What you ought to be reading”
'The Florist's Daughter' by Patricia Hampl
By Julia Keller, Tribune cultural critic
The
word "memoir" has fallen on hard times. It sounds sloppy and self-indulgent.
These days, memoirs seem like the last refuge of the unimaginative. And yet,
the genre has such a rich history -- think of Edmund Gosse's "Father and
Son" (1907) or Robert Graves' "Goodbye To All That" (1929) or Alice Sebold's
"Lucky" (1999) -- that the current debasement is a shame. (A pox on your
prevaricating hide, James Frey!) If anyone can restore the memoir to glory, it's Patricia Hampl. She has been writing superb first-person books and essays that explore her inner and outer life, with beauty and precision. The St. Paul resident never falls into self-pity. Her latest book, "The Florist's Daughter" (Harcourt, 2007) is ostensibly about her mother's final days, but it tells the history of a Midwestern family. A sample: Her father "loved the river, was drawn to it. We trailed along it, out of town on day trips to hamlets well off any main road, places that betrayed a tendency toward tatter and resignation. Bitter coffee and Grain Belt, burgers and fries, catfish breaded stiff as hardtack, and a pool table in the back ... "
Read Hampl, and you'll forget about Frey.