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Overview
During the long farewell of her mother’s dying, Patricia Hampl revisits her Midwestern girlhood. Daughter of a debonair Czech father, whose floral work gave him entrŽe into St. Paul society, and a distrustful Irishwoman with an uncanny ability to tell a tale, Hampl remained, primarily and passionately, a daughter well into adulthood. She traces the arc of faithfulness and struggle that comes with that role from the postwar years past the turbulent sixties. The Florist’s Daughter is a tribute to the ardor of supposedly ordinary people. Its concerns reach beyond a single life to achieve a historic testament to midcentury middle America. At the heart of this book is the humble passion of people who struggled out of the Depression into a better chance, not only for themselves but for the common good. Widely recognized as one of our most masterful memoirists, Patricia Hampl has written her most intimate, yet most universal, work to date.
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
Editorials
Danielle Trussoni
…electric and alive, containing a fire her mother would surely recognize and a beauty her father would approve. The Florist's Daughter is Hampl's finest, most powerful book yet…Hampl's honest examination of her own life makes The Florist's Daughter a wonder of a memoir. A conflicted daughter, a begrudging Midwesterner and a woman who has been besotted by illusions, Hampl proves that the material closest to home is often the richest. Her mother, who complained that her daughter never confided in her, who wanted her daughter to open her "cold heart," said upon learning that Hampl was writing this book: "Good. It's about time." I think you will find that Mary Catherine Ann Teresa Eleanor Marum Hampl was right.—The New York Times
Juliet Wittman
Hampl avoids easy sentiment, conscious lyricism and emotional effusiveness. The narrative circles around, returning again and again to specific insights and images, which gain resonance with each repetition. You can see both her mother's incisiveness and her father's love of beauty in Hampl's prose, and there is a power here that makes the final chapters quietly devastating.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Hampl (Blue Arabesque; I Could Tell You Stories) begins her very personal memoir with one hand clutching her dying mother Mary's hand, the other composing an obituary on a yellow tablet-an apt sendoff for an avid reader of biographies. As years of dutiful caretaking and a lifetime of daughterhood come to an end, Hampl reflects on her middle-class, mid-20th century middle-American stock, the kind of people who "assume they're unremarkable... even as they go down in licks of flame." Since her Czech father, Stan, couldn't afford college during the Depression, he made a livelihood as a florist. Hampl's wary Irish mother, a library file clerk, endowed her with the " traits of wordiness and archival passion." Like Hampl, Mary was a kind of magic realist-a storyteller who, finding people and their actions ancillary, "could haunt an empty room with description as if readying it for trouble." The memoir begins with the question of why, in spite of her black-sheep, wanderlust-hippie sensibilities, Hampl never left her hometown of St. Paul, Minn. In the end, the reason is clear. There was work to do, beyond daughterly duty: "Nothing is harder to grasp than a relentlessly modest life," she writes. With her enchanting prose and transcendent vision, she is indeed a florist's daughter-a purveyor of beauty-as well as a careful, tablet-wielding investigator, ever contemplative, measured and patient in her charge. (Oct.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationPublishers Weekly
"With her enchanting prose and transcendent vision, she is indeed a florist's daughter -- a purveyor of beauty -- as well as a careful, tablet-wielding investigator, ever contemplative, measured and patient in her charge." (starred)Kirkus
"A memoir for memoirists to admire -- with language that pierces." (starred)Library Journal
"With delicate precision and wry humor and in a style at once poetic and spare, [Hampl] recounts her years growing up in St. Paul, MN. This wistful air coloring her writing is well balanced by her fond yet dry characterization of the colorful, sometimes caustic mother of Hampl's younger years. A thoughtful and elegant memoir."People
"Addictive...quietly stunning." (Four stars)Library Journal
Hampl's (English, Univ. of Minnesota; A Romantic Education) knowledge of memoir is well exercised: she's written four. With delicate precision and wry humor and in a style at once poetic and spare, she here recounts her years growing up in St. Paul, MN. Adult life saw Hampl still very much entwined in her role as a daughter, and she relates both the frustrations and the fulfillment of this casting throughout the work with frankness rather than self-pity. The book commences with an adult Hampl at the bedside of her dying mother. This wistful air coloring her writing is well balanced by her fond yet dry characterization of the colorful, sometimes caustic mother of Hampl's younger years. Hampl doesn't shy away from mundane details, instead using them to create vivid pictures of the surroundings and the people in her life. For example, she draws on some beautiful imagery from her father's occupation as a florist, using this as a window through which to view St. Paul's post-World War II social order. A thoughtful and elegant memoir suited to public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/1/07.]
