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.)
Author Bio
Noelle Howey is a freelance editor who has contributed to numerous magazines and web sites, including Ms., Self, Time Out, Mademoiselle, and Mother Jones. She is also the author Dress Codes. She lives with her husband and daughter in Cleveland, Ohio. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[Howey] never loses her sense of humor.... A clever writer, Howey takes this incredible material and creates a witty, warm, life-affirming memoir.
Washington Post Book World
A profoundly affecting account of her father’s long road to self-realization and a meditation on what it means to be female.
San Francisco Chronicle
Howey’s voice is chatty and clear, sassy at times, with all the aplomb of somebody used to explaining an unusual family structure. Dress Codes is a mix of contemporary references and timeless emotion.
Oregonian
It’s hard to imagine any memoir of recent years that better exemplifies "family values"—in the form of openness, love, and the sharing of intimacies.
Salon.com
Noelle Howey remembers her father, Dick, as a distant presence in her childhood; he would come home, fix a drink, and retreat to his corner of the living room. So Howey feels that she gained rather than lost a parent when Dick divorced her mother and became Christine. As Christine, she was “kinder, nicer, tidier, better with children, interested in flowers and birds and chick flicks,” Howey writes in Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods - My Mother's, My Father's and Mine. It was “like the transformation of Mr. Hyde into Miss Jekyll.” Yet she wonders, “If all these wonderful traits were inside my father all along, why was gender the only means to let them out? Why wasn’t loving me—or my mother—enough?”
Kate Taylor - The New Yorker
(Starred review.) In this rich memoir, Howey details not one life, but three. It's a difficult juggling act, but it pays off beautifully, for the story of her father's coming out as a male-to-female transsexual is only part of a larger narrative of growing up female in America. Howey's writing is neither sensationalistic nor condescendingly cheery; this is a loving portrait of a girl's complicated relationship to her father's femininity and her own. The author, co-editor of Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Parents, nicely juxtaposes her childhood dress-up games and clandestine sexual experimentation (she wanted to be Madonna) with her father's secret penchant for soft scarves and pumps (he dreamed of becoming Annette Funicello). As a teenager, Howey was impatient with the attention that her father's adventures always garnered and told her parents, both of whom she enjoyed a healthy relationship with, about her sex life: "It was a power maneuver on my part.... Dad kept raising the bar of what Mom and I could accept with equanimity, and I felt justified in doing the same." She is no less forthcoming about the odd celebrity status having a transsexual parent granted her at her ultra-liberal college, elevating her "above all the other upper-middle-class white chicks in thrift wear roaming the commons." Howey's candid, funny writing gives this memoir the cast of fiction, perhaps not surprising in a book honest enough to admit "we all reconstruct our lives in reverse, altering our own anecdotes and stories year after year in order to make them more congruent with our present-day selves." Agent, Karen Gerwin. (May)Forecast: Sure, there are lots of books out there on families with transgendered parents. But how many are memoirs? And how many are as funny and candid as this one? Howey's work will do splendidly.
Publishers Weekly
When we think of a typical American family, we do not often think of a family that comprises a transgendered father, a tomboy mother, and their daughter. However, this is the very dynamic of this touching autobiographical account of Howey's growing up under anything but ordinary circumstances. Dress Codes is a candid and compelling look back at how teenager Howey and her mother struggled with her father's transformation from a bad-tempered dad to a loving transgendered woman. Readers will both laugh and wince at the numerous issues Howey and her family have to come to terms with as they learn to grow both individually and as a family. Howey (coeditor, Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Parents), who has written for various publications, including Glamour, Jane, and Self, details her own evolution along with her family's with honesty, grace, and wit. Highly recommended for all public libraries. —Sheila Devaney Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens
Library Journal
Introspective, honest, and intelligent, Howey's memoir will appeal to readers not just as a story of transgenderism but also simply as the story of a family that has to redefine itself. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. In many ways, Dick and Noelle experience their adolescence together, simultaneously making the transformation into womanhood. How does each girl cope with this situation? How does Dick approach becoming a woman differently than he did becoming a man?
2. Discuss Dinah and Dick’s relationship. Why is Dinah so invested in Dick despite the face that he is emotionally and sexually distant? Why does she pass up her other prospects to marry him? When Dick transforms into Christine, how does their relationship change? Does Dinah feel as responsible for Christine as she did for Dick? Why or why not?
3. Dinah knew Dick’s secret when she married him, yet it is the secret that keeps themc distant and unhappy. In what ways does the secret damage Dick’s relationship with Noelle?
4. Why is it so easy for Christine to repair her relationship with Noelle and so difficult with Dinah? What about Grandma H is so attractive to Noelle when she is a child? What changes? What does Grandma H later represent to Noelle that she is trying to hard to reject?
5. When they are first married, Dick and Dinah attend a few meetings for crossdressers but neither feels comfortable and they stop going. But later Christine attends meetings that she finds informative and friendly. Discuss what changes have occurred that allow Christine to attend transgender meetings with confidence?
6. Why does Dick take Noelle to see his father’s grave? What is he trying to tell her? What mistakes did Dick’s father make that Dick later repeats with Noelle?
7. Noelle has a turbulent adolescence in which she tries hard to find herself sexually. Why is having sex at a young age so important to Noelle? What is she trying to prove to herself? In what ways does sex dominate her relationships throughout high school and college?
8. On page 222, Dinah tells Dr. Smith, “I spent ages taking care of [Dick], and I don’t have anything to show for it. I don’t even know who I am anymore.” Dr. Smith tells her to try and remember. Does Dinah find herself? In what ways does she come into her own womanhood through Dick’s coming out? By the end of the narrative, how has Dinah changed? What about her is the same? Why does Noelle have a harder time dealing with her mother’s changes than her father’s transformation?
9. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Noelle relates better to her mother than her father. Yet in many ways she is a lot like Dick. Considering Dick’s boyhood, discuss Noelle’s tendencies towards her father’s behavior.
10. Publishers Weekly wrote, “The story of [Noelle’s} father’s coming out as a male-to-female transsexual is only part of a larger narrative of growing up female in America.” What does Dress Codes say about being female in America? What female stereotypes must each of the women in the book face? How does each cope with overcoming how society says women “should” be?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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