A Luminous Amazement at Existence

PATRICIA HAMPL IS a daydreamer. “I waste my life. I want to. It’s the thing to do with a life,” is how she put it in The Florist’s Daughter (2007). The New York Review of Books has described her as “a memoirist almost completely devoid of ego.” Instead of self, Hampl lauds the mystery of being. “Observing it all,” she declared in Virgin Time (1992), “noting it, seeing it—this was the real point not only of literature but of life itself.”

Hampl, who received an MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor in the MFA English program at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, has authored two books of poetry and six prose works. When she started writing memoir, the genre was very different. Save for notable exceptions like Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Conroy, only the famous or incredibly odd found an audience. Hampl’s A Romantic Education (1981) and other works, especially Virgin Time and I Could Tell You Stories (1999)—all New York Times notable books of the year—contributed to breathing fresh air into the now-popular genre.

Hampl is sometimes labeled a “Catholic writer,” and religion is visible in much of her work, but it is like the lead in a stained-glass window, providing only the soldered framework. Her thoughtful reflections are the colored glass. —still Hampl’s bestknown work—tells the story of a pilgrimage to Assisi, where she focuses on practice (there is a lot of walking and gardening) and shows there is something there with them,” spending much of her time gardening with Brother Thomas, “a man of few words.” While Hampl left the church long before her pilgrimage, her time in Assisi redefines how she once perceived it. She writes, “[The church] ceased to be the imprisoning cell of catechized thought and repressive habit, with its egregious insults to common sense. It became, simply, my most intimate past. It returned to its initial state, it became poetry.”