 Making the Strange Familiar
This evening I had the great pleasure of hearing Noelle Howey read from her memoir DRESS CODES. This is not a book it would ordinarily occur to me to pick up, but Noelle's voice and extraordinary storytelling ability makes DRESS CODES a must-read. From page one I was hooked. What is so compelling about Noelle Howey's story is how she makes what at first glance seems so strange - a father becoming a woman - into an every-family story (she grew up in Ohio, what is more middle-America than that?). Do yourself a favor and read DRESS CODES.
Lacerating, facetious, triumphant
I bought this book because I'm addicted to memoirs-at least currently. After reading the first chapter, I almost aborted the reading effort, thinking it might be too sexual for my tastes and that I wasn't really interested in transgender issues. But I stuck with it and this book stuck to my hands for two days while I couldn't put it down. It is incredibly well written (it reads like a novel) and the author is so honest and forthright, she becomes a teacher on issues beyond transgender and ultimately into clinical depression. It's a terribly sad story, painful and emotional on many levels, yet ultimately triumphant and always very FUNNY! I kept looking at the young author's photo on the book jacket-and the collection of family photos on the covers--to remind myself that these characters are real people, even the people next door. Noelle Howey has an impressive vocabulary and a knack for writing things simply, yet elegantly. I highly recommend this book.Submitted by the author of I'm Living Your Dream Life
TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE...
This is a well-written memoir by a remarkable young woman who, at the age of fifteen, was made aware of the fact that her father was suffering from gender dysphoria. It seemed that her father enjoyed cross dressing and had decided that he would prefer to do so all the time. He had come to a realization that he was actually a transsexual and not just a transvestite. This wryly funny memoir, which is not just the author's memoir but that of her mother, as well, and, to some extent, that of her father, though, as in life, his essence remains the most elusive. The author is clearly an intelligent, perceptive young woman, and she lays bare her parents' relationship, to the extent that she can, with their blessing, as well as her recollection of growing up in a household where the father was evidently deeply troubled by his gender issues. She outlines the impact that this had on him and, consequently, on her and her mother, as well as on the family dynamics. She fully discusses the changes that his coming out about his gender issues would confer upon them all, both good and bad. Informative as well as entertaining, the author manages to infuse a great deal of perceptiveness in analyzing the familial relationships. She supported her father's decision, though some of the issues that she had with him were not as a direct result of his gender dysphoria, but rather with the way he treated both her and her mother as she was growing up. Still, as someone who grew up in a seemingly traditional nuclear family, only to find herself in a non-traditional one, the author has remained remarkable sanguine about the entire experience. This is a wonderful book that gives a birds-eye view of the experience of living with someone who has gender dysphoria. It is also gives the reader a peek into a family that was simply trying to cope the best way that they knew how, given the little that they knew about what was really at the core of many of the troubling dynamics within the household. It is a book that grounds what some may perceive as an unreal situation in the context of a vital family that was simply struggling to survive a complicated situation into which they were thrust by forces beyond their control. It is a portrait of a family in pain that survives and comes to terms with its permutation.
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