Ruth O. Saxton

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.

As I printed the reading list for my upcoming Book Group for the Downtown Oakland Senior Center, I reflected on our beginning as a collaboration between the DOSC and my final post-retirement English Department course at Mills College, “Coming to Age.” What began as monthly in-person sessions between undergraduate Mills students and members of the DOSC transitioned to Zoom sessions due to the Covid pandemic. No longer a collaboration after the end of the spring semester 2020, the DOSC readers decided to continue meetings on Zoom, taking summer and mid-winter breaks between sessions. We discussed 37 books between 2020 and 2021, chosen by me as an extension of my book, The Book of Old Ladies, in which the protagonists are all women over sixty. Currently, the selections are chosen together with members of the group.

I took a break from social media this summer and fall, and I have recently been asked for an update on the books we read in our summer/fall 2022 session. They included short stories, novels, and essays. Here they are:

We enjoyed “Olive Kitteridge” and returned to Elizabeth Strout with “Olive, Again.” The collection of stories follows Olive into her old age and home into assisted living with the lively characterization and detailed sense of small towns in Maine we had earlier enjoyed.

We then reached back to the nineteenth-century portrayals of elderly widows by Sarah Orne Jewett. “The Country of the Pointed Firs” is also set in Maine.

Two short stories by Katherine Mansfield featuring three generations in an Australian setting rewarded us next: “Prelude” and “At the Bay.”

We then read Charlotte Wood’s 2022 novel, “The Weekend,” also set in Australia, in which three elderly women friends meet at the ocean cottage of the deceased friend to clean out her belongings and face their future without their beloved friend, who often was the glue that held them together—also discovering long-held secrets.

Louise Erdrich’s much-celebrated novel, “Love Medicine,” was a tough read. However, her prose is lovely, exposing the anger, desire, and healing power that is love medicine within this first novel in her Native American series.

Ursula Le Guin’s late-in-life collection of essays, “No Spare Time,” was our first non-fiction reading. It brought laughter of recognition in her short essay that gives the book its title and awe for her wisdom, and we determined to include one of her novels in our first 2023 session.

We concluded with Julie Otsuka’s short contemporary novel, “The Swimmers,” written in a “we” voice and moving from an underground community swimming pool to life in an assisted living residence. And we just decided to include one of her earlier historical novels in the next session.

When we first adjusted to Zoom sessions in 2020, we had no idea we would continue in my retirement, using zoom and appreciating the chance to see each other’s unmasked faces on the screen.

Stella Fosse’s most recent blog posting, “First Do No Ageist Harm,”  examines the underlying assumptions of a study on brain health in which she participated because she wanted to contribute to research that would help develop treatments for brain disorders.  In her lucid account, she reports that many of the questions came from underlying assumptions she considers ageist–assuming decline, for example. There were no questions about the positive aspects of aging, suggesting there was no financial incentive similar to that of drug companies seeking cures. I had recently revisited Ursula K. Le Guin’s collection of short blog-like pieces written in her eighties and nineties, entitled No Time to Spare in which she begins by referencing a questionnaire she received from Harvard, sent in advance of the sixtieth reunion of her 1951 graduating class. Her response to a question about what she does in her spare time, like the questions Fosse mentions, reveals the underlying ageism of the questions.  I suggest you read all four entries in the opening section, “Going Over Eighty.” I love her response that she has no spare time because her time has always “been occupied by living.”

Next, I plan to follow up on Fosse’s recommendation of Becca Levy’s book,  Breaking the Age Code:  How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and How Well You Live.  Like LeGuin, I bristle when someone claims I don’t look my age, sharing her sense that we earned our wrinkles and age spots in over eighty years and we don’t want them to deny our experience of living.