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