Shocked

Starred review from February 11, 2013
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 outré 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.

February 15, 2013
The spirited account of how an encounter with a memoir by couturier Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) 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.

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November 1, 2012

The best-selling author of Stuffed offers another memoir, which places her squarely between her mother and the famed Italian fashion designer.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2013
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 Dal- 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 womenboth polestarsin 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 sexand 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)