Patricia Hampl's memoir "The Florist's Daughter" chronicles the author's journeys into the past as she comes to grips with her mother's impending death. I find that I connect deeply with this work as it relates the experiences of a daughter struggling between a need for independence and the primal attraction of home. For Hampl, these conflicting needs manifest themselves most strongly as she faces the inevitable death that will leave her without a parental home to return to.

Hampl's vivid writing draws the reader into the world of her childhood. Her florist father, who had already passed on at the time of this memoir, was an artistic, shy florist whose profession brought him into contact with the upper crust of St. Paul, Minnesota. His lifetime focus on beauty and order doubtless inspires the balance and beauty of Hampl's writing. Her mother, even in her final illness, is a real sparkplug, brilliantly sarcastic and cuttingly observant of her daughter's life. In Hampl's interactions with her remarkable parents, both in memory and in the memoir's present, we come to understand why this self consciously independent modern woman never left her hometown.

Hampl dwells on the past in this memoir as a reflection of her unconscious need to escape from the present. Any who have experienced watching a dear family member or friend decline and die understand this need. No matter how medically obvious the impending death may be, and even if the family member or friend in question welcomes death as a relief from unremitting pain, we still cannot accept the reality of it. By travelling back into her childhood memories, Hampl allows herself to enter a sentimental haze and thereby prevents herself from fully confronting her mother's death.

In these recollections, though, Hampl includes a brutally honest assessment of her own expectations and conceits. While she has denigrated Midwestern life in the past, in this memoir she accepts that life as her own, casting aside her past illusions that one day she will move to a more glamorous, cultured locale. Ironically, this acceptance comes precisely at the time when her Midwestern life as she knows it, that of a daughter, is coming to an end.

Due to its emotional depth and blunt honesty, this memoir is almost too personal, and at the same time almost too universally applicable. Hampl lets us into her conflicted feelings of disillusionment and denial to such an extent that we are forced to confront the same issues in our own lives. This, I believe, is the mark of a truly remarkable memoir.

Learn more about this author, Geraldine Bivens.
Click here to send author comments or questions.

---

Add your voice

Know something about Book reviews: The Florist's Daughter by Patricia Hampl?
We want to hear your view. Write now!