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Summary
Summary
From the acclaimed author of Stuffed: an intimate, richly illustrated memoir, written with charm and panache, that juxtaposes two fascinating lives--the iconoclastic designer Elsa Schiaparelli and the author's own mother--to explore how a girl fashions herself into a woman.
Audrey Morgen Volk, an upper-middle-class New Yorker, was a great beauty and the polished hostess at her family's garment district restaurant. Elsa Schiaparelli--"Schiap"--the haute couture designer whose creations shocked the world, blurred the line between fashion and art, and believed that everything, even a button, has the potential to delight.
Audrey's daughter Patricia read Schiap's autobiography, Shocking Life, at a tender age, and was transformed by it. These two women--volatile, opinionated, and brilliant each in her own way--offered Patricia contrasting lessons about womanhood and personal style that allowed her to plot her own course.
Moving seamlessly between the Volks' Manhattan and Florida milieux and Schiap's life in Rome and Paris (among friends such as Dalí, Duchamp, and Picasso), Shocked weaves Audrey's traditional notions of domesticity with Schiaparelli's often outrageous ideas into a marvel-filled, meditation on beauty, and on being a daughter, sister, and mother, while demonstrating how a single book can change a life.
Author Notes
Patricia Volk is the author of the memoir Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family and four works of fiction. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Playboy . She lives in New York City.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Volk (Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family) has a talent for unearthing meaning in the seemingly mundane. She works off the theory that everyone reads one influential book before puberty that leaves an indelible mark. Hers was outre fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli's memoir, Shocking Life, filched from a shelf before her voracious reader of a mother (who wore Schiaparelli perfume) could return it to the Upper West Side bookstore where she "rented" books. Volk also describes studying her own mother (deemed beautiful by everyone from the dentist to the hostess at Schrafft's) as if she were a text: watching her put on her makeup and dispense aphorisms ("Never let a man see you with cold cream on your face"); observing as she falls out and reunites with her four best friends; and then witnessing her mother's decline later in life ("Either she's getting shorter or I'm getting taller"). This is no soft-focus hagiography, however. Volk is cheerfully honest about her mother's concern with what others think of her and her cruelty to her own mother, and she bluntly calls Schiaparelli "a terrible mother." When Volk returns to Schiaparelli's memoir 57 years after her first read, she realizes that her 10-year-old self completely missed the woman's "profound melancholia" and suicidal tendencies. Including both personal photographs and depictions of Schiaparelli inventions, such as women's underpants that didn't require ironing, this memoir is a compelling tribute to two ambitious women who were way ahead of their time. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins/Loomis Agency. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Presenting an unusual memoir, Volk (author of Stuffed, 2001, among other works) writes eloquently of her mother, Audrey Morgen Volk, a very fashionable, well-off Manhattanite, and of another woman of fashion who also influenced Volk's life, who happened to be her mother's polar opposite, Elsa Schiaparelli, the famous Parisian couturier and devil-may-care pal of artists Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau (and others). Young Volk secretly read Shocking Life, Schiaparelli's autobiography, imbibing with gusto the scent of a risky life. She used both women both polestars in leading her to become a writer. Progressing through both women's lives, Volk's chapters center on one specific topic per chapter: gambling, for instance, and attitudes toward clothing and sex and feature Audrey and Elsa anecdotes, punctuated with photos of both women. The contrast between the two couldn't be more startling or poignant. Ever the smart NYC shopper, Audrey looks for deals at Ohrbach's and Loehmann's; her furrier copies the likes of Revillon, though not at that price. Elsa delights in doing startling things, and gives birth to baby Gogo, broke and deserted by her husband, a count. But parallels also abound, and through Volk's history and memories, we get the best of both women and their impact on the author.