The Florist's Daughter by Patricia Hampl

St. Paul Author Remembers Her Parents and Her City

Jul 8, 2009

A beautifully written reminiscence of family and place (and their connection) Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter is the most recent in a series of memoirs.

St. Paul author Patricia Hampl has been called the definitive memoirist. Although she's written and published collections of poetry, and contributed to and edited numerous other types of books, beginning with 1981's A Romantic Education, memoir is where Hampl has made her award-winning mark.

The Florist's Daughter Explores Immigrant, Old-St. Paul

Her most recent memoir, The Florist's Daughter, is an exploration of family and place. Set at her dying mother's bedside, with quiet hours to reflect on the past, Hampl weaves stories of her immigrant parents and “old-St. Paul" into the broader tale of an upper-midwest upbringing. It is the author’s ability to masterfully combine the two, and do so eloquently, that gives the book its power. Along the way, she comes to a better understanding of her present-day self via that past.

Two of the stronger examples of Hampl’s rendering of “place” are chapters that take place at her father’s florist shop in downtown St. Paul during the busy Christmas holiday season, and at the greenhouses, deep in the immigrant neighborhoods. The young florist’s daughter worked at both, of course, as family members were expected to.

She recalls the sights and smells of the plants and flowers with lovingly vivid detail: “The flower shop was here…but it was also marvelously other, this place heavy with the drowsy scent of velvet-petaled roses and Provencal freesias in the middle of winter, the damp-earth spring fragrance of just-watered azaleas…”

Hampl Draws Connections Between Family, Place and Self

As well-written and memorable as those scenes are, it is Hampl’s memorializing (as well as contrasting) of her Irish, book-loving, story-telling mother and her suave, fun-loving Czech father that succeeds in showing her family as representative of the very immigrant city of St. Paul, and herself as the product of not only those parents, but that city she so loves.

Addressing the idea of “memoir,” Patricia Hampl has stated that “Memoir is not what happened…it is what has happened over time, in the mind, in the life as it attends to these tantalizing, dismaying, broken bits of life history…It is a try at the truth. The truth of a self in the world.”

While The Florist’s Daughter is clearly Patricia Hampl’s own story, a seemingly successful try at the truth of her self, it is also one in which readers will recognize the larger truths of all of our connections to our parents and to our homes, where we come from.

Patricia Hampl is a McKnight distinguished professor of English Literature at the University of Minnesota. Besides The Florist's Daughter, which recently won the Minnesota Book Award, her memoirs include A Romantic Education, Blue Arabesque, and I Could Tell You Stories. Learn more about the author and her award-winning works at her website: Patricia Hampl

Hampl, Patrica. The Florist’s Daughter, 2009, Mariner/Houghton Mifflin. 227 pages.

The copyright of the article The Florist's Daughter by Patricia Hampl in Biographies/Memoirs is owned by Dale Van Every. Permission to republish The Florist's Daughter by Patricia Hampl in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.