when she was a teenager; the last years were grim, her dad occasionally violent. He had barely been in touch with Faludi in the 20-some intervening years. Moreover, in becoming Stéfanie Faludi, her father has embraced an armful of gender stereotypes that Susan Faludi, as a feminist, has spent her career combating. Finally, Stéfanie was determined to control the narrative, and at first simply stonewalled any questions about any aspect of her life save the one she wanted to talk about, the rightness of her decision to become a woman.

Stéfanie did not really want to talk about being Steven Faludi, for instance, or how that family broke up, nor about being Istvan Friedman, the son of prosperous, socially prominent Jews in Budapest in the 1930s, nor about hiding from the Nazis in 1944 and 1945, nor about being Jewish at all (she thinks of herself as Hungarian, and is especially attached to the Franz Joseph days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, before she was born), nor about the current Hungarian government's willingness to fan the still-smoldering embers of anti-Semitism for political advantage...

...however, Faludi's patience and persistence gradually (the narrative covers ten years) get to all those topics and more, as well as the complex process of electing to change one's sex and learning to live on  the other side of the gender line.  The book ends up being about many dimensions of identity, about what a subtle, evolving, negotiable thing it can be, but also also how it can be an instrument of power and coercion, as with Nazis and (apparently) the Fidesz party in Hungary.

What will really stay with me, though, is how Faludi's relationship with her father develops over the course of the book. Faludi does not offer much commentary on the relationship is changing, but carefully presents her interaction with her father so that we see progress being made, wounds being healed, love finally struggling into expression.