From the best-selling author of Stuffed, comes a richly illustrated memoir, written with charm and panache, that juxtaposes two lives--an iconoclastic Italian fashion designer and the author's 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 lover of fashion, and the polished hostess at her family's garment district restaurant. Elsa Schiaparelli--"Schiap"--the high-fashion designer whose creations shocked the world, broke every rule, blurred the line between fashion and art, and believed that in both fashion and life, 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 very different women--volatile, opinionated, and brilliant, each in her own way--offered Patricia lessons about womanhood and personal style that would stay with her throughout her life. Moving seamlessly between the Volks' Manhattan and Florida homes and Schiap's astonishing life in Rome and Paris (among friends such as Dalí, Duchamp, Picasso), How to Be a Woman weaves Audrey's notions of domesticity with Schiaparelli's often outrageous creations into a dazzling meditation on beauty, then and now, and on being a daughter, sister, and mother. It is funny, wise, and utterly delightful.