A lifelong journey
"I get the feeling your mother doesn't ... like me," a doctor confides to Patricia Hampl. "You got that right," Hampl thinks.
Meet "Leo the Lion," aka Mary, Hampl's fierce, proud, disdainful, Irish-American mother. Mary smokes like a chimney, names her furniture ("Napoleon" is a love seat, "Benito" an armchair), frets over incorrect usage of language and proudly archives even the Post-It notes of her writer daughter.
Mary married her high school sweetheart, Stan, Hampl's father, and spent her whole life in St. Paul, Minn. -- as has Hampl herself. And so Hampl's new memoir, "The Florist's Daughter," is a journey through two questions: "Who are these people?" (her parents) and "How is it that I never got away?"
In today's tell-all world, a reader could be forgiven for asking if we need another cinéma-vérité rendition of a writer's childhood. Well, in this case, yes -- simply because Hampl does it so well.
"Nothing is harder to grasp than a relentlessly modest life," Hampl points out, and then goes on to lay bare the tenderness, humor and pathos found in these unassuming Midwestern lives.
Hampl's father, Stan, a Czech-American florist passionate about his work, radiates the cheery conviction that daily life is full of wonder. His work supplying floral arrangements to St. Paul's wealthy "cracked open a door to glamour, to sparkle and wonder." Her father was the parent who appealed more to the young Hampl. "I was on my father's side -- the side of trusting people and pleasing them, the side of flowers and winking party lights."
Mary was sometimes harder to love. Ever puffing on a cigarette and addicted to thick volumes of Irish history, Mary nourished an old-world hatred of the English and was ever ready to imagine "an oppressor on the doorstep."
Stan and Mary Hampl were oddly matched and perhaps not always happy. But the ultimate success of their union is demonstrated through Hampl herself, whose writing blends Stan's joyous decency to Mary's darker wit. The end of "The Florist's Daughter" chronicles the downward spiral of Hampl's parents' medical conditions, and parts are hard to read. It also pokes into some of the darker corners of their lives -- the business mistakes spawned by Stan's trusting nature, the casual comment of an ex-girlfriend that raises questions about his loyalty to Mary.
Hampl is a memoirist by trade. Among other titles, she is the author of "A Romantic Education" about her sojourns in the former Czechoslovakia, and "Virgin Time," about her travels through Europe and California.
Here, however, Hampl seems primarily a Midwesterner. She takes a clear-eyed look at the ordinary folk around her and the myths by which they live and, without failing to acknowledge the imperfections, also finds honor and value. What it proves is that, in the end, Hampl is indeed the daughter of both Stan and Mary -- and that's intended as a compliment.
Book review
Title:
"The Florist's Daughter"
Author:
Patricia Hampl
Publisher:
Harcourt, $24