The Florist's Daughter [Paperback]

Patricia Hampl (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

"Nothing is harder to grasp than the relentlessly modest life," observes Patricia Hampl, the award-winning author of several memoirs. In The Florist’s Daughter, she turns the focus from herself to her parents and their ordinary lives. Resisting the impulse to be sentimental, she "homes in on the unguarded moment, the pivot of contradiction, that reveals character" (Newsday) and brings Stan and Mary Hampl to vivid life in her lovely prose and breathtaking metaphors. Critics note that the title is somewhat misleading and that some of Hampl’s language is a bit over the top, but these were minor complaints. Honest, humorous, and heartfelt, Hampl’s storytelling shines in what the New York Times Book Review calls her "finest, most powerful book yet."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Reprint edition (January 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156034034
• ISBN-13: 978-0156034036
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #710,651 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A rich, rewarding meditation, November 29, 2007

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Florist's Daughter (Hardcover)

Patricia Hampl's newest memoir, THE FLORIST'S DAUGHTER, opens with an indelible image. The author sits in her mother's hospital room. At her side lies her mother, who has suffered a serious stroke and is expected to die at any moment. In her lap lies a yellow notepad, on which Hampl is composing her own mother's obituary. For Hampl, whose way of dealing with the contradictions and complexities in her life has always been to write about them (in memoirs such as A ROMANTIC EDUCATION), writing a mini-biography of her mother even as the woman lays dying seems a fitting image.

Of course, as Hampl extends her mother's obituary beyond the mere facts and figures of a long, full life, she casts her mind back to her own memories of her mother, to those mundane but unforgettable kitchen-table moments that form the bulk of memories but are unlikely to appear in any sort of formal obituary.

Almost immediately, Hampl sets up a contrast between her mother, a biography-reading, pragmatic library clerk who balances the family's checkbook down "to the penny." Fond of telling cautionary tales and of reading her horoscope (her astrological sign and its accompanying personality traits cause Hampl to dub her mother "Leo the Lion"), Hampl's mother is an Irish Catholic, ironic, cautious and distrustful. Hampl muses that she may have inherited her own penchant for writing from time spent with her mother, who has the gift of remembering --- and describing in minute detail --- every aspect of the glamorous parties she sometimes attends. Hampl's mother certainly has a writer's eye, even if the only thing she ever published were vitriolic letters to the editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Or perhaps Hampl inherited her craft from her father, a quiet "man of many projects" but few words, a florist whose artistic eye, naïveté and utter lack of practicality made for beautiful floral arrangements but occasionally bad business decisions. Born into a family of Czech immigrants, Hampl's father learned both the greenhouse trade and eventually flower arranging as a young man, and excelled at both, particularly as he created whimsical, unforgettable arrangements for high-society functions: "He wanted a certain kind of formal, purchased beauty to exist, and especially for this elegance to mean something --- something good, something hopeful."

In addition to these two dynamic characters, and the background presence of Hampl herself in their lives, the city of St. Paul also plays a key role in Hampl's memoir. Set in a time between Fitzgerald's tales of the city's robber barons and mansions and the more diverse population of today, Hampl's St. Paul is simultaneously romantic (especially when set in contrast with its more staid sibling, Minneapolis) and stifling to a young woman who just wants to experience the Great World.

In THE FLORIST'S DAUGHTER this setting, family history and personal memoir intersect to make for a rich, rewarding meditation on how we become the people we are, why we end up where we live, why we make the choices we do. Hampl's story is at once intensely personal and surprisingly universal, as her reflections on what it means to be a lifelong child of one's parents have implications for almost all her readers.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely and lyrical, October 28, 2007

By 

Mama Trish (Marlton NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Florist's Daughter (Hardcover)

I really liked this book and it was a quick and pleasant read. Hampl is a talented writer who chooses words for their beauty as well as their weight. The memoir opens with the impending death of her mother, a difficult but independent minded woman of Irish descent. She muses on the immigrant world of "old St Paul," a place that is described as somewhat ordinary and a world away from the booming city of Minneapolis. She and her parents are decent, hardworking and ultimately likable people (unlike the characters in Sebold's latest) with the kinds of stories, flaws and challenges that we all might encounter in our family tree.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular Memoir, So Vivid and Well-Written, December 7, 2007

By 

Carol Zsolnay "CAZ" (Midwest USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Florist's Daughter (Hardcover)

Gosh, I absolutely loved this memoir--the writing is superb and the life of St. Paul, Minnesota from the 1930s and beyond is so vivid, but with lean language--just perfect. The provincialism of the Minnesota Irish Catholics contrasted with the Minnesota Czechs/Bohemians--and each of their neighborhoods in the pecking order, is so well drawn. The contrast too between parents, one who sees life's beauty and one who sees life with suspicion. I am giving copies of this as gifts to three writers I know.