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The Stone Diaries

Carol Shields

3.87 · Rating details · 36,695 ratings · 1,916 reviews

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 au ...more

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Paperback, 361 pages

Published April 1st 1995 by Penguin Books (first published 1993)

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Best Canadian Literature

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Nov 12, 2008 Tracey rated it it was amazing

Shelves: pulitzer, book-club, own

I love this book. It has been 14 years since I have read it and I still remember clearly what it means to me:

Life is long....and in this long life you lead a series of mini-lives. In each "life" you become a different version of you. We are blessed with the chance and sometimes forced against our will to reinvent ourselves again and again until one day we are very old and find that we are living in Florida wearing polyester pantsuits. Did you ever imagine that would be you?

That person you marr ...more

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Nov 23, 2019 Michael Finocchiaro rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: pulitzer-fiction, american-20th-c, fiction, novels, pulitzer-winning-fiction

My next read going backwards through the Pulitzer winners is The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. This book also won Canada's top book award the name year and was a National Book Award finalist as well. All these awards and praise were well-merited as this is a well-written and compelling story about a woman's life from birth to death.

Daisy Goodwill is born at the turn of the century to a mother who passes away while giving birth and a father who is an accomplished stonemason in rural Canada. Th My next read going backwards through the Pulitzer winners is The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. This book also won Canada's top book award the name year and was a National Book Award finalist as well. All these awards and praise were well-merited as this is a well-written and compelling story about a woman's life from birth to death.

Daisy Goodwill is born at the turn of the century to a mother who passes away while giving birth and a father who is an accomplished stonemason in rural Canada. The themes of life/death and the metaphor of stone percolate through the entire book, starting with the title: The Stone Diaries. We hear Daisy writing her journal with decade breaks between the chapters, mostly in the 3rd person and we get a sense throughout of her feeling of dislocation in her own life. Her beginning was also her mother's ending - this event underscores the life/death motif and distorts her concept of time:
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 season 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 parts sieze on the tongue, so that so say, 'Twelve years passed' is to deny the fact of biographical logic." (p. 27)

Baby Daisy is certainly helpless and is taken under the wing of her neighbor, Mrs Flett, who absconds with the baby to live with Daisy and her son Barker Flett in Ottowa. Daisy will not see her father again until the death of her "aunt" some eleven years later. In fact, each of the chapters is about a period of her life ("Birth", "Childhood"..."Death") and focuses (with many meandering diversions of course) on one key defining event.

Another theme in the book is sex and how various characters experience it. Her mother dies in the course of giving birth to her marking sex as something with potential danger. Her father is similarly distant from everyone but his precious rocks, but he has a special and eternal fascination for his dead first wife: the gathering of tenderness, rising blood, a dark downward swirl of ecstasy and then - this seems to him particularly precious - the miraculous reward of shared sleep, his beloved beside him, her breath dissolving into his. A coil of her hair will be loosened on the shared pillow and without waking her he will kiss the tips of this hair. (p. 36)

Throughout the narrative, again proposed in the form of a diary, we also peek into the minds of many people that Daisy knows during her long life, after all as she says, Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. (p. 36)

Her caretaker in Ottowa, Professor Barker Flett, is obsessed with flowers rather than stone and so the motifs of pistil, stigma, style, ovary, stamen, anther, filament, petal, sepal, receptacle (p. 42) become a pendant for the motif of stone. Stone symbolizing a more male permanence and the gravestone, flowers representing a more effiminate side and evoking life.

Some of the more evocative images in the book are the tower that Cuyler Goodwill, Daisy's father, builds for his dead wife in Canada out of stones pilferred secretly from his quarry before moving to Indianapolis and the pyramid he starts as a time machine there in Indianapolis and dies building at the end of the book. He was a man, on the contrary, who could easily be sounded out given the space...His voice, you might say, became the place he lived (p. 85) Despite his gift for oratory, gleaned from reading the Bible, he is never quite able to bridge the gap between himself and his daughter probably owning to the fact that he was eccentric perhaps, an artisan naif, but not unapproachable, not in the least....His tongue learned to dance then, learned to deal with the intricasies of evasion and drama, fiction and distraction.( p. 85) Perhaps, it was this same tongue that kissed the tips of his wife's hair, but which still serves as a buffer between himself and his own feelings.

Daisy inherits this inability to connect to her own feelings marrying by default an alcoholic with who she never consumes the marriage (he was always too drunk) and who she sneezes out of a window in one of the novel's more dark-comic scenes. For Daisy, love is mostly the avoidance of hurt, and futhermore, she is accostumed to obstacles, and how they can be overcome by readjusting her glance or crowding her concerns into a shadowy corner. (p. 147).

Dasiy does finally find love later - oddly with Flett's son who she stayed with in Canada after the death of his mother until she was eleven - and had three children. Her daughter Alice is the one closest to her and we get her perspective a bit more often than the other children. The birds and bees discussion on pages 165-166 was particularly well-written from Alice's perspective. Her dream during the boring, unsatisfying lovemaking of Barker about the film The Best Years of Our Lives: What would it be like to be touched by cold bent metal instead of human fingertips? What would it be like to feel the full weight of a man on her body, pinning her hard to the world? (p. 192) is also telling of her compromises in love and sex even in middle age.

