Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods—My Mother’S, My Father’S, and Mine

An intensely felt and extraordinary family memoir by Noelle Howey, who characterizes her touching and confusing sexual journey into womanhood as influenced by her relationship with her transgendered father and tomboy mother.

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.

With edgy humor, courage, and remarkable sensitivity, Noelle Howey challenges all of our beliefs in what constitutes gender and a normal family.