The Florist's Daughter

A tribute to the ardor of supposedly ordinary people, this memoirs concerns reach beyond a single life to achieve a historic testament to mid-century middle America, in Hampls most intimate, yet most universal, work to date.

During the long farewell of her mother's dying, Patricia
Hampl revisits her midwestern girlhood.Daughter of
a debonair Czech father, whose floral work gave him entree
to St. Paul society, and a distrustful Irishwoman with an
uncanny ability to tell a tale, Hampl remained, primarily and
passionately, a daughter well into adulthood. She traces the
arc of faithfulness and struggle that comes with that role--
from the postwar years past the turbulent sixties. At the heart
of The Florist's Daughter is the humble passion of people
who struggled out of the Depression into a better chance,
not only for themselves but for the common good.Widely
recognized as one of our most masterly memoirists, Patricia
Hampl has written an extraordinary memoir that is her most
intimate, yet most universal, work to date.This transporting
work will resonate with readers of Francine du Plessix
Gray's Them: A Memoir of Parents and JeannetteWall's
The Glass Castle.