Shocked - My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me

Zusatztext 77572463 Informationen zum Autor Patricia Volk Klappentext An NPR Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year How does a girl fashion herself into a woman? In this richly illustrated memoir! writer Patricia Volk juxtaposes her two childhood idols to find her answer. Her mother! Audrey! was an upper-middle-class New Yorker and a great beauty-meticulously groomed! proudly conventional. Elsa Schiaparelli was an avant-garde fashion designer whose creations broke every rule and elevated clothing into art. While growing up in Audrey's strict household! Patricia read Schiap's freewheeling autobiography and was transformed by it. Shocked weaves Audrey's traditional notions of domesticity with Schiap's often outrageous ideas! giving us a revelatory meditation on beauty and on being a daughter! sister! and mother-and demonstrating! meanwhile! how a single book can change a life. 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....

Product details

• Authors: Patricia Volk
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 22.04.2014
• EAN: 9780345803429
• ISBN: 978-0-345-80342-9
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 130 mm x 203 mm x 17 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries