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.
Review:
"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) (Publishers Weekly)
"A memoir for memoirists to admire -- with language that pierces." (starred) (Kirkus)
"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." (Pat Conroy, author of My Losing Season and Beach Music)
"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." (Thrifty Umigar, author of The Space Between Us)
"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." (Debra Dean, author of The Madonnas of Leningrad)
"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." (Kristin Ohlson, author of Stalking the Divine)
"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''" (O Magazine 2007-10-01)
"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." (More 2007-10-01)
"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." (Library Journal 2007-09-01)
"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." (Los Angeles Times 2007-10-02)
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