--Jacobs, Barbara Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SEVEN years ago, a drunken woman made a dramatic emphatic gesture in a Manhattan cab that sent one of my vintage faux gold-and-turquoise Schiaparelli clip-on earrings flying somewhere into the back seat's nether regions. This is not one of those taxi stories with a happy ending (the sole copy of the manuscript recovered; the priceless Strad delivered in time for the big concert). The driver spent several minutes kindly helping me search. Numbers were exchanged. Forms filed. All in vain. That this minuscule loss still nags at me, prompting compulsive early-morning sweeps of eBay, Etsy and the rest, is testimony both to the sentimental power of objects and to the mysterious allure of a designer people keep trying to dredge from historical obscurity, despite her all-but-moribund brand. Last year Elsa Schiaparelli, the longtime rival of Coco Chanel best remembered for a vivid shade of magenta pink, was yoked to the global fashion powerhouse Miuccia Prada in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute. Now she figures centrally in "Shocked," a sensual memoir by Patricia Volk, illustrated with photographs, artifacts and maps - some doctored to amusing effect, as if an enthusiastic Surrealist with a pair of scissors had gotten hold of the Volk family album. Excerpts from Schiaparelli's own 1954 memoir, "Shocking Life," which received a wry but affirming review in these pages from the distinguished editor Leo Lerman and is currently sold in paperback as a novelty item at Urban Outfitters, are themselves folded into Volk's, as if in a croissant or a knish. (Volk is one of the scions of a Jewish restaurant clan, which she previously examined in the delightful memoir "Stuffed.") A voracious childhood reader who writes of plunging into the Classics Illustrated comic series "like Scrooge McDuck diving into his swimming pool of money," Volk tells of being so mesmerized by "Shocking Life," which her stern and stylish mother, Audrey, had rented from Womrath's bookstore, that she faked a sore throat to stay home from school and finish it. She had already been intrigued by the elaborately manufactured bottles filled with Shocking perfume, modeled after Mae West's torso, that her father wrapped in hundred-dollar bills for his wife's birthdays. This is what Audrey ("the most beautiful woman in the world," according to Volk lore) spritzes on at the end of a rigid grooming routine that includes Pond's cold cream, Max Factor Pan-Cake, Elizabeth Arden lipstick in Sky Blue Pink, the "guillotine" of the eyelash curler and an audience of one daughter, sometimes two, watching in fascination and horror. "My mother has painted a portrait of her face on top of her face," Volk announces. "My mother is a painting." But being raised by this mother was not exactly "Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe" - more, on occasion, "The Scream." Audrey is animated by rage (her nickname is THOON, for The Hand Out of Nowhere), once smacking Patty across the face so hard that she requires a root canal on her lower-right central incisor. Audrey never apologizes. She is fixated on appearances, even demanding that the family fake merriment in public. When Patty asks her to name one regret, late in life, she replies: "That I talked my mother out of getting a face-lift." Audrey is superstitious and guarded but insists her young girls take weekly showers with their father. "It dangles there, pointy with a ridge, looking like a map of Manhattan," is how Patty remembers Daddy's member, adding dryly: "I live on my father's penis." Specifically in a lavishly decorated apartment on that long-lost and much-mourned version of the Upper West Side, where her mother refuses to recognize the undesirable Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, and the east side of Broadway besides. From this gilded cage, Schiaparelli's flights of fancy seem a merciful escape. Intimidated by Audrey's meticulous wardrobe (instead of a wing and a prayer, she lives by a ring and a mink), Patty marvels at the designer's trompe l'oeil dresses, wacky hats and creative buttons, which present obvious appeal to a child, if not the American mass market: "Owls! Swans! Bugs! Nuts! Suns! Moons! Stars! Cinnamon sticks and licorice!" She sympathizes with the homely Schiap's youthful experiment in "face planting" - not falling down, but stuffing nasturtium, poppy and morning glory seeds in her nose, ears and mouth so that she might burst into bloom and be prettier than her own older sister. And Patty admires Schiap's wartime good works. The Volk family boycotts Chanel (who at the very least associated with Nazis), perhaps with especial vehemence because Patty's father, Cecil, dodged the draft. This too might've been Audrey's doing: "Cecil, the care and feeding of him, the loving and ongoing perfecting of him and the earnest burnishing of their lives together, the hallowedness of their union, is her lifework." Until Audrey decides to try each of her adult daughters' professions, that is. AT a time when feminism wasn't in vogue and bourgeois values prevailed, the self-reliant Schiap provided an alternate path, a dash of Continental romance. Still, the insistence that "Shocking Life," which went unmentioned in Volk's previous memoir, exerted a "transformative" influence on such an intellectually omnivorous child feels a little overstrenuous. (Didn't the book have to go back to Womrath's at some point, its pages unworried?) Volk visits the now centenarian psychoanalyst Martin Bergmann to ask why pre-pubescents' reading is so universally powerful (it "helps them into puberty," he replies) and appends a list of other people and their transformative books, including Oprah Winfrey, which feels like a brazen bid for Oprah's Book Club cooked up in the publisher's conference room. But whatever it takes to get readers into "Shocked" may be worthwhile. It's a time machine laden with long-lost physical objects (dance cards, darning eggs), a meditation on the plastic possibilities of womankind and a very special treat. Alexandra Jacobs is an editor at the Thursday and Sunday Styles sections of The Times.
