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Summary
Summary
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 entrZe 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.
Author Notes
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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Hampl knows that everyday life is shaped by intrigue, ardor, and tragedy. A penetrating memoirist profoundly influenced by her home ground the Catholic enclave of old St. Paul, Minnesota Hampl portrays her temperamentally oppositional parents with humor and poignancy. Hampl's sardonic, pragmatic, book-devouring mother, Mary, took her Irish heritage seriously and never worried about her handsome Czech husband's fidelity, knowing that his mistress was his work as a gifted florist. As for Stan, he distrusted words and believed in nature's promise of renewal, grace, and innocence. Hampl remembers her young self as willing to be enchanted and as being torn between the divergent sensibilities of her compelling parents as she awoke to the bounty of art and literature. Her language is as voluptuous as her father's most ravishing floral arrangements; her sense of embedded truths stems from her mother's ferocious intelligence. Incisive and piquant, Hampl's homage to those who gave her life and who lived their own with fire and panache is a spirited tale of nature and nurture that brilliantly articulates our bred-in-the-bone need for beauty, purpose, and love.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WATCHING a parent die can be a startlingly unreal experience. Call it denial, call it self-delusion; no matter how much you've prepared, you simply don't believe it will happen. You assume that both of you - dying parent and attentive child - will get through this unfortunate experience as you've gotten through everything else: together. After all the madness of hospice nurses and morphine and final confessions, the relentless deathlike goings-on you've endured, life will snap back to a normal shape. Death is just a hiccup, a trick, a detour in your lives. Soon, the two of you will walk down the street to a bar, order a few drinks and complain about how uncomfortable the whole thing was, how absurd and overdramatic. In the hours before losing a parent, the notion that death is final seems incomprehensible. Death is something that happens to other people. Joan Didion's memoir "The Year of Magical Thinking" explored this zombie-walk of denial as it occurred after a sudden death in the family. For a year, Didion lived in a state of unreality, mourning a husband she expected to walk through the door at any moment. But there is an equally befuddled zone of psychic stasis that occurs in the days before an ill family member dies. Through the haze of exhaustion and horror, we see death coming and quickly close our eyes. Time warps at the edges and then stops altogether. The past seems more real than the future. This is "magical thinking" in reverse. It is on the pulse of this moment that Patricia Hampl's fifth memoir, "The Florist's Daughter," begins. "Funny, the idea of keeping time - here of all places," Hampl thinks as she sits by her mother's side during the final hours of her life. "In this room it's yesterday. We won't reach today until this is over, the time warp we entered three days ago." Mary Catherine Ann Teresa Eleanor Marum Hampl, her beloved spitfire mother, is dying in a hospital room. Her father (the florist of the title) died years before. As Hampl's memories of the years she spent in the realm of "eternal daughterdom" unfold, the reader understands that what is about to occur "soon, in hours apparently," is not only the death of the mother, but the death of the daughter, too. For the moment, however, reality is in dreamlike abeyance. As Hampl wards off death with her memories she is able to evade, if just for a short while, the terrible loneliness of being "nobody's daughter." It is a heavy load to carry, being nobody's daughter. Especially for Hampl, who spent much of her adult life in service to her "frail, failing parents," always within their reach, living only "a long walk" from her girlhood home. While her brother left for the West Coast, Hampl remained behind while her father suffered heart attacks and her mother grand mal seizures, dutiful despite being the "family hippie, onetime pot smoker and strident feminist who refused for years to marry." The truth - one Hampl readily admits - is that she was more attracted to home and family than she allowed herself to believe. One of the saddest, most searing moments in "The Florist's Daughter" occurs when Hampl admits that, despite a lifetime of scheming, she never actually left home. "How is it that I never got away?" she wonders. The simple answer is that she loved her parents too much to leave. "M. & D.," as she referred to them in the journals she kept as if "doing research for a historical novel," were the force that pulled at her so profoundly that her identity formed around them. Hampl's mother, with her lion's mane of flyaway hair and arsenic wit, self-immolating with "elderly fury," was a woman of scabrous intelligence who kept Hampl on edge. A librarian who secretly wanted to be a writer, she loved her daughter to distraction, keeping an archive or "shrine" of Hampl's writing. She liked her daughter to play a role, "to be the Writer" in her presence. Hampl's father was a