Susan Faludi
After having been estranged from her father for nearly a quarter-century, Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of Backlash, received an email from her father, “an imperious patriarch” who bullied the family, announcing that he, Steven Faludi, had, at 76, become Stefánie.
The story, told in Susan Faludi’s In the Darkroom is “an absolute stunner of a memoir,” reads the New York Times review, “probing, steel-nerved, moving in ways you’d never expect. Ms. Faludi is determined both to demystify the father of her youth — ‘a simultaneously inscrutable and volatile presence, a black box and a detonator’ — and to re-examine the very notion and nature of identity.”
Faludi is wrapping up a three-year stint as Bowdoin’s Distinguished Lecturer in Gender and Women’s Studies.