Kirkus Review
The spirited account of how an encounter with a memoir by couturier Elsa Schiaparelli (18901973) transformed a young girl's view of what it meant to be a woman. Novelist Volk (To My Dearest Friends, 2007, etc.) adored her movie-star gorgeous mother Audrey. However, even as a child, she could never quite countenance the "blind adherence to the mystifying virtue of seemly' [female] behavior" that Audrey demanded of her. She unexpectedly found another, more subversive model for feminine behavior in Schiaparelli, whose autobiography, Shocking Life (1954), Volk read at age 10. Like the author, "Schiap" was a much-loved child. But she was also one her parents "thought of as difficult,' " who could never buy into the idea that there was "a right way and a wrong way" to do things. Schiap was no great beauty, something Volk also understood. Yet she still managed to create an enduring legacy as an avant-garde fashion designer with a genuinely artistic flair. Schiaparelli's remarkable story provided Volk the "shock" she needed to grow away from Audrey's certitudes--about everything from clothes to men to life itself--and into her own, unique sensibilities. If Schiap could be successful designing dresses that mimicked skeletal forms or hats that looked like shoes, then anything was possible for creative women who couldn't fit the pre-existing gender mold that Audrey both touted and exemplified. Generously illustrated with images from the two worlds Volk depicts--that of her family and of Schiaparelli--the narrative that emerges from Volk's deft interweaving of lives is as sharp-eyed as it is wickedly funny. Her attention to detail, especially in her evocations of 1950s New York, is nothing short of delicious. Witty, tender and vividly nostalgic.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Novelist and memoirist Volk's (To My Dearest Friends) sophisticated vision unfolds with the study of two very different but very glamorous women-her mother, Audrey, an upper-class New York domestic goddess with the looks and manners of Grace Kelly, and genius haute couture European artist Elsa Schiaparelli, whose book, art, and (yes) perfume forever change the course of young Volk's life. As funny as it is poignant, Volk's work employs a combination of words to live by, rich vignettes, and photographs to show how she learned what it meant to be a woman and how all it takes is one book to transform a young person's world. Full of high fashion, mink furs, and family, the book manages to weave a tale that is sure to stick with readers long after the last page. Verdict Perfect for anyone who loved Volk's first autobiographical effort, Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family, or who enjoys the work of memoirists like Jeannette Walls or Grace Coddington.-Melissa Culbertson, Homewood, IL (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Mirrors Everything is mirrors. The legs of the vanity, the vanity itself, the pullout stool. The drawers, drawer pulls, the ivy planters on both ends. The three adjustable face-mirrors that recess behind beveled mirror frames. Audrey wears her green velvet robe. It grazes her green carpet and matches her green drapes. A broad lace collar frames her face. When she perches on the stool we are almost the same height. I stand behind her to the left. That way I can watch from every angle. I can see her reflection in all three face-mirrors and see the real her too, her flesh-and-blood profile closest to me. I can see four different views of my mother simultaneously. Sometimes, when she adjusts the mirrors, I can see thousands of her, each face nesting a slightly smaller face. The lace vee of her robe gets tiny, tinier, smaller than a stamp, until it vanishes. "Is there a word for that?" I ask. "Phantasmagoria, darling," my mother says. The mirrored drawers store her tools. The left drawer holds hair-grooming aids: a tortoiseshell comb, her rat tail, a brush, clips, bobby pins, hairpins, brown rubber curlers, perforated aluminum ones. In the middle drawer, she keeps her creams, tonics and astringents. (Soap is the enemy. She does not wash her face. Water touches it only when she swims.) A blue and white box of Kleenex, the cellophane tube of Co-ets (quilted disposable cotton pads), her tweezers, cuticle scissors and emery boards that are made, she has told me, out of crushed garnets, her birthstone. The right-hand drawer (she is right-handed) organizes makeup and--separated from everything else, in its own compartment, her eyelash curler. Everybody tells me my mother is beautiful. The butcher tells me. The dentist, the doormen, my teachers, cab drivers gaping at her in the rearview mirror as they worry the wheel. Friends from school, friends from camp, camp counselors, the hostess at Schrafft's. The cashier at Rappaport's and the pharmacist at Whelan's, where we get Vicks VapoRub for growing pains. At Indian Walk, the salesman measures my feet for Mary Janes and says, "You have a very beautiful mother, little girl. Do you know that?" When