A voyage round her father
In her new book, Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer Prize-winning feminist author, turns a searching gaze on her relationship with her father – and herself.
In her new book, Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer Prize-winning feminist author, turns a searching gaze on her relationship with
her father – and herself.
‘ Aren’t all our parents utter enigmas to us in the end?” muses Susan Faludi, on the phone from her home in Maine. Well, yes. But the father she’s talking about – a Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust, photographer and intrepid adventurer who was mercurial, violent, and then estranged – would test any daughter and memoir writer.
In 2004, Faludi received an email, the first communication she’d had in years from her father, Steven Faludi. Subject line: Changes. “I have decided,” he wrote, “that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.” Photographs were attached, including one of her father, after gender-reassignment surgery in Thailand, in a sheer blouse and red skirt.
That must have landed like a grenade in her inbox. “It may have felt like a grenade at the start – it was certainly at least a bolt from the blue,” says Faludi. “It became my father’s olive branch. This was my father’s way of saying, ‘I’m opening a door. Are you going to come see me? Are we going to reconnect?’”
From the first follow-up phone calls, Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, became an instant feminist classic, had her notebook and pen poised. Soon, she was on a plane to Budapest to meet her father, now named Stefánie.
It takes a little getting your head around. Faludi is patient with my initial stumbling over pronouns: Your father … he … she … “You know, Hungarian has no gendered pronouns,” she says. “The situation never even came up in Hungary. It would solve a lot of problems if we could do that in English.”
In her memoir, In The Darkroom, Faludi uses male pronouns for Steven before transition, female for Stefánie after. Some things remain unchanged: “Whoever she was now, she was, as she herself had said to me on the phone, ‘ still your father’.”
Faludi’s father was, during her childhood, a tyrant. “For as far back as I could remember,” she writes, “he had presided as imperious patriarch, overbearing and autocratic.” When Faludi was a teenager, her Catholic best friend arranged for her to have a meeting with a priest. In a spirit of intellectual inquiry – she had a dream of being a journalist – Faludi went along. Her father, deeply ambivalent about his Jewishness, found out about it, stormed into her room that night and dragged her out of bed. In the Darkroom records the scene: “‘I created you,’ he repeated as my head hit the boards. ‘And I can destroy you.’ Thus did one daughter come to know that her father was a Jew.”
“For as far back as I could remember, he had presided as imperious patriarch, overbearing and autocratic.”
THE THREAT LAID BARE
She was 17 when her father violated a protection order and attacked her mother’s boyfriend with a baseball bat and Swiss Army knife. “The living room looked like a scene out of Carrie,” she writes. Steven Faludi claimed he believed he was protecting his wife from an intruder and got off with a fine. Faludi’s feminism was forged at that moment.
Steven Faludi went back to Hungary. For years, his daughter barely saw him. “The easier thing to do would just be to let things lie,” she says, characteristically cool in the face of these traumatic events. “Operating against that was my native curiosity. I think that’s why I became a journalist.” Well, it’s a terrific story. “And beyond that was my desire to have a father; to find out whether we could have a relationship.”
Their reunion in Budapest was fraught. She wanted to go out, see places where her father had lived before and during the war. Stefánie wanted to keep her inside. “Merely to go outside, I had to ask her for the key. Stefánie’s schloss was starting to feel more like Dracula’s castle,” writes Faludi.
Her father makes her watch the video of her surgery. Goodness. “I was halfway through [the visit] and thinking, ‘Can I get on a plane earlier?’” Only her poor mastery
of Hungarian and her writer’s instincts kept her there. “In my journalistic mode, I can wait people out a really long time to get a story out of them. Although I have to say my father was my greatest reportorial challenge by far. She played such a cat-andmouse game. She would dangle intriguing elements of her story and then, as soon as I asked another question, she would snatch it off the table and clam up.”
In her memoir, Faludi speculates that Stefánie was trying to keep her coming back. “I think how tragic, because she didn’t need to do that. But I think she saw it as she had a limited set of cards and she was going to deal them out really slowly.”
FROM POLITICAL TO PERSONAL
Faludi is used to forensically analysing the public and political dimensions of a story, from the backlash against feminism to the collapse of traditional masculinity in Stiffed and the post-9/11 landscape in The Terror Dream. This time it’s personal. “I never really even say ‘I’ in my books. The biggest challenge was coming out from behind the duck blind because, as much as I wanted to be an observer in this story, ultimately I’m part of the story.”
She is. To Faludi’s horror, Stefánie insists her daughter should wear the Victoria’s Secret bras outgrown since her surgery. There are fights, over feminism – “You write about the disadvantages of being a woman, but I’ve found only advantages!” says her father – and when Stefánie pressures her daughter to have a child, she has no desire for.
There’s a reconciliation of sorts; an apology of a sort, though her father doesn’t recall saying those terrible words “I made you and I can destroy you.” The odd commentator has taken Faludi to task for telling her father, it’s okay. “You know, by saying it’s okay I didn’t mean, ‘Oh, let bygones be bygones.’ Forgiving somebody is very different from exonerating their behaviour,” says Faludi. “I’m still four-square on my mother’s side as far as any sort of violence or abusive behaviour goes. ‘It’s okay’ is code for ‘I’m here with you now and I’m grateful that you are able to express contrition.’”
It’s complicated. In the Darkroom is also an exploration of identity. Steven Faludi was born István Friedman, the only child of a glamorous, indifferent mother and a father he idolised but who had little time for him. You could play amateur psychologist and wonder what part his childhood had in forging his complex identity. “Right, and here I am playing amateur psychologist but, whatever one thinks of Freud and psychology, early child experience is formative.
