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

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

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 also written for Ms., Jane, Mother Jones, Teen People, Bitch, Mademoiselle, and Self. 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.