—Rebecca Bollen Manalac
Kirkus Reviews
A dutiful daughter-and superb memoirist-reflects upon the deaths of her parents. Hampl (English/Univ. of Minnesota; Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, 2006, etc.) has crafted an honest and loving tribute to her parents, who raised her in St. Paul, Minn., where she has remained virtually her entire life. Her father (the eponymous florist) and mother (a librarian) had different cultural histories. He was Czech; she, Irish. They worked hard, went to church, believed in truth, justice and the American way, did nothing the world would deem remarkable. And, Hampl says, "Nothing is harder to grasp than a relentlessly modest life." Her writings about that life highlight difficult truths about both the author and her parents. (It was her mother, she says, who made Hampl realize the coldness of her own heart.) Hampl begins at the hospital bedside of her mother, who lay dying after a stroke. She holds her hand and tries, simultaneously, to take notes. Several times in the ensuing text she returns to this scene-the hand-holding, the death-watch-until no life remains in the room but her own. The author moves back in time, telling us about her father's business (the employees, the customers, the economics of flower growing and selling) and her mother's career (she loved biographies). She adds that both had mixed feelings about her decision to become a poet. Her father, she says, thought "being a poet was all right, though hopeless." Her mother eventually created an archive of Hampl's work-every clipping, every note, every word she wrote. Hampl mentions occasionally her more conservative brother, who became a dentist and moved west, but his story is on the periphery. Death is the principalcharacter, and Hampl shows us powerfully that Death touches not only the dying. A memoir for memoirists to admire-with language that pierces.Author of My Losing Season and Beach Music
"Patricia Hampl writes the best memoirs of any writer in the English language. The Florist's Daughter is her third memoir and her best by far—her first two were fabulous but she gets better with each book. But here is what I love about Patricia Hampl: Sentence for sentence she writes the best prose of any American writer, period. The rest of us cannot touch her."People Magazine
"Addictive...quietly stunning." (Four stars)Author of The Madonnas of Leningrad
"In this age of tabloid tell-alls and sloppy hyperbole, The Florist's Daughter is a cool tonic: a memoir that sings the quiet anthem of good daughters everywhere. In Patricia Hampl's hands, supposedly ordinary people in allegedly ordinary lives are rendered with luminous grace and quiet beauty."Author of Stalking the Divine
"All of us eventually become orphans and lose not only our parents' physical presence but also the opportunity to keep asking, over and over, for their stories. Patricia Hampl's lovely bruising book takes us to that final rupture between mother and daughter. Hampl offers the bloom of meditation on the mysteries between parents and children, between the past and the present, and between those old adversaries, beauty and truth."Author of The Space Between Us
"The Florist's Daughter is a magical book. Patricia Hampl's compassionate sense of history and understanding of human nature is matched only by the crystalline poetry of her words."Chicago Tribune
"The Florist's Daughter creates context. It yields perspective. It makes sitting, waiting, aching and watching honorable, restores our sense of purpose. It also yields some of the most glorious sentences and narrative framing you will find anywhere. Hampl's childhood may have been ordinary by the standards of James Frey or Lauren Slater, but her talents as a writer render it far more meaningful, and resonant."Star Tribune
"Patricia Hampl has written a decidedly old-fashioned memoir...What Hampl has so generously done is to treat her parents like fully imagined characters in a complex novel... Her style moves easily from the high lyricism of wonder and delight to the unfooled coolness of irony and skepticism...I can only admire her passionate attempts to parse reality—as if she were attending closely to a text, pressing the juice out of every sentence and paragraph and translating it into her own luminous words. "Chicago Tribune
"If anyone can restore the memoir to glory, it's Patricia Hampl...Read Hampl and you will forget about Frey."Newsday
"Hampl is that rare writer who refuses to sentimentalize even those she loves most...The tensions in this novelistic masterpiece gather stitch by stitch, one ordinary but riveting anecdote after another, interwoven with dry comedy."Christian Science Monitor
"The result is rather like a significantly kinder, gentler version of that other nouveau-Midwest classic: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections."St. Louis Dispatch
"[Hampl] paints a rich, evocative portrait of growing up in an upwardly mobile family in 1950s and '60s St. Paul, Minn."New York Times Book Review
"The Florist’s Daughter is Hampl’s finest, most powerful book yet…. Hampl proves that the material closest to home is often the richest...a wonder of a memoir."Los Angeles Times
"Patricia Hampl is the queen of memoir...Do the pieces Hampl gives us fit together to form a whole person? Yes! When will it end? Hopefully, never."O Magazine
"Patricia Hampl's memoir is set in St. Paul, Minnesota, a place where ordinary people live faultlessly ordinary lives. It is this ingrained modesty of ambition that troubles the writer as she tries, at her mother's deathbed, to pierce the deep freeze of her own emotions. A relentlessly middle-class enclave can be, as Hampl wryly notes, a cozy setting for heartlessness. Her optimistic father, the purveyor of beautiful flowers who trusted that life was not only good but intrinsically elegant, and her judgmental, charismatic mother produced a daughter who kept longing to bolt from 'Nowheresville,' even as the sweet 'sin of memory' called her home. 'In its cloudy wistfulness,' she writes, 'nostalgia fuels the spark of significance. My place. My people'"More
"In her new memoir, Hampl mulls over the notion of forgiveness while recalling her charistmatic Czech father, her dying mother and Midwestern childhood she never really left behind."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 preVelvet 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