I’m sitting here, holding her hand, but it’s the ardent face from 1936 that keeps appearing, the face in the photograph placed on the shelf above the piano all the years of my girlhood and beyond. Heart-shaped with high cheekbones and eyes set wonderfully wide, it is the face of a romantic lead.
-- Patricia Hampl, The Florist’s Daughter
Patricia Hampl’s most recent memoir opens with a striking scene. As her elderly mother lays dying, the acclaimed writer sits at her bedside and begins composing an obituary on a plain yellow notepad. What follows is The Florist’s Daughter, a loving tribute to her parents and to the startling passions that define supposedly ordinary lives.
The talk — presented as part of The Writing Program’s fall Reading Series — is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall. A reception and book signing will immediately follow.
For more information, call (314) 935-7428.
“As years of dutiful caretaking and a lifetime of daughterhood come to an end, Hampl reflects on her middle-class, mid-20th century middle-American stock, the kind of people who assume they’re unremarkable,” notes Publishers Weekly.
The New York Times adds that, “The result is electric and alive, containing a fire her mother would surely recognize and a beauty her father would approve."
Patricia Hampl
Hampl’s previous memoirs include Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, a portion of which was chosen for The Best Spiritual Writing 2005; A Romantic Education, about her Czech heritage; and Virgin Time, about her Catholic upbringing.
I Could Tell You Stories, her collection of essays on memory and imagination, was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Awards. Other books include two poetry collections, Woman before an Aquarium and Resort and Other Poems, as well as Spillville, a meditation on Antonin Dvorak’s 1893 summer in Iowa.
A 1990 MacArthur Fellow, Hampl has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She is Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.