Synopses & Reviews
Review
PRAISE FOR THE FLORIST'S DAUGHTERA Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Notable Book"The Florists Daughter is Hampls finest, most powerful book yet."The New York Times Book Review Addictive . . . quietly stunning.” People
If anyone can restore the memoir to glory, its 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
Synopsis
During the long farewell of her mothers 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 rolefrom the postwar years past the turbulent sixties. At the heart of The Florists 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 Grays Them: A Memoir of Parents and JeannetteWalls The Glass Castle.
Synopsis
A tribute to the ardor of supposedly ordinary people, this memoir's concerns reach beyond a single life to achieve a historic testament to mid-century middle America, in Hampl's most intimate, yet most universal, work to date.
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