Made possible by the Drue Heinz Trust

In her recent book, In the Darkroom, Pulitzer Prize-winning feminist journalist Susan Faludi investigates her transgender father’s lifetime of identity transformations, and the mysteries of identity—personal, political and cultural—transfixing our times.

“In the summer of 2004 I set out to investigate someone I scarcely knew, my father. The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things—obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness.”

So begins Susan Faludi’s extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of identity in the modern world and in her own haunted family saga. Faludi’s struggle to come to grips with her father’s metamorphosis takes her across borders―historical, political, religious, sexual–to bring her face to face with the question of the age: Is identity something you “choose,” or is it the very thing you can’t escape?

Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, and The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.