From the acclaimed author of Stuffed (“Vibrantly textured . . . taut, sharp”— The New York Times Book Review; “Gorgeous . . . Unnervingly delightful”— The Miami Herald ) comes an intimate, richly illustrated memoir, written with charm and panache, that juxtaposes two fascinating, very different lives—an iconoclastic Italian designer 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, broke every rule, 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 astonishing 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, revelatory meditation on beauty, then and now, and on being a daughter, sister, and mother, even as it demonstrates how a single book can change a life.