The Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields
Summary
Daisy Goodwill is born in 1905 on a kitchen floor in a Manitoba quarry town, to a mother so large she did not know she was pregnant and who dies within the hour. The novel follows her the whole way: raised by a neighbour, moved to Indiana, widowed on her honeymoon when her first husband falls from a window, married again in middle age to a man twenty years older, a garden columnist for the Ottawa Recorder, then a widow again, then Florida, then a nursing home.
Shields presents it as Daisy's own autobiography, which is the trick, because Daisy cannot possibly be narrating some of it. Whole chapters are given over to letters, to recipes, to her friends' opinions of her, to a family photograph album printed in the middle of the book. At times she disappears from her own life story for pages while other people discuss her.
What the form argues is that an ordinary woman of that generation was largely written by other people, and that a life can be full and still leave almost no record of what its owner actually wanted.
Readers divide over whether Daisy is a rounded character or a deliberate absence. That argument is the book working rather than the book failing.
The supporting lives are wonderful and are given proper room: her stonemason father, who builds a tower in his grief, and a grandfather gone home to Orkney, the neighbour who raises the baby and then walks out of her own marriage, a botanist son, a great niece who cannot make sense of any of them. Several chapters are essentially self contained stories.
It is not difficult and it is often very funny, particularly about domestic detail and about what women of Daisy's generation were permitted to say out loud. Best for readers who like formal invention that never gets in the way of the story, and who want a whole twentieth century life in under four hundred pages.
Historical Context & Significance
The Stone Diaries won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and, in 1993, Canada's Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. No other book has won both. It was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993.
Carol Shields was born in Illinois and moved to Canada at twenty two, which is how one novel came to be eligible for the national prizes of two countries.
She died in 2003. The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, founded in her name and awarded for the first time in 2023, carries one of the largest purses in fiction and goes to a woman or nonbinary writer in Canada or the United States, which makes her the rare novelist who is now also an annual event.