With November's book, The Florist's Daughter: A Memoir by Patricia Hampl, we move from a wide-angle cultural consideration of extraordinary success to an intimate portrait of Hampl's parents and an illumination of her assertion that "[n]othing is harder to grasp than a relentlessly modest life."As Hampl's memoir opens, she is holding her dying mother's hand and at the same time writing her obituary. From this endpoint, Hampl circles back through her childhood in the "blameless middle" of America, St. Paul, Minnesota. She describes her "eternal daughterdom" to her Czech-American father, a florist for the St. Paul elite, and to her Irish-American mother, a library file clerk who loved to tell a tale, revealing her own conflict with the role of daughter and her development as a writer. Hampl asks, "These apparently ordinary people in our ordinary town, living faultlessly ordinary lives, and believing themselves to be ordinary, why do I persist in thinking--knowing--they weren't ordinary at all?" Her honest, tender picture offers an exquisite answer.
We hope you will join the conversation about this "memoir for memoirists to admire" (Kirkus): Tuesday, November 9, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, November 18, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.
