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When Noelle Howey refers to her father as "she," you know immediately that this is no ordinary memoir. She isn't coy about the reason: "I have a girl for a dad." Transsexuals may be a staple of daytime TV, but before you dismiss this book as one more piece of kinky confessional literature, listen: DRESS CODES is not sensationalistic. It's poignant (when Noelle first sees her father dressed as a woman, it made me tear up). It's wildly readable. And how Mr. Howey became Ms. is a gripping story, even if you already know how it comes out in the end.
It must have been a real brain-twister to figure out how to construct a narrative that was judicious but not boring, dramatic but not cheesy, and fair to everyone involved. If Noelle had stuck solely to her particular point of view, about nine-tenths of her childhood wouldn't have seemed all that special: a withdrawn and angry father, a loving-but-miserable mother who tried desperately, and vainly, to make her marriage work --- big deal! She needs to get at the why of this sad impasse and she does it, as the subtitle of the book suggests, by alternating her own story with third-person reconstructions --- complete with dialogue and inner musings, presumably based on diaries, letters, and interviews with her parents --- of the early lives of her father Dick (later Christine) and her mother Dinah.
This approach isn't an unqualified success. For one thing, it doesn't ring quite true (it is scarcely credible that Dick and Dinah would remember verbatim a conversation they had 20 years ago!). For another, it doesn't lend itself to analysis; and while on the whole I was happy to be spared the sort of pop psychology and sociology that usually passes for critical thought these days, I wouldn't have minded a little more depth. At times, too, I had the sense that Howey is almost too smooth a writer --- concise, punchy, super-accessible --- for such thorny material. She just misses being glib, and she has a habit of turning off deeper feelings with a joke. I wished that she'd allowed herself more often to stop being so relentlessly entertaining and trusted that her subject, and her story, would carry themselves.
However, the juxtaposition of the three protagonists' tales does make for an awfully good read, frank and immediate. More importantly, it points up the startling parallels between Dick Howey's yearning to be female and the kind of gender-related role-playing so-called normal people go in for; Dinah's determination to be a good, supportive wife even if it meant almost never having sex and going to cross-dressing parties; or Noelle's staged seduction of her high-school boyfriend. One of the most touching sections shows Dick attempting to "pass" as a regular guy by cultivating the correct body language ("Masculine Movement 101") and requisite insensitive manner; how different is this from Noelle's attempts to make herself over à la Seventeen magazine?
Dick became so skillful at disguising himself that he turned into the very opposite of the "nice" husband and loving father he had hoped to be. He criticized Dinah's body, blaming her for their infrequent sexual encounters; he drank heavily; he either ignored Noelle or put her down. "For someone having a hard time being a guy," Dinah would say, "he was awfully damn good at it."
Happily, he turned out to be even better at being a woman. Reversing his self-inflicted teen-age drills in "guy" behavior, once Dick had decided to become female, he really applied himself: He worked with a vocal coach, honed his makeup technique, traded fashion tips via e-mail, practiced smiling. He won a local cross-dressers' beauty competition and was crowned Miss Paradise 1989. On a deeper level, he felt comfortable with himself at last. "Now that I'm a woman," Dick told Noelle, "I think I can finally be a real dad...Boy, that sounds fucked-up, doesn't it?"
Not really. Not to Noelle, anyway, who, after essentially doing without a father her whole life, is thrilled to have one. By the time Dick is ready to go public under his new name, Christine, he and Dinah are divorced, but she and Noelle throw him a "coming out" party anyway --- and I defy anyone to read about it without a lump in their throat.
DRESS CODES could have stopped there, in a burst of sitcom-style happiness, and it would still have been a good book, but because it continues into the more problematic years that followed, it is a better one. It's not that Noelle ran into a lot of sexual prejudice. In fact, as a freshman at ultraliberal Oberlin College, her father's transformation actually gave her status. But she had received even more mixed messages than your average young woman about what it means to be female, and clearly it was her turn to yell for help. She did it with a full-barreled crisis: lousy relationship, grad school screw-up, severe depression. Her parents rallied to rescue her, and they did it together. DRESS CODES concludes with a quiet celebration of Noelle's 24th birthday, just the three of them: Dinah, remarried; Christine, reborn; and their daughter, recovered and learning to find her own way. It's a poignant ending to a very brave book.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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