The Florist's Daughter

by Patricia Hampl

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 entrée to 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. At the heart of The Florist’s Daughter 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 masterly memoirists, Patricia Hampl has written an extraordinary memoir that is her most intimate, yet most universal, work to date.This transporting work will resonate with readers of Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them: A Memoir of Parents and JeannetteWall’s The Glass Castle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780156034036
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/15/2009
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

PATRICIA HAMPL is the author of four memoirs—A Romantic Education, Virgin Time, I Could Tell You Stories, and Blue Arabesque—and two collections of poetry. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship, among many other awards. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Table of Contents

A series of vignettes from The Florists Daughter appeared in an essay titled Lilac Nostalgia in Five Points Journal in Spring 2003

What People are Saying About This

Pat Conroy

"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."

--(Pat Conroy, author of My Losing Season and Beach Music)

Debra Dean

"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."--(Debra Dean, author of The Madonnas of Leningrad)

Kristin Ohlson

"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." --(Kristin Ohlson, author of Stalking the Divine)

Thrifty Umigar

 "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."--(Thrifty Umigar, author of The Space Between Us)

Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE FLORIST'S DAUGHTER A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year A New York Times Notable Book "The Florist’s Daughter is Hampl’s finest, most powerful book yet."—The New York Times Book Review “Addictive . . . quietly stunning.” —People “If anyone can restore the memoir to glory, it’s Patricia Hampl . . . Read Hampl and you will forget about Frey.” —Chicago Tribune “[A] beautiful bouquet of a book.” —Entertainment Weekly “Tender, thoughtful.” —Christian Science Monitor —

From the Publisher

…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

Danielle Trussoni

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

Juliet Wittman

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 Information

Publishers Weekly

"A memoir for memoirists to admire -- with language that pierces." (starred)

Kirkus

"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."

Library Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews

"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."

New York Times Book Review

"[Hampl] paints a rich, evocative portrait of growing up in an upwardly mobile family in 1950s and '60s St. Paul, Minn."

St. Louis Dispatch

"The result is rather like a significantly kinder, gentler version of that other nouveau-Midwest classic: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections."

Christian Science Monitor

"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."

Chicago Tribune - Beth Kephart

"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."

Newsday

"If anyone can restore the memoir to glory, it's Patricia Hampl...Read Hampl and you will forget about Frey."

Chicago 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. "

Star Tribune

"Addictive...quietly stunning." (Four stars)

People

"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."

Los Angeles Times

"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."

author of The Space Between Us Thrifty Umigar

"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."

More

"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'"

O Magazine

"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 Stalking the Divine Kristin Ohlson

"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 The Madonnas of Leningrad Debra Dean

"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."

author of My Losing Season and Beach Music Pat Conroy

"Addictive...quietly stunning." (Four stars)

People Magazine

"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."

Author of The Space Between Us - Thrifty Umigar

"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 Stalking the Divine - Kristin Ohlson

"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 The Madonnas of Leningrad - Debra Dean

"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."

Author of My Losing Season and Beach Music - Pat Conroy