Patricia Hampl remembers some more

MOSt writers only allow themselves one. But Patricia Hampl is the queen of memoir.

In “The Florist’s Daughter,” her fifth memoir, even the nurse who attends Hampl’s mother at her deathbed is a little horrified by the writer’s frenzied note-taking: She is writing the obituary even as her mother dies, but she is also working on this latest memoir.

Let’s take a look at what we’ve got so far and see if the pieces fit: Hampl’s first memoir, “A Romantic Education” (1981), was about her Czech heritage. In the second, “Virgin Time” (1992), the author dissected her Roman Catholic upbringing. In “I Could Tell You Stories,” a 1999 collection of essays (many of them literary, on such writers as Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath), she examines her obsession with memoir. “Blue Arabesque” (2006) is about Hampl’s early fascination with the Matisse painting “Femmes et poisson rouge” and its role in the development of her ideas about art and intellect. For these and two books of poetry, Hampl has racked up just about every literary prize a writer could win: two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a MacArthur, a Guggenheim and a Fulbright (these are just the biggies).

Now, inspired by her mother’s death, she has written a memoir about her parents. If we faithful readers put them all together under one cover, would we get the whole story, the whole author? As my horrified husband once asked me after I had gained 10, 20 and then 30 pounds: When will it end?

It always seems ridiculous when a writer offers up a memoir at, say, age 25 or 30. But it’s equally ridiculous to think that we shed just as much wisdom on our past at 30 as we might at 50 or 80. Things sink in differently at different times, a fact that makes memoir writing more like blogging than storytelling. Stories require narratives. Memories elude narratives. Too much narrative and you’re in fiction territory. Without a map.

If Hampl is the memoir queen, Annie Ernaux and the late Anaïs Nin are the founding mothers of the blog. Since both have written mostly about their lovers, updates are constantly necessary. Hampl, thus far, has pretty much avoided the “L” word in favor of the “A” word: Art, Life as Art, Life in Service of Art.

Hampl thinks of herself as the rebel in the family, specifically because of her insistence on writing as a profession, despite its relative instability. She is therefore horrified to learn, as her mother lay dying in St. Paul, Minn., that her mother also wanted to be a writer. This is one of the beautiful perils of memoir writing, uncovering the patterns that secretly control our destinies: “Choice is an illusion, rebellion is a mad dash on a long leash.”

Still, Hampl acknowledges that her mother’s insistence on narrative and raw talent for it inspired her own flagrant disregard for storytelling. “She possessed natural distance,” Hampl writes of her mother, “an acute eye, the willingness to size things up. She could stir the soup of detail to a narrative froth.” “She could describe a vestibule for ten minutes, a veritable Proust of the breakfast table where we sat, she with her black coffee and pack of Herbert Tareytons.”

“I wasn’t after story,” Hampl writes, distinguishing herself from her mother. “I didn’t want the deathly Pontiac rammed into the snowdrift, love and betrayal frozen in the backseat. . . . Description only, please, the spongy thinginess of life.”

As the title would indicate, “The Florist’s Daughter” is also about the writer’s father, an elegant, handsome man with a love for beauty and an eye for detail. Guess what Hampl got from him? The true romantic meaning of roses sent “loose in a box,” for example, rather than arranged. The thrill of flowers, their names and the messages they conveyed in a time when only the wealthy could afford a dozen roses, much less orchids and flowering ginger. The feel of the greenhouses in winter: geraniums, poinsettias, tree roses and aspidistras.

Hampl worries, as she has in the past, about being too good, too predictable; living just blocks from where she grew up, taking care of her aging parents, being trapped in their expectations of her, being a dutiful daughter. Looking at a painting her father did of her as a child, she thinks: “She’s going nowhere. She’s her father’s angel, her mother’s dutiful daughter.” Memoir, it turns out, is her vehicle for escape. Combing over her past, Hampl establishes, again and again, the many differences between herself and her ancestors. This explains the layer of rage that percolates through the admiration when Hampl writes about her mother. “Stay away!” she remembers feeling as an adolescent when her mother touched her. “As if she were leaching out the life force instead of giving it.”

At last, we might say to ourselves, paraphrasing Alfred Stieglitz’s famous first reaction to Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings, “a woman on paper!” Do the pieces Hampl gives us fit together to form a whole person? Yes! When will it end? Hopefully, never.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com