The Florist’s Daughter -- Patricia Hampl. Harcourt. $24 (240p) ISBN 978-0-15-101257-2
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. (Oct.)