The Florist's Daughter - Hardcover

Hampl, Patricia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151012571 ISBN 13: 9780151012572

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007

Synopsis

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About this title

Review:

" ""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."

"A memoir for memoirists to admire -- with language that pierces." (starred)
"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 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)
"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 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 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.""
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"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''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''"

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 and is Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0151012571
• ISBN 13: 9780151012572
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 227