timid, steadfast artist who believed in poetic proportion above all else; he held that order "exists within matter itself and is understood as elegance." While her mother may have been the impetus behind Hampl's career choice, her father taught her the importance of beauty. Together, this seemingly ordinary couple became the poles of Hampl's existence, opposing magnetic forces that held their conflicted daughter firmly between them. Since her first memoir, "A Romantic Education," was published in 1981, Hampl has yearned for the beyond, and her search has skewed to exotic regions beyond the pallid Midwestern landscape. New York, the Côte d'Azur, heaven - she can be relied upon to illuminate our desire for meaningful pilgrimage while reminding us of the "hopelessness of escape." Her previous memoirs portray a woman watching the world go by without her, an outsider gazing in. Hampl could see but not touch, and one felt that it was only a matter of time before she would jump headfirst into the life she wanted to live. And so it is ironic that, for all her dissatisfaction with exile in "a provincial capital of the middling sort" (in Gogol's words), Hampl has remained in St. Paul all her life, rooted to the city of her birth in the "blameless middle" of America. "The Florist's Daughter" confronts this central irony with ruthless honesty. It turns out that despite her endless pining for faraway lands, Hampl "didn't long for the Great World after all." Her "deep Midwestern faith: that life is elsewhere" was a false religion. Gone is the romanticism of much of her early writing, including the somewhat precious obsession with her own position as a writer. Now, Hampl takes a hard look at the life she has led, where she has ended up, and why. Her signature literary triangulations - the author analyzing herself as she explicates the world through artists she worships - dissolve in the emotional immediacy of her subject. Many of her previous interests show up: St. Paul society; F. Scott Fitzgerald (Hampl's patron saint of escape, who left St. Paul for the East); Prague; the physical contortions women go through for beauty; the allure of religious experience. Only now, she is no longer a groupie of the beyond; her own life takes front and center stage. The result is 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. In many ways, Hampl's emotional range brings to mind Vivian Gornick's classic memoir, "Fierce Attachments," particularly its unsentimental portrayal of the contradictory feelings a daughter harbors for her mother. As Gornick is both proud and horrified to realize she has become similar to her mother, so Hampl admires and abhors the prison-hold her parents have had on her. Both writers distance themselves from family drama enough to look closely, without judgment, upon it. And yet "The Florist's Daughter," with its blighted Midwestern provinciality, mystical yearning and the sense that home (despite its comfort and familiarity) is not quite home, is uniquely Hampl. Like all of her work, this book demonstrates that life is much bigger than it appears. One only has to look long enough. Perhaps this is why the title is so unfortunate: it suggests a smaller, narrower book than the one Hampl has written. The title is not only one of the few flat notes in this uniformly high-pitched book, it is also misleading. Hampl is as much her mother's daughter as her father's. In fact, in many ways this is a book about the complex and passionate love between a daughter and her difficult, charming mother. But maybe this tendency to downplay is another Midwestern trait that Hampl cannot shake. After all, in the Midwest, where lives are "little; our weather big," it is bad form to play the drama queen. Everyone west of Ohio and east of Nebraska knows that drama is "all just weather." And, in a way, playing down her most intense, brilliant book with a soft title makes sense: Hampl is a memoirist almost completely devoid of ego. She once wrote that good autobiographical writing is less about self-absorption than about the individual's interaction with the world. Memoir, she claimed, "begins as hunger for a world, one gone or lost, effaced by time or a more sudden brutality." Like the best memoirists, Hampl has used her own experiences to understand what is exterior, amorphous, longed for. She has written about herself to understand what shaped her, but also about the ways desire has pulled her beyond the self. Her tireless ambition to rise above her own limitations - in art, in God, in escape from her home - has always been best served through a voice that is highly suspicious of glorifying the self. But in the end, 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. Patricia Hampl takes a hard look at the life she has led, where she has ended up, and why. Danielle Trussoni, the author of "Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir," is working on her first novel.
Kirkus Review
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 principal character, and Hampl shows us powerfully that Death touches not only the dying. A memoir for memoirists to admire--with language that pierces. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
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, LJ 6/1/07.]-Rebecca Bollen Manalac, Sydney, Australia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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 |
