Mommy Dressing: A Love Story, After a Fashion

by Lois Gould

Book Overview

The unanimously acclaimed portrait of a bittersweet girlhood, capturing the glamour and cruelty of New York's fashion world in the middle of the century. Exquisitely written and painfully observant,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385490534
• ISBN13: 9780385490535
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 261 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Poetic, heartbreaking, and fascinating

Lois Gould's memoir of growing up as the daughter of American designer Jo Copeland strikes a rare balance. Gould's childhood was often harsh, lonely, and bewildering, yet also thrilling, if only in the looking-back on it. The creative juices flowing all around her were abundant, and must have informed her own artistic bent. Gould is a poetic writer, and while she doesn't flinch from revealing the nastier aspects of her childhood, she also doesn't fall into the oh-woe-is-me psychobabble so popular today. She comes to a hard-won understanding of and compassion for her beautiful, brittle, dazzlingly talented mother. The book is also a rich history of American social and political life in the first half of the 20th century. Highly recommended.

Mommie Dressing

This was a Christmas present last year that I just re-read and loved even more for the texture of Lois Gould's rarified existence and the terror and mystery of her mother's unbelievable life. All my favorite topics are combined in this remarkably dry-eyed memoir: fashion, mother-daughter relations, Park Avenue life, how to pack a steamer trunk when going off to the Paris collections...

Further proof that real life is the stuff of novels

Lois Gould's biography of her mother, and in no small part her own autobiography, is written with the novelist's touch. The prose is spare but evocative; the observations through a child's eyes clear but heartbreaking. It's a beautiful "read" although a sad, sad story. Lois Gould, however, bears no malice and allows us to judge Jo Copeland, which we do ultimately with compassion.

Unsurpassed poignancy

Gould's flawless memoir captures the complexities of a family, an era and a place beautifully, and anyone who reads her book is richer for it. As with the autobiography Angela's Ashes, Gould is able to recreate her personal history with fascinating detail. The fashion sketches and photos of her mother enhance the text. The book is a captivating armchair journey. I admire Gould for her ability to write of her parents with unblinking perception, conveying her compassion despite their tremendous shortcomings.

A Dark Look at the Life of a Celebrity's Child

How often we might envy the lives of children of the rich, the talented and the famous. But Lois Gould's poignant memoir "Mommy Dressing" again underscores that a childhood lived in the shadow of glamor but without love and affection is no way to grow up. It is a dark moment when Gould asks her mother about a scar only to learn that her mother, who had a horror of doctors, had a rib surgically removed the better to wear the fashions of the 1920s. Gould's portrayal of herself as the gawky, awkward, intellectual daughter of a beautiful woman who dominated the American fashion industry for a time is reminiscent of Susan Cheever's recollections of her life as the daughter of novelist John Cheever. A quickly read but fascinating book.