The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

Just before the pandemic, I first discussed a selection from my Book of Old Ladies with seniors at the Downtown Oakland Senior Center, meeting in person in a large ballroom where over 70 seniors met with my small Mills seminar of 15 students to discuss Toni Cade Bambara’s short story, “My Man Bovanne .” We intended to meet monthly at the center, but after our second meeting to discuss “They May Not Mean To, But They Do,” the pandemic precluded meeting in person and we turned to Zoom, then a startling new technology for most of us.  

Going forward, I intend to use this blog  to update you on our current readings in the hopes that you may find the books and discussions of interest!

Since we have already met twice (life does show up in the way of good intentions as we all know!), we have had two sessions already this season, and so I will start with a brief account of of these and give you a heads up on what follows in case you want to read along with us.

On August 11, we discussed Carol Shield’s 1993 novel, The Stone Diaries. We selected this novel because of its importance to the member who originally recommended it and said she found it a good companion during the long days she sat by her dying father’s hospital bed

The novel is a fictional autobiography which follows the life of Daisy Goodwill from her unusual birth to her quiet death, drawing on diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and other  “real life” materials to document the life of an ordinary woman. While I need to listen to books because of my vision, I purchased a second hand copy of the novel so I could see the photographs included in this facsimile of a biography, and I was interested to learn Shields used photographs of her own children to represent Daisy’s three children and drew on vintage  photographs purchased in thrift shops to represent the other characters. 

Shields commented that with this novel, she finally wrote the book she wanted to read: one in which an ordinary woman, with no astonishing or heroic accomplishments, lives day to day, primarily in family and domestic settings. Daisy Goodwill Flett’s life  is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirth. Through marriage and motherhood, Daisy “struggles to understand the paradoxes of her life” (The New York Public Library), and the book is divided into ten chapters detailing each epoch of Daisy’s life.The Stone Diaries won the 1993 Governor General’s Award for English language fiction in Canada and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the United States.. It also received the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

Our discussion of Stone Diaries was unusual in that readers had no questions about difficult passages. And few had marked favorite lines to share with the group, although we agreed that the writing was excellent. Perhaps because Daisy’s life felt familiar with its domestic every day focus, despite some of the tragic details of her experience. The narrator’s descriptions of Daisy are  always from the outside, never probing her interior. The arc of the novel did not lead to dramatic lows and highs; rather it, like life, echoed the rhythms of ordinary life–its intended purpose. By the end of our discussion, nearly everyone mentioned intending to read the novel again with an altered sense of expectations,, and commented on how the novel mirrors most lives, one incident follows another without building up to a crisis or tying up loose ends with a bow.

Tune in next week for Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.