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Shocked (My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me) by Patricia Volk: a Book Club Discussion
Editor’s Post by Deborah Hetrick Catanese
Here we are back into the bliss of summer reading time at long last, and it’s time to talk about the first selection of our new Book Club, Shocked by Patricia Volk. And if you haven’t already jumped in with us and picked up this very interesting and readable book, maybe our discussion questions and answers will inspire you to do just that…preferably with a beach chair, sunglasses, and a refreshing beverage nearby!
The goal of our book club is that we read together a non-fiction or fiction book that relates to our mission of enhancing our experiences as both mothers and fashionable women as we stay true our own quality code for living. With that goal in mind, this first selection certainly fits the bill. It is an amazing memoir of a writer’s struggles to find herself while growing up with a mother who both dazzled and bewildered her with very rigid prescriptions for how to live an Upper Middle Class life as a wife, mother, and beautiful woman in Manhattan in the days of “fashion to die for”, during those mid times of the twentieth century.
I have presented a few of my own “study questions”, and have taken the liberty to answer them from my own personal reactions to this book. Hopefully, it will stimulate some thinking on your parts as well. I’m sure many of you have either read this book or a review of it, but I will try to write this in a way that it’s also interesting for our busy Mamas who didn’t have the time to read it.
The author Patricia Volk organized the book around two central role models for womanhood and personal style: her mother Audrey Volk and Avant Garde fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli.. Did you find one or the other of these women more interesting or compelling?
When reading this memoir and its point/counterpoint of these two women, I often sat back and imagined if they had met. Would there have been a massive clash of two strong wills, or a recognition that here stood another woman who might be actually be worthy of some attention? Would they have shared tea or cocktails? I would have paid to watch them circle around and mentally critique each other! AND I would have loved to see these two running a blog together, hahaha, one lovely lady with rules for EVERYTHING and the other determined to break all of them!
But interestingly, Audrey’s fashion sense was astute enough to know the iconic value of a bottle of Schiaparelli’s famous perfume, Shocking”, with a bottle shaped like Mae West’s mannequin. Plus, Audrey was just the type of woman that Schiap was truly targeting, someone who had the strength and confidence in herself to pull off anything.
Personally, I loved the feisty challenging air of both women. And though they both experienced heart break with their first love, their lives totally diverged in how they choose to handle that in their personal lives down the road…with Audrey’s broken heart helping her find on her second try the husband she treasured, while Elsa decided to go it alone and abdicate responsibility of her young daughter to others after her husband’s betrayal. Here, I lean toward Audrey, since I loved her coping techniques that allowed her to get over being wounded and still have an intact heart to give to another person.
Rather than being chronological, each chapter starts with a quote by each iconic woman, followed with a focused topic regarding fashion and/or womanhood, and finishes with illustrations of items discussed. How did this structure affect your reading experience?
I simply LOVED the knife-edged focus on specific topics covered in each chapter, with a view of how each woman handled that issue. Chapter topics such as beauty rituals, superstitions about life, having a custom-made garment fitted, and “The Womanly Arts” (which spells out some of Audrey’s rules for being a woman), for example, ladies, listen to this quote!!
“Rule number 4. Men Lead. Women follow. There are four kinds of social dancers: natural, schooled, bad and the ones who learn to trust one partner exclusively. They perform well but only with the particular person…At one time, Audrey had diverse partners. But now she likes to dance only with Cecil [her husband]. To watch her dance with another man at a party, to watch her compromise her ideal of perfection, is agony.” Wow, right?
The issue of a Transformative Book was what compelled Patricia Volk to write this memoir, which in her case was her discovery at age 12 of Elsa Schiaparelli’s autobiography Shocking Life. Do you have a transformative book that significantly impacted your view of life?
We can start with one of the few books I owned as a child, “Lassie and the Mystery of the Blackberry Bog”, LOL. So much so that when I saw a women fall deeply into quicksand last year in Mexico, I had to remind myself that it was very bad and very traumatic that she lost her shoes and her cell phone and almost got lost in the bog forever, to stop me from being uber-excited about finally realizing my lifelong dream to see quicksand! Too bad Lassie wasn’t there to save her!
I could go on forever about books that have influenced me as an adult, so I’ll just name two: Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger and The Mystery of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. READ THEM! (Did you think I was going to say 50 Shades?!)
Were you empathetic to Patricia’s need to balance her mother Audrey with Elsa? Once again, I saw this as the author finding a revelation in Elsa’s radical artsy attitude and using it as the relief she needed to escape, at least mentally, from the oppressing views of her mother. Here, we see that we all have many kinds of influences in our unique lives. Just as we can’t find all the traits of Everyman in a chosen husband or partner, no matter how wonderful he or she may be, we can’t expect to find all the nurturing, role-modeling, and wisdom we long to have imparted to us in our own mothers. And sometimes it is what we reject, the rules we refuse to follow, that is most revealing about our true selves. But isn’t it true that we learn from what we DON’T LIKE as much or more from what we do? I think Audrey’s strict adherence to rules is exactly what allowed Patricia to open herself to the wildly unconventional Elsa. And perhaps admiring Elsa’s courage allowed Patricia to embrace the mother she had in Audrey, both her perfectionism and her flaws.
The fashion in this story is clearly remarkable and high end. What about the mothers in this story? How does this make you reflect on your own impact on your children? Herein the question lies the crux of why I love this book for Project Motherhood. Our site wants to find balance, balance between managing our own needs and committing our relentless attention to the needs of our children. I love that this book gave me even more realization that if we are honest with our children, willing to show them who we really are, and always lend an ear to when they are trying to tell us the same thing about themselves, then our children will not be too damaged by our lack of perfection. Patricia’s mother was far from perfect, but let’s consider this amazing quote near the end of the book: “My mother drove me nuts but she was there. She made herself a necessary person. I was a priority and I knew it.” I don’t know about you, fellow Mamas, but I hope with all my heart that my children both know that they indeed were and are a priority to me.
So, my dear Mamas and fellow readers, these are just MY opinions. What about yours?
Fashionably,
Deborah
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