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Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods—My Mother's, My Father's and Mine
Noelle Howey, 2002
Macmillan Picador
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312422202
Summary
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 fourteen, Noelle’s mom told her the family secret: “Dad likes to wear women’s clothes.” As Noelle copes with a turbulent adolescence, her father begins to metamorphose into the loving parent she had always longed for—only now outfitted in pedal pushers and pink lipstick. (From the publisher.)