a man tips his hat on Broadway and says, "Mrs. Volk! How lovely to see you!," my mother says, "Patty, this is Mr. Lazar, a customer of your father's." We shake hands. "How do you do, Mr. Lazar?" I say, or "Nice to meet you, Mr. Lazar," and Mr. Lazar pinches my cheek. "Did anybody ever tell you," he says, "you have one gorgeous mother?" Thursday nights, when four generations of family gather at my grandmother's for dinner, the relatives tell my mother, "You look so beautiful tonight, darling." Then they violate Audrey's Pronoun Rule: "It is rude to discuss someone who is present using the third person. Never call someone within hearing distance 'he' or 'she.' Refer to that person by name." Yet they use "she." They speak about my mother as if she weren't there. Right in front of her they say, "Isn't she beautiful? Did you ever in your life?" But this face in the mirror right now, people who think my mother is beautiful don't know this face. I know what my mother looks like without makeup. I know her real face. I know how beautiful she really is. She spreads two bobby pins with her teeth and pins her hair back. She dips three fingers in a large jar of Pond's, then creams her face in a circular motion. She plucks four Kleenexes: FRRRIIIIP! FRRRIIIIP! FRRRIIIIP! FRRRIIIIP! and tissues off the Pond's. Here she sometimes pauses, meets my eyes in the mirror and says, "Never let a man see you with cold cream on your face." She disposes of remaining shininess using tonic shaken onto a Co-et. Her face is bare, the smooth sleeping face I kiss before leaving for school. Her poreless skin, stretched tight in flat planes, no matter what time of year it is, looks tan. She dabs on moisturizer and smoothes it in. From the -right--hand drawer, she extracts a white plastic box of Max Factor pancake makeup. Its contents are the color of a -Band--Aid and smell like an attic. Sometimes she calls pancake her "base." Sometimes it's "my foundation." She unscrews the lid and rubs a moist sponge into the color. She makes five smears with the sponge: center of the forehead, both cheeks, tip of nose, chin. Then she begins the work of evening it out, concentrating to make sure the color reaches her hairline and under her chin, and that part of the nose dab is used to lighten the inside corners of her eyes. She is satisfied when her face is all one color, including her lips. This is the moment she stops looking like my mother. This is when her face is reduced to two eyes and two nostrils. It is as flat as the rink at Rockefeller Center. This is when I swear: "I will never, ever wear makeup, Ma." "You'll change your tune." "I won't." She laughs. "We'll see." She slips her base back in the drawer and flips the lid on her cream rouge. She dots her cheekbones and feathers the color. Opening her compact, she pats on powder, focusing on her nose. She inspects herself from all angles. She taps on pale blue eye shadow with her pinky. Her red -mascara--box slides open revealing a black cake and miniature toothbrush. She swirls the brush in a shot glass filled with water then rubs it against the cake. Holding the brush to her lashes, she blinks against it, upper lids first. She freshens her eyebrows with the brush, shaping them and making sure no powder lurks in the hairs. Then it is time for the eyelash curler. The bottom half looks like the grip of scissors. The working end is an eyelash guillotine. She brings the curler up to an eye. She rearranges her lipless mouth into a black "O." If she blinks or sneezes while curling her eyelashes, the eyelash curler will pull them out. Her eyes will be bald. She leans so close to the mirror it mists. She opens her eyes wide, angling her lashes into the vise. "Don't bump me," she warns. We hold our breaths. She clamps down, setting the lashes. We exhale when she releases them and moves to the other eye. Now she sits back a bit. She analyzes her work. My mother has painted a portrait of her face on top of her face. My mother is a painting. She takes the pins out of her hair and drops them in the pin drawer. She shakes her blondish hair out and fluffs her fingers through it. If it is Saturday, there's a chance her nails haven't chipped yet. She gets them done Fridays for the weekend and even though she is careful, sometimes they chip. When that happens, she blurts a woeful "Darn!" and it breaks my heart. Finally, she is ready to apply her lipstick, the only color she wears: Elizabeth Arden's "Sky Blue Pink." Stretching a smile, my mother paints her lips back on. She mashes them together then blots them on a folded tissue: FRRRIIIIP! She reapplies the "Sky Blue Pink," blotting one last time. "If you blot twice," she instructs, "you can eat a frankfurter and your lipstick still won't come off." Once her lips pass inspection, she is ready to ask me to leave her room. Audrey does not wish to be seen getting dressed. She does not wish to be seen in her underthings. I have seen her in a bathing suit at the beach and once by accident in a full slip while waiting for her at the