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 entree 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.

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9780156034036

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Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE FLORIST'S DAUGHTER <p> A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year <p> 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<p> If anyone can restore the memoir to glory, it's Patricia Hampl . . . Read Hampl and you will forget about Frey. -- Chicago Tribune<p> [A] beautiful bouquet of a book. -- Entertainment Weekly<p> Tender, thoughtful. -- Christian Science Monitor<p> <p>

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

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. 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 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. 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. 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'' PRAISE FOR THE FLORIST'S DAUGHTERA Chicago Tribune Best Book of the YearA 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 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 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 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. -- Beth Kephart Chicago Tribune (10/27/2007) 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. The result is rather like a significantly kinder, gentler version of that other nouveau-Midwest classic: Jonathan Franzen''s The Corrections, [Hampl] paints a rich, evocative portrait of growing up in an upwardly mobile family in 1950s and ''60s St. Paul, Minn. 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. 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. 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. If anyone can restore the memoir to glory, it''s Patricia Hampl...Read Hampl and you will forget about Frey. Addictive...quietly stunning. (Four stars) 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. 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. 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. 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) A memoir for memoirists to admire -- with language that pierces. (starred)

PRAISE FOR THE FLORIST'S DAUGHTER <p> A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year <p> 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 <p> If anyone can restore the memoir to glory, it's Patricia Hampl . . . Read Hampl and you will forget about Frey. -- Chicago Tribune <p> [A] beautiful bouquet of a book. -- Entertainment Weekly <p> Tender, thoughtful. -- Christian Science Monitor <p> <p>

Author Information

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.

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