The Florist's Daughter
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
This New York Times Notable memoir of a middle-class, middle-America family is a "beautiful bouquet of a book" (Entertainment Weekly).
They say "a daughter is a daughter all her life," and no statement could be truer for Patricia Hampl. Born to a Czech father—an artistic florist—and a wary Irish mother, Hampl experienced a childhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, that couldn't have been more normal, the perfect example of a twentieth century middle-class, middle-American upbringing.
But as she faces the death of her mother, Hampl reflects on the struggles her parents went through to provide that normal, boring existence, and her own struggles with fulfilling the role of dutiful daughter as she grew through the postwar years to the turbulent sixties and couldn't help wanting to rebel against the notion of a "relentlessly modest life."
Named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, The Florist's Daughter is Hampl's most extraordinary work to date—a "quietly stunning" reminiscence of a Midwestern girlhood, and a reflection on what it means to be a daughter (People).
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.
