Synopsis
"Nothing is harder to grasp than a relentlessly modest life."
From Patricia Hampl, the author of Blue Arabesque, comes this thoughtful and affecting memoir, a meditation on the death of her parents. As Patricia holds on to her dying mother's hand with one hand, she begins to write her obituary with the other. "She would have expected nothing less," Patricia explains. "For the dutiful writer-daughter scribbling in the half-light, holding the dying hand while hitting the high points of her subject’s allegedly ordinary life that is finally going to see print."
From here, Patricia reflects on growing up middle class as the daughter of a florist and his wife in St. Paul, Minnesota. Whereas her father, a true artist, was obsessive about his flower arrangements, he was also inattentive to the outside world. She recounts the Midwestern values he clung to, even as he was losing his business to cheats. She also begins to understand how her mother, the feisty and distrustful daughter of Czech immigrants with an uncanny ability to tell a good story, almost lost her mind fighting their enemy.
In The Florist's Daughter, Hampl once again exhibits her ability to capture the complexity and depth of her subjects, suggesting that what is most personal, can also be most elusive.
The Barnes & Noble Review
"I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them." So wrote Patricia Hampl in her first memoir, A Romantic Education; that 1981 book is a telling exploration of family and inheritance, detailing her journey from her native Minnesota to pre–Velvet Revolution Prague in quest of her father's Czech heritage. Meditative, lyrical, generous, it remains of the most memorable coming-of-age tales published in the past quarter century.
This book, which begins at her mother's deathbed and circles back through the author's St. Paul childhood, focuses with similarly fulfilling attention on the two people she comes from most directly, a dapper florist and a fierce, savvy Irishwoman. "These apparently ordinary people in our ordinary town, living faultlessly ordinary lives,...why do I persist in thinking -- knowing -- they weren't ordinary at all?" Her answer to that question -- delivered in a voice by turns poetic, reflective, narrative, and incisive -- is an aptly dutiful, extraordinarily beautiful testament. --James Mustich