Beauty can be a beast. That’s one message from Shocked, Patricia Volk’s smart, fascinating book about her complex relationship with her beautiful, elegantly attired, hypercritical mother.
Volk’s delightful first memoir, Stuffed, which focused on her eccentric family of New York restaurateurs, was published just a year after the death, in 2000, of her 80-year-old father, Cecil Sussman Volk, longtime proprietor of Morgen’s West Restaurant but also a sculptor, inventor, and motorcycle enthusiast. Although more than six years have passed since Audrey Morgen Volk’s death, her daughter refrains from revealing her mother’s age: “There’s enough in this book that violates her confidence already.”
To facilitate the tricky business of capturing both her mother’s beauty and less lovely side, Volk turns to a surprising foil: Shocking Life, the 1954 memoir by avant-garde couturier Elsa Schiaparelli. This was one of many books young Patty snatched from the pile that commandeered her mother’s attention every afternoon when she returned from hostessing at the family restaurant, Morgen’s. “I want to know what is in those books that is better than spending time with me,” Volk writes. What I want to know is what Audrey Volk got out of the voracious reading that left her daughter feeling neglected — perhaps some mental stimulation otherwise lacking in her life?
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