Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine

Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine
by Noelle Howey

Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine
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Book Summary Information

Author: Noelle Howey
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2002-11-21
ISBN: 031242258X
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Picador
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Book Reviews of Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine

Book Review: It's all about the tone she takes.
Summary: 3 Stars

I am a great fan of using humor to deliver painful truths in writing, but this book goes too far in that direction. The writer's tone is unbearably flippant at times. She seems to hold her life and the lives of her parents at arm's length where she can giggle at it all with shoulder-shrugging, eye-rolling smirks. When dealing with her own childhood, that approach is fine, but I was taken aback by the writer's overly jokey tone when talking about her mother's adolescence and her father's painful childhood. That is probably one way of dealing with the confusion and pain of her father's life and the distance that caused in their relationship. Thankfully, late in the story, her father goes through his transformation and so does she. When her humor finally fails her, she also relaxes her frenetic "let's-play-it-for-laughs" posture. As a reader, I was relieved. All in all, this is a fascinating story about gender that raises as many questions as it answers. The writer's eye for telling detail brings her past alive, and she is one funny woman, so I do recommend it despite the snarky tone. Also, how many other people can tell this story? That alone makes this book worth it.

Summary of Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine

"There's no news like hearing irrefutable proof that you're not the sole cause of your parents'' woes, your father's drinking, your unshakable feeling that you're not put together quite right and finding out the problem all along was your father's unrequited yearning for angora." --Noelle Howey from Dress Codes

Throughout her childhood in suburban Ohio, Noelle struggled to gain love and affection from her distant father. In compensating for her father's brusqueness, Noelle idolized her nurturing tomboy mother and her conservative grandma who tried to turn her into "a little lady." At age 14, Noelle's mom told her the family secret straight out: "Dad likes to wear women's clothes."

As Noelle copes with a turbulent adolescence, further confused by the male and female role models she had as a girl, her father begins to metamorphose into the loving parent she had always longed for--only now outfitted in pedal pushers and pink lipstick. Could becoming a woman make her father a completely different person? With edgy humor, courage, and remarkable sensitivity, Noelle Howey challenges all of our beliefs in what constitutes gender and a "normal" family.

If the only time you think you've seen a transsexual is on the Jerry Springer show, Noelle Howey's thoughtful, funny memoir of her suburban childhood with a cross-dressing dad may leave you wondering where all the fireworks are. The first half of Dress Codes is like anyone's story of parental neglect. "I had a dad possibly like yours," Howey explains, "sullen, sporadically hostile, frequently vacant." It was her loving mother who eventually confided her father's secret when Howey was 15, by which time it came as a relief that the remoteness, the drinking, the mood swings were not the young Noelle's fault, but the result of her father's constantly stifled "yearning for angora." Although the early chapters are interesting, Dress Codes really takes off at the halfway point, when her father realized he was not a heterosexual male transvestite, but a woman. His sexual transition, and the family's awkward adjustment to it--including the author's inability in high school to keep any secret aside from this One Big Secret--is written with warmth and insight, and colored with a lonely girl's lingering disappointment. --Regina Marler

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