| Description: |
|
Amazon.com Review
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
Product Description
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 let her buy a pair of Guess jeans that she had been coveting.Then, staring straight at the car windshield on the way home from the mall, her mom finally blurted out the family secret: "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 with 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.AUTHORBIO: NOELLE HOWEY is the co-editor of Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Parents, winner of two 2000 Lambda Literary Awards.She has written for publications as varied as Ms., Jane, Mother Jones, Glamour, Self, Fortune Small Business, Teen People, Seventeen, and Bitch.A finalist for a GLAAD Media Award, she received a 2001 Nonfiction Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.An Ohio native, Noelle Howey lives in Minneapolis with her husband.REVIEW: "...rarely has the true value of family been so movingly and lovingly evoked as it is in Dress Codes." (John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl) REVIEW: "With disarming honesty and startling lucidity Noelle Howey beautifully weaves together the stories of three people coming into themselves." (Thisbe Nissen, author of The Good People of New York) REVIEW: "Noelle Howey's story is astonishing for the skill, perception and integrity with which it is told...both funny and entertaining."(Amy Wilensky, author of Passing for Normal: A Memoir of Compulsion)
|
