In this landmark collection, Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May have gathered fourteen original essays from award-winning memoirists and historians. They are all storytellers, wrestling with a fascinating grey area where memory intersects with history and where the necessities of narrative collide with mundane facts, and whether the record emerges from archival sources or from personal memory, these writers show how to make the leap to telling a good story - while also telling us true.

In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl, one of our most elegant practitioners, "weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) as she explores the autobiographical writing that has enchanted or bedeviled her. Subjects engaging Hampl's attention include her family's response to her writing, the ethics of writing about family and friends, St. Augustine's Confessions, reflections on reading Walt Whitman during the Vietnam War, and an early experience reviewing Sylvia Plath. The word that unites the impulse within all the pieces is "Remember " a command that can be startling. For to remember is to make a pledge: to the indelible experience of personal perception, and to history itself."

When Patricia Hampl's first book of poems, Woman Before an Aquarium, appeared in 1978, Choice called it "a generous . . . first collection," and Virginia Quarterly Review characterized her work as "a poetry of accumulated details, strikingly presented."
Now, after the success of her brilliant prose memoir, A Romantic Education, which won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, Hampl has taken her poetry a step further in her new collection, Resort. The classical themes of beauty and love, loss and memory have always formed the core of Hampl's work. Here, they are treated in a series of shorter poems and then gathered powerfully into the long title poem of the collection. Set in a small, tumbledown cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior, Resort follows the season of summer as Hampl explores a period of solitude following a loss, employing as a touchstone the image of the wild rose as it blooms and withers. In essence a poem about healing oneself through paying attention to the world outside, Resort has been called by poet Sandra McPherson "major, richly entangled, ebullient . . . all of a sudden my favorite long poem."

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.