Q&A with Susan Faludi
Susan Faludi is one of America’s very few indispensable reporters—a category that gets thinner every year. Her books, which include Backlash and Stiffed, combine an activist’s passion for justice and truth with the skepticism of a noir detective on a case that she knows will never turn out the way it was pitched. Her flat, almost-affectless prose is a vehicle for her profound empathy for and insight into her subjects, regardless of whether they fall into politically or narratively convenient boxes.
Yet as revelatory and socially important as some of her past work has been, none of her previous books can compare in complexity, emotional insight, and sheer bafflement to In the Darkroom—her haunting, urgent account of the life of her father, Steven Faludi, a teenage survivor of the 1944 Hungarian massacre of Budapest’s Jews. Showing resourcefulness and courage, Faludi saved both himself and his parents from death. After the war was over, he fled Hungary for Brazil and then attempted to make a new life as a man in America.