Posts by Live Talks Los Angeles

Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404

PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission Section Seating 
$45 Reserved Section seat + a copy of In the Darkroom

Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of the best seller 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. Her most recent book, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America, was an unflinching dissection of the post-9/11 American psyche in the media, popular culture and in political life.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Nation, among other publications.

“In the Darkroom is an absolute stunner of a memoir―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.”―The New York Times

In The Darkroom is Susan Faludi’s most personal book to date—an extraordinary inquiry into her family saga. When the feminist writer learned that her 76-year-old father—long estranged and living in Hungary—had undergone sex reassignment surgery, she felt compelled to confront a past she knew little about and a person she had long put aside. How was this new parent who identified as “a complete woman now” connected to the silent, explosive, and ultimately violent father she had known? What did this mean for her as a feminist and daughter? If who we are is most profoundly forged by who our parents are, what did her father’s metamorphosis say about her own identity?  Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood in Westchester County, New York, and her father’s many previous incarnations: American dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest, commercial photographer who had built his career on the alteration of images.

Lisa Napoli is a career journalist who has worked at The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and has covered arts and culture for KCRW.  She’s the author of the book, Radio Shangri-La, about her time in and around the kingdom of Bhutan, where she went to start a radio station at the dawn of democratic rule.  She is the author of the upcoming book, The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away, to be published November 2016. She is the proud recipient of the 2014 Halo Award from the Deutsch Family Foundation for a monthly volunteer cooking group she leads at the Downtown Women’s Center on Skid Row.