“My grandmother, by all accounts, was a difficult mother who left the rearing of her child to a succession of nannies and governesses and tutors. My father was a very lonely child and probably craved, as we all do, Mom’s attention. It struck me as telling that my father’s idea of what it meant to be a woman was being this kind of overdressed diva, much as my grandmother was.”
HIS PARENTS’ SAVIOUR
Her father was also a hero. During the Nazi occupation of Hungary, dressed up as a member of the local, keenly fascist Arrow Cross group, he saved his parents from deportation. As a Jewish teenager, he lived with being considered less than human not just by the Germans but by many of his fellow Hungarians. What happened to the Jews there required often-enthusiastic local help. “Right. There were only, what, 200 members of the SS team in Hungary and that included the drivers and the secretaries and the help. There’s no way the Final Solution would have occurred, that they would have exterminated more than half a million people, with that skeleton staff,” says Faludi.
That betrayal was profound. “The trauma of the Holocaust years for my father infuses everything else in her life. It’s part of her whole identity struggle. There were many times when I would ask my father a question about becoming a woman and she’d be halfway through it and it was like a trapdoor would open and she’d be talking about her Holocaust experience,” says Faludi.
“She would say that the experience of passing as a Christian during the war set her up for being able to pass as a woman, which I thought was rather an extraordinary equation to make. It’s not like the Holocaust was some switch that flipped my father’s gender, but those experiences were in conversation with each other in my father’s mind.”
Faludi argues with Stefánie over how, considering this history, she could vote for Hungary’s right-wing Fidesz party. “Long before Trump came up with the idea of building a wall, [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán had already built a 13-foot (4m) fence across the Serbian border and then started on another one across the Croatian border,” says Faludi. “Trump and Orbán are big fans of each other.”
We’re soon comparing notes on the age of Trump in which we all find ourselves, even in New Zealand. “Ha, how terrible,” she says. “There’s all these rich people in America who have brought property in New Zealand so they can escape, ratcheting up your real-estate values.”
Her work over the past two decades provides insights into some of the forces that have led us here. “I look back at the men in Stiffed, my book on masculinity. I can’t tell you how many of these quote-unquote angry white men, who years later made up the loudest cheering squad of Trump’s campaign, just went on and on about Hillary Clinton. Back then, she was just the First Lady, but they were saying that she is running the country, Bill is just her puppet and also she’s the Antichrist, Lady Macbeth and the Wicked Witch of the West. She, in their minds, was the personification of everything that went wrong in their lives. One way of looking at Trump’s election is the culmination of this gender drama that’s been building for at least 20 years.”
As for her next project, she says, enigmatically, “One way or another, it will be dealing with our current horrifying moment politically. It won’t be a memoir. I’ve had enough of that for a while.”
“It was telling that my father’s idea of what it meant to be a woman was being this kind of overdressed diva, much as my grandmother was.”
NOTHING IN COMMON
Faludi is excellent company, yet she has a reputation for being a little reserved. As her father hid behind his camera, perhaps she has … “Hidden behind my notepad? Yeah, as a child I wanted to think I have nothing in common with my father, but in some ways the apple didn’t fall that far from the tree.”
She doesn’t think she’s as reticent as some have made out. “I know there was an article or two that said that and I thought, ‘Jeez, well, they just didn’t ask any questions.’ I sometimes think of myself as a blabbermouth.”
Certainly, writing a family memoir involves some blabbing. Were her brother and her mother supportive? “My father asked me to write her story. My brother and
my mother did not. But, ultimately, it’s my story. Memoir is a complicated and dangerous genre in that regard. Families are very Rashomon,” she says, invoking the classic Kurosawa film in which different characters give self-serving, clashing accounts of the same story. “Everyone has their experience of what happened. So I can really only speak for my own. I’m sure they would tell you, ‘There are other books she could have written that would have been easier going.’ But, in the end, we’re all in one piece and speaking to each other.”
Faludi’s father transitioned at the age of 76, but this was never going to be just a version of Transparent. “So much of the book is not even about trans experience. It’s ultimately about this mysterious parent,” says Faludi. “In one way, having sex-reassignment surgery doesn’t change the person’s mind or history or psychology. My father was in many ways the same difficult, explosive, scary person. But, by having made this choice, she was working really hard to try to break out of this lifelong, congealed set of personality traits she wanted to shed.
“I think that it was also about becoming a more vulnerable persona and hoping that she could finally have some meaningful human connections.”
Especially with her children. For Faludi, the experience of reconnecting was, she says, a gift. “My father apologised to me for one particular moment when he – I say he – was violent towards me as a child, but I took that as a more global apology. And, in turn, I asked my father to forgive me for letting the estrangement go on for so many years.” Forgiving the unforgivable: that’s almost as much as you can hope for in a difficult relationship.
There was no full closure. “I don’t really believe in that. We were arguing the next day, so it’s not like we went into the sunset. But we recognised each other in a way that wouldn’t have been possible without all those years of struggle since my father made the first phone call to me.”
And, in grappling with her enigmatic father, Faludi found questions of identity, male or female, were not so complicated. “… there is in the universe only one true divide, one real binary, life and death. Either you are living or you are not,” she writes. “Everything else is molten, malleable.”
Stefánie Faludi died, aged 87, in 2015. The mysterious parent remains mysterious, her true identity still molten and malleable. “As she liked to say to me, ‘I impersonate myself.’ Such a disturbing sentence because you want to say, ‘Who are you underneath all these impersonations, and do you know?’” she says. “Frankly, since my father died, I wake up in the middle of the night and I think, ‘Why didn’t I ask her this? Why didn’t I ask her that?’ So it never ends.”
Susan Faludi will be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival, May 16-21.