Pilgrim soul: memoirist Patricia Hampl talks about the quest literature of our time

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Reading Patricia Hampl is a little like coming home, not necessarily to the house you grew up in but to a place that nonetheless seems familiar. It's an intimate experience and an exhilarating one, partly because of the elegance with which Ms. Hampl writes, partly because of the acuteness of her insights. You read her words and you feel a thrill of recognition shot with gratitude. That's exactly it, you say in triumph, as ff it were you rather than she who nailed the passing moment in all its ambiguity and color.

Memoir has been called the literary genre of our age, and Patricia Hampi is a master of it. "Memoir and I grew up together," said the 61-year-old author, who published her first memoir, A Romantic Education, in 1981, when the category of memoir didn't yet command its own shelves at bookstores. The author of two books of poetry and six books of nonfiction, most of them considered memoirs, Ms. Hampl has had her work recognized by a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (one in poetry and the other in prose) and a MacArthur "genius" award.

In the last two years, she's come out with two new books, Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, a meditation on art, women and spirituality inspired by Matisse, and The Florist's Daughter, a memoir that picks up the threads laid down in A Romantic Education. The latter depicted Ms. Hampl's Catholic girlhood in St. Paul, Minn., and her sojourn to communist Czechoslovakia as the author, granddaughter of Czech immigrants, explored her heritage. The Florist's Daughter opens with Ms. Hampl sitting at the deathbed of her mother and within the 24-hour period that the book depicts the reader is treated to a detailed evocation of Ms. Hampl's suspicious, acid-tongued mother and her honorable, unworldly father, a man dedicated to bringing beauty to the world through flowers.

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Necessarily, the author figures in the story if only as the storyteller, the family rebel and one-time hippie who longed to leave the Midwest and yet grew up to become the faithful daughter, the mainstay of her parents in their old age.

In conversation, Ms. Hampl talked about the memoir, its popularity and privileged status today, its role as the quest literature of our tame. "It's an inquiry," she said. "You're in possession of something and you pause to look back in order to move forward." Whereas journalism depicts what happens, memoir, said Ms. Hampl, is how people reflect on what has happened. And for her, she said, memoir is not always or necessarily about herself. "It's not about me. It's about using me," she said. "It's about the world I'm creating using the first person. The first person is the instrument, not the subject."

Ms. Hampl said her life put her in possession of two subjects: the long, lingering life of immigration and her experience of Catholicism. The romantic Catholic education she received attending a private school for girls run by cloistered nuns vanished after Vatican II; since then, Ms. Hampl has written affectionately about that world and probed its differences from contemporary Catholic practice.

But one way or another, Catholicism seems to pervade all of Ms. Hampl's work. To read her is to read a peculiarly Catholic writer, not a common characteristic for a writer these days, a throwback to another era in which writers like Flannery O'Connor and Graham Greene attested to the permeable borders of faith and literature. Much of that seems gone these days. But not, it appears, for Ms. Hampl.

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It wasn't always the case. For 20 years, Ms. Hampl said she never set foot in a church, not even to look at art. In her mid-30s, however, she returned to the practice of Catholicism. "The way in for me was through Franciscan monasticism," she said. "A group of Poor Clare nuns. I went to the Poor Clare monastery in Minnesota and it was love at first sight. I began going to Mass there, and I never stopped and that was 25 years ago."

The Poor Clares presented her with a conundrum.

"It was fascinating in our contemporary world to think of contemplative nuns who had dedicated their lives, their days and their intelligence to prayer," Ms. Hampl said. "No fools these women. They were and are passionate, profoundly inquiring, intelligent. Why were they doing this? why were they putting prayer first? I want ed to pursue that.

A skeptical seeker

The book that grew out of that pursuit, Virgin Time, is an inquiry into the contemplative life. "The spine of the book, the through line," as Ms. Hampl puts it, is Assissi. In the book, published in 1992, Ms. Hampl tacks back and forth between Assissi and her childhood in Minnesota, with stops in Lourdes and a women's monastery in Northern California. Along the way, she serves up dead-on, humorous depictions of her fellow travelers' eccentricities and a wry, self-deprecating look at herself as the skeptical but hopeful pilgrim. It's a kind of Canterbury Tales for today's world. The Minnesota nuns feature only briefly in the book, though they act as an anchor and inspiration for it.