dressmaker's. I have never seen her body. My sister says when she's dead we'll strip her and see everything. I don't want to. One morning at breakfast, Audrey's bathrobe buckled between the buttons and I saw something she would not have wanted me to see. I was miserable. She adjusts the mirrors and turns her face from side to side. She smiles, raises an eyebrow and flirts with herself. She inspects her teeth for lipstick. When she is satisfied, she reaches for one of the two bottles on top of her vanity. During the day, she opts for the larger one. This bottle is five and a half inches tall and filled with yellow eau de cologne. The top, electric pink, looks like Ali Baba's hat. The bottle has breasts. The woman who made the bottle, a sculptor named Leonor Fini, modeled it on the mannequin of a Hollywood movie star. The movie star's name is Mae West. In summer camp, we wear orange canvas flotation vests the RAF nicknamed Mae Wests that make us look busty like the bottle. We pose like calendar girls with our hands behind our heads. Wiggling our hips we chant: Knit one Purl two Mae West Woo! Woo! When she is going out for the evening, my mother uses the smaller version of the bottle. This one contains perfume the color of whiskey. It is three inches high and rests on a gold-and-pink velvet pedestal. The bottle is covered by a clear glass dome made in Bohemia, a miniature version of the kind taxidermists use to protect stuffed owls. White lace is printed around the base of the dome and it's raised, you can feel it with your fingertips. The neck of the bottle, where it meets the round gold head of the -frosted--glass dauber, is wrapped with a choker of gold cord. The cord is sealed with a membrane called onionskin that rips the first time the bottle is used. Draped over the cord is a minuscule measuring tape made of cloth. It hangs from behind the mannequin's neck and crosses over the front of the bottle where a navel would be. Here a small metallic seal with the letter "S" in the center holds the tape together. Tucked under the tape at the back of the frosted dauber are glass flowers--baby blue, pink, red, yellow, and sometimes dark blue--with contrasting glass stamens and two green glass leaves, all hand-blown on the island of Murano. The flowers are pierced by wires covered with green florist's tape and twisted into a nosegay until the stems join in a point. The bottle, its dome and its pedestal are packaged in a box that opens like a bound book. Its green velvet spine is stamped in gold with the name of the perfume and the woman who made it, the perfume's title and author. The perfume and its box are called a "perfume presentation." You could slip the presentation between two books on a shelf and no one would know it -wasn't a book. My mother says the perfume is manufactured in a mansion not far from Paris. She says each bottle has twenty separate parts made in three different countries and takes thirty ladies to assemble. My mother touches the long frosted dauber to her pulse points--the places blood flows closest to the skin, hence her warmest external places, where the scent heats most and disperses widest--the inside of her wrists, behind her ears, and the backs of her knees. In the evening, if she is going out, she dabs below her neck. When she leaves the apartment, I play games with the bottle. I dress up in her green velvet robe, lift the flowers out of the measuring tape and pretend a man is giving them to me: "Why, monsieur! Merci for zee lovely bouquet! Ooo-la-la!" I pretend I am selling the bottle to a famous customer in my fancy French store: "Madame would perhaps care to buy zee perfume, oui oui?" or that the bottle is a movie star and she needs my opinion. The name of the perfume is "Shocking." It is made by Elsa Schiaparelli (ski-ah-pa-raY-lee). I know it is special. Every year on my mother's birthday, my father gives it to her, every January 21 the same gift. Late at night, after closing our family's restaurant, he opens the door to our bedroom. "Get up, girls!" He shakes my sister and me awake. We follow him down the hall, past the locked linen closet, into their bedroom so we can witness the event. Every year my mother is surprised. Every year she is thrilled. "Oh, Cecil!" She clasps her hands under her chin. "Really, you are much too extravagant!" She throws her arms around his neck and kisses him. She raises one foot behind her, pointing her toe like she does when they dance. She balances against him, smiling down at her daughters. "Girls, I hope you know: Your father is the most generous man in the world!" Then my father says to us: "Isn't your mother the most beautiful woman in the world?" "Yes." We nod then pad back to bed. "Shocking," the smell of my mother. Always the perfume comes gift-wrapped. My father makes the paper himself. He uses Scotch tape and as many hundred-dollar bills as it takes to get the job done. Excerpted from Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me by Patricia Volk All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
