Mommy Dressing: A love story, after a fashion

Novelist Lois Gould pulls off an impressive balancing act in her memoir of life as the daughter of pioneering American fashion designer Jo Copeland. She unsparingly depicts Copeland as a distant, self-involved, critical parent ("I never perspire," she tells Lois. "Why must you?"), yet Gould is also sympathetic to her mother's point of view. The daughter of a garment jobber who nurtured her gifts but appropriated her earnings to pay for her brother's education, Copeland could escape only through marriage to a handsome cigar manufacturer. Unfortunately, Ed Regensburg found the talent and ambition he had admired in his fiancée irksome in a wife. He saddled Copeland with two children she didn't want, then moved out, leaving her to support them. Gould conveys the black humor implicit in her mother's horror of having her glamorous life spoiled by childish messiness--in one hilarious scene, Lois and her brother, sent to visit a friend's equally neglected son in the country so they won't spoil a fancy party, erupt into the living room, bedraggled from a long train ride, to announce indignantly, "Stevie Sondheim cheats!" She also appreciates Copeland's importance as one of America's first and best female designers (active from the 1920s through the mid-'60s). She was a pioneering career woman out of necessity and desire doing her best in a society that neither appreciated nor offered any help to working mothers. Gould's memoir is all the more poignant because it is clear-sighted and unsentimental. --Wendy Smith