The Stone Diaries

"The Stone Diaries" caught me by surprise. Yes, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so I should have been prepared, but it received mediocre reviews and some of the criticism was pretty harsh using words like slow, awkward, dull, and experimental. In my humble judgement, it is none of those things. It was enthralling, emotional, thought provoking, and laden with beautifully written lyrical prose.

"The Stone Diaries" is the life story of Daisy Goodwill Flett - an ordinary woman who lived an ordinary life as so many millions of people do. And what is the sum of one ordinary life? Birth, death, a few monumental celebrations, a few life defining moments, an occasional life altering decision, work, play, scattered memories... joy, love, show more pain, fear, loneliness and moments of clarity. That was Daisy’s life.

Told in segments, almost like short stories progressing in time, and sometimes skipping a decade between segments, we watch Daisy age along with her loved ones.

Maybe to get the most out of this book, one would have to be a mature adult who has seriously contemplated the enigma of mortality, had a few of those clarifying moments and life altering decisions, and knows all too well of vulnerability and the difficulty of defining one’s own true purpose on Earth. Or perhaps if the reader has served as caretaker for an elderly loved one, knowing their time on earth is limited, watching them come to terms with the sum of what their life has been, their disappointments and regrets… wondering “what was the meaning of it all?”

And how much does anyone really know of another’s deepest inner being... their thoughts, their passions, their driving force. On her death bed, moments before she dies, Daisy agonizes because she is alone, “we require in our moments of courage or shame, at least one witness, but Mrs. Flett has not had this privilege. This is what breaks her heart. What she can’t bear. Even now, eighty years old.” Though her family was gathered around her, still the lack of intimacy was heartbreaking. So many barriers... so much complacency... unknown words... so little time.

I particularly enjoyed the way Carol Shields injected the opinions and feelings of several different characters, various bits of advice everyone gave Daisy, and their thoughts involving Daisy’s actions, moods, and appearance. Ironically, everyone saw things differently - biased from their own personal experiences and their own frame of reference. And isn’t that the truth of human nature? Is perception the real reality? When we are gone, are we merely the sum of the memories of others? So much to think about.

The message of the story exudes throughout the pages of the book. Most people in retrospect - when all is said and done - have pretty ordinary lives. They may have a hidden well of profound thoughts and deep emotions that were never shared or never acknowledged. Unspent passion, unfulfilled dreams, and a fleeting legacy. What is left when that person is gone... some photos, a complimentary obituary, a few mementos?

"The Stone Diaries" offers up some powerful advice. Do not be complacent. Cherish relationships. Share your feelings. Make that bucket list and get started on it now. Carpe Diem. show less

The Publisher Says: The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman's story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling missed connections she discovers between. Daisy's struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm show more of the unsettled decades of our era.

A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date.

My Review: Read thirty (!) years ago, still fresh in my heart if not my mind. This quote from my commonplace book sums up the appeal, and the limitations, of the work for me:

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced—and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.

"Limitation" as used in reference to this book is simply recognition that it's very much a read for older folk and/or those whose lives have been marked by grief and loss on scales beyond the ordinary. Inside those limits, Daisy is a good companion and a deft storyteller with permaybehaps a bit less than universal appeal. Her acceptance of things can feel passive, as though she's willingly playing the victim in her own narrative. Ultimately, after three more decades of my own lfe have elapsed, I now see this as her strength, her water-like incompressibility, expressing itself.

A very good read indeed. Recommended most particularly to men who are married to women. show less

On the surface, this is the story of the life of a typical woman who lived from 1905- 199*. Daisy Goodwill Flett doesn't do much that is remarkable. She is orphaned at a young age but adopted by a neighbor. Marries twice, is a housewife and mother, finds a job after her husband's death as a gardening columnist, suffers from depression when she loses her job, finds her way back into a comfortable old age, and dies.

At first as a reader, I sort of wondered, what is the point? But there is a lot to ponder here. Lots about how society views women, how women's lives changed over the century, and what sort of voice a woman has. The book is titled The Stone Diaries which led me to believe this would be a first person account of a woman's life show more with lots of personal reflection. But actually, almost everyone gets to comment on Daisy except for Daisy herself. Her friends, children, neighbors all voice observations about Daisy and her life, but only at a few points is Daisy herself allowed a voice about her own life.

Another matter for pondering is the genre of historical fiction itself. This book is set up to make you believe that it is a fictionalized account of real people. There are pictures included of the family, letters that could easily be real, a family tree, etc. So I wondered if Shields was commenting on the genre. She made me think about what is important in historical fiction? How much needs to be true vs. the importance of depicting life in an era whether it's "true" or not. Is Daisy's fictional life any less true than an account of a "real" woman who lived over this era would be?

What I loved about this book is that it can be read on many different levels, one of the marks of a great book for me. show less

I found The Stone Diaries to be both highly interesting and thoroughly readable. This is a biography of a fictional woman, from her moment of birth in 1905 through to her death in the 1990s. Daisy Goodwill Hoad Flett lived a seemingly simple life yet this novel captures not only her and her family but also paints a vivid picture of life in 20th century North America. The author also includes a detailed family tree and a selection of black and white photographs that brings the whole book to the edge of reality.

The book is divided into chapters, each one entitled after an event or episode of Daisy’s life, hence we have “Birth, 1905”, “Marriage, 1927”, “Motherhood, 1947”, and as her life plays out over the pages, we absorb show more both her story and that of her family. Included are obituaries, recipes and shopping lists all of which open her life for the reader to explore.

The Stone Diaries is an inventive and original look at a person’s life and although Daisy was always surrounded by family and friends, it is obvious that her journey, as indeed all of our journeys, is internally a solitary one. And while the author acknowledges loneliness, she also allows for grace, candour, and dignity. show less

“(They) scraped with their tiny tools at the surface of the hidden world, hoping for what? To find a microscopic tracing of buried life. Life turned to stone.”

