Feminist author Susan Faludi explores her father's life in her latest book. Credit:Sigrid Estrada Faludi began a series of visits to Budapest, where she gradually got to know Stefanie, pieced together her complex identity, and was there when she died in 2015. Stefanie had asked her to write a book and yet was a reluctant interviewee. Faludi approached her subject as a journalist, researching and rewriting the book until she felt it dealt with big issues and "was not just a tale of woe". "Ultimately my father gave me a great gift," she says on the phone with the same calm intelligence tinged with humour. "All of us grow up incarcerated with adults we don't know. I was given the opportunity to fulfil every child's wish, to find out who is this mystery person we were raised by."

Faludi, 57, lives in the north-eastern state of Maine, where she teaches gender and women's studies at Bowdoin College and her husband, Russ Rymer, teaches journalism ("to students who won't get jobs"). She sees a desire among students to define themselves narrowly, often introducing themselves in terms of gender, race and ethnicity. There is, she says, "a deep need to belong" and "a quest for an identity one chooses". "In my own field and the culture at large the question of identity looms so large," she says. "It determines everything right now: Brexit, hysteria about immigration, the rise of xenophobia, Trump and 'make America great again', Isis....Everyone is retreating into their own microworld, to a kind of neo-tribalism. It is a very mysterious moment." Although she sees her father as "idiosyncratic", her book is timely as transgenderism and nationalist politics are both topical issues. As a Hungarian Jew, Steven (then Istvan) had survived the Holocaust – and saved his parents – by passing as a Christian, and yet returned to Hungary when anti-Semitism was on the rise again.

Faludi remembered her father as a macho man who worked as a photographic retoucher – always manipulating images – and became violent, attacking her mother's boyfriend at their suburban New York home after their separation. The post-surgery Stefanie presented herself "as a very '50s stereotype woman in frills, high heels, a push-up bra and fluttering round the kitchen" and later settled happily into being "a matron in tweed". Perhaps, Faludi realises, her father had always struggled with the demands of masculinity as she herself had struggled as a young woman with traditional gender roles. "In many ways my father's behaviour catapulted me into feminism," she says. "Towards the end I saw how controlling he was when second-wave feminism was boiling up and we were living in a cookie-cutter suburban family where the wives stayed home, the fathers were breadwinners. "Feminism came into this town like a Mack truck...There was a lot of backlash from their husbands, and my father was one of those who clamped down and wanted to restrict his wife's opportunities and self-expression.

"I was really troubled by this as a teenager. After he left, my mother was working but was not paid very well; the absence of money to support her children registered. Light bulbs were going on in my head. "Later on I would think about my father's insistence on extreme masculinity and wonder if it was a mask too, and whether femininity was the only way he could release himself from that carapace." During an argument soon after they reunited, Faludi told Stefanie, "I wrote Stiffed because of you". She had never thought that before but it was indeed a book in which she showed empathy for men trapped in deadening masculine roles. All her work seems to have dovetailed. Before she committed to writing about her father, Faludi had been considering a book about intergenerational tensions within feminism, "which boiled down to the simplest level are mother-daughter tensions", or another about right-wing women. "And here's my father, a right-wing woman," she says with a laugh.