Fancy dress: Noelle Howey has a ball in a memoir of gender, femininity, and family.

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

* Noelle Howey * Picador USA/ St. Martin's Press * $24

Not for nothing is Noelle Howey a contributor to an array of top magazines and a two-time Lambda Literary Award winner. With a keen eye and keener wit, the coeditor of Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up With Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Parents has crafted a classic tale of coming of age, queer and otherwise, in America.

Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine enters an already crowded field. Gay lit is never short of memoirs, and recent years have generated enough transgender biographies to trigger a run on Revlon. But Howey transcends her sensational subject matter. By exploring how she and her parents each experienced adolescence, she unearths surprising truths about the nature of sexual identity.

"Would you ever want to be a boy?"

Howey describes her mother, Dinah, as an adolescent confronting this question and answering no. "Girls had unbreakable, forever kinds of bonds," Howey writes. "Boys were barely even sociable. The nice ones didn't say much, and the ones who did speak didn't usually have anything pleasant to say. Dinah couldn't imagine having to live in such a solitary world."

Years later, Howey's dad decides he doesn't want to live there either. After years of struggling against his desire to cross-dress, Dick Howey renames himself Chris and transitions to life full-time in women's clothes. Eventually, with her daughter at her side, Chris takes the final step of sex-reassignment surgery.

The fact that Dick sorts through his feelings during Howey's own adolescence makes this stow more intriguing. She deploys a charming sense of the absurd when she chronicles their tandem gropings toward Total Womanhood. While Howey staves off body angst with rhinestone earrings and a "rainbow palette of department-store eye shadows," her father camouflages his desire for similar accessories by nicknaming himself Duke, taking up bowling, and subscribing to Esquire.

"It's one more irony that I was offended by my father's propensity at the time to see women and men in black-and-white archetypal terms, since I was as likely to fall into that trap myself," Howey writes. "I had grown concerned that [my boyfriend] was not aggressive, arrogant or snide.... He was a nice guy, which in my mind automatically translated into not guy enough."

Howey, who is heterosexual, breaks an unspoken taboo of transgender stories by poking fun at her father's first clumsy efforts at femininity, but these are no more ridiculous than Howey's own. Sure, the former Duke goes overboard with her tweezing, moisturizing, and exfoliating--but on the other hand, Noelle's best attempt to copy an outfit from Seventeen magazine gets her sent home from school for appearing in "unfortunate attire."

In Dress Codes, Howey shrugs ruefully at the cultural necessity of gender. Femininity, she seems to say, looks a little silly on all of us.