Daisy is an ordinary woman whose life story is told through a third person narration, occasionally alternating with Daisy’s own perspective and that of family and friends, as well as through letters written to her. Throughout the book, we see her life through others’ eyes and as it went on, I began to see this as the central theme of the book – how a woman’s life is framed by others’ perceptions and experiences of her and how she can maintain her own identity in those circumstances. Loneliness and numbness and the transience of existence are explored, not only show more through Daisy’s story but through those of some of the secondary characters.

The novel is broken up into several sections; interestingly, the section on “Motherhood” is broken up into several sub-parts, which brought to mind the fragmentation of a woman’s life – wife, mother, friend, etc., and the subsuming of the whole person to these various roles. And in the last section, “Death”, Daisy’s life is reduced to a recitation of lists, a few recipes, and scraps of conversation among her family who never seem to truly have known who she was.

A few favorite passages:

“Is this what love is, he wonders, this substance that lies so pressingly between them, so neutral in color yet so palpable it need never be mentioned? Or is love something less, something slippery and odorless, a transparent gas riding through the world on the back of a breeze, or else – and this is what he more and more believes – just a word trying to remember another word.”

“In turn it perceives nothing of her, not her history, her name, her longings, nothing – which is why she is able to love it as purely as she does, why she has opened her arms to it, taking it as it comes…”

“So much had happened, so many spoken words and collapsed hours, the rooms of his life filling and emptying and never guessing at the shape of their outer walls, their supporting beams and rough textured siding….. There are chambers, he knows, in the most ordinary lives that are never entered, let alone advertised, and yet they lie pressed against the consciousness like leaf specimens in an old book.”

“… hurling herself at the emptiness she was handed at birth. In the void she finds connection, and in the connection another void – a pattern of infinite regress which is heartbreaking to think of – and yet it pushes her forward, it keeps her alive.”

Shields writes with grace and a subtle depth of feeling that grows as the story advances. There is a lot to reflect on in this novel, and I have only touched on a bit of it. I have not done justice to a beautiful book that pulled me in from the beginning. show less

This book! It’s just the story of a life, of several lives, of loneliness and internal desolation, of a life half lived or unlived, of too late awakenings, of “orphanhood” and the horrible effects of feeling unloved….of loss …and unresolved grief that lasted a life time. And yet, it’s so much more.

We are taken on several characters’ journeys in a biographical/autobiographical structure that normally would have confused me (all the switches from omniscient narrator to third person back to first, etc.), but seemed to have worked for this book. It begins and ends with the same character, Daisy.

Shields’ writing is good, but there were some metaphors left me utterly confused (forgot to write them down).
Another bothersome bit show more was the picture used for the fictional character, Mercy (the author incorporates family pictures in the middle like you may find in biographies/autobiographies, which thrilled me). So much (so much!) emphasis was made as to how obese Mercy was, how elephantine and enormous she was (the author’s descriptions not my own assumptions), and the picture used was of an average portly woman and nothing like the Mercy that was described.

But these two small gripes are nothing compared to the aspects I absolutely loved about this book:
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The main thing I got out of this book is that time passes and time is precious. We should make the best of this thing called life for as long as we can, and according to our own interpretation of what it means to be alive and present: ““It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence “twelve years have passed” is to deny the fact of biographical logic. How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.” Time *is* precious…say what you need to before it’s too late.
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This is such a simple story and yet so profound. The notion that we can, and often are, different people at different times of our lives is not usually acknowledged or accepted. This is exemplified in various characters but most notably with Cuyler Goodwill: quiet acquiescing child, besotted young husband who had an erotic awakening, despondent widower who leaned into faith, negligent father who reassumed his role with guilt and determination, self-made man who became extremely eloquent, and a man who later lost his flavor for words and started a new life with a new wife. So many different people in one life time!
As to the ending – it will haunt me for a minute. Initially it felt so drawn out and long. I was thinking “Where the heck is this leading? It’s the end of a life. I get it” – But then realized that, not only did the author do an amazing job of “ending” a life phase, but she set it up as a contrast between what “we” (the general societal “we”) see as opposed to what “we” (the personal) may be thinking or experiencing at the end of our lives:

“Daisy Goodwill Flett….died peacefully…after a long illness patiently borne…” VS “I am not at peace.” (final unspoken words by Daisy) – AHHHHHH!!!! I’m still shuddering. show less

'What is the story of a life? A chronicle of fact or a skilfully wrought impression?', 8 May 2013
By
sally tarbox

This review is from: The Stone Diaries (Paperback)
A beautifully written life story of a Canadian woman, Daisy Goodwill. The first chapter describes her birth in 1905 - the feelings of her parents and the neighbours. We then follow her in chapters that move on at 10-yearly intervals : her childhood, marriage, motherhood, work...
It soon becomes apparent to the reader that Daisy's life is primarily shown in terms of how it relates to those around her. Even the photos of family members exclude Daisy. The chapter on 'work', which consists largely of letters, only includes those written to her, not those she composed. Although we show more know the events of her life, she remains somewhat unknown to us, her personality vague. As she grows old and finds herself in a nursing home, her daughter Alice contemplates her mother's reduced property:
'all Mrs Barker Flett's possessions accommodated now by the modest dimensions of a little steel drawer. That three storey house in Ottawa has been emptied out....How is it possible, so much shrinkage?'
A consideration of a woman's life, how things that at one time are so important and in which we invest so much time - homes, gardens, jobs - ultimately all fade away. And yet from Daisy's life spring the new generation of family, whose conversation occupies the final paragraph.
A wonderful and enjoyable read, can't recommend it enough. show less