Unable to find a sexual outlet, she turns to gardening 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, every leaf, every stem, every root and sign. (p. 196)

After the pre-mature death of her husband, she takes over the column he wrote about gardening in the paper and finally has some individual success, however short-lived. Cut short, she loses the column due to an affair with the newspaper editor and drifts into a deep depression which her children and friends struggle to help her out of. A few years later, she moves to Florida with her remaining friends and lives the rest of her life at the Bayside Ladies Craft Club in her condo keeping her hands occupied, filling more and more of the world with less and less of herself. (p. 268). She comes to a sad, but true realization: No one told her so much of life was spent being old (something I am personally struggling with) Everything she encounters feels lacking in weight. The hollow interior doors of her condo. The molded insubstantiality of the light switches. The dismaying lightness of her balcony furniture. The rattling loose-jointed cabs she sometimes takes... (p. 280). Her attachments to earth, then, remain superficial as she enters her twilight years. ...life "thus far" has meant accepting the doses of disabling information that have come her way, every drop, and stirring them with the spoon of her longing - she's done this for so many years it's become second nature. (p. 282)

This quote was also incredibly apt: And it's occurred to her that there are millions, billions, of other men and women in the world who wake up early in their separate beds, greedy for the substance of their own lives, but obliged every day to reinvent themselves. (p. 283). This reinvention for Daisy is a necessary, painful thing done without complaint as opposed to a new exciting way of precisely reclaiming one's own life. Her pain hidden in her past, remains too difficult for her to deal with directly and thus she takes this resigned approach: The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals. (p. 291)

After a visit to her grandfather in the Orkleys north of Scotland, her downhill slide becomes inevitable. She has a massive heartattack and is recovering, And her knees, her poor smashed knees. Amazing, considering all this, that she can remember the appropriate phrase, amazing and also chilling, the persevering strictures of social discourse.
Never mind, it means nothing: it's only Mrs. Flett going through the motions of being Mrs. Flett." (p. 314).

Her daughter Alice comes to her during this final phase when she is turning into stone: Knuckles of pearl, Already dead. Mineralized. She reminds herself that what falls into most people's lives becomes a duty they imagine: to be good, to be faithful to an idea of being good. A good daughter. A good mother. Endlessly, heroically patient. These enlargements of the self can be terrifying. (p. 326).

It remains unspoken about whether Alice decides to be more in contact with herself than her mother was, but she is the one child who is in a relatively stable marriage and having moved to England in seeming bliss and discovery.

As Daisy passes from this world, Something has occurred to her - something transparently simple, something she's always known, it seems, but never articulated. Which is that the moment of death occurs while we're still alive. Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being butting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. (p. 342).

This was a beautiful book and it is likely that I will seek out other books to read from this author even while I tried to live a bit more consciously, trying to take some of the lessons about living and aging that this book tries to teach. ...more

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Nov 13, 2011 Sarah rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

A breathtaking and thoroughly original novel. I'm completely in awe of the choices Shields made in the shaping of this narrative. The whole is flawlessly cohesive. The parts are poetry unto themselves.

Essentially, it's a book about loneliness, every kind of loneliness: starved, suffocating, denied, cherished, physical, existential, or simply the result of petty misunderstanding. --And it's not always clear cut. She allows for ambiguity. She allows for the reader's subjective response, whatever t ...more

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Sep 11, 2013 Fabian rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

The type of book others rigorously want to imitate. That is, the elusive "turn of the century All American novel", with myriad glimpses at gorgeous post millennial metafiction. "The Stone Diaries" no doubt inspired other works of immeasurable brilliance like T. C. Boyle's "World's End" and Coetzee's "Elizabeth Costello"--it is heartbreaking, endearing, and, best of all, quite accessible. (Although the Puig-like tricks, that is, Latin American lit. concessions, are quite distinguishable.) The sym ...more

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Aug 23, 2012 Carol rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2015, bookclub, cultural-canada, pulitzer-prize-winner

The Stone Diaries tells the story of Daisy Goodwill Flett's troubled life beginning and ending with sadness and death. There is so much to absorb about the character's in this short novel that I feel the need to read it again, and probably will at some point, but for now..........

Mercy, Mercy.......Cuyler Goodwill loved you so.......Why did you not share your secret?

I did like this somber 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner that does actually have a few laughs, and one shocker, but was somewhat annoy

...more

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Apr 24, 2020 Sara rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: women-writers, pulitzer-prize-winners, death, literary-fiction

The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman’s life. Daisy Goodwill Flett comes into this world in a strange and tragic circumstance. The book follows her through her life to the moment of her death. You might say she has an ordinary life in many ways, and perhaps that is part of the point Shields is making, that all lives are the same because, no matter how different they are from their fellows, all lives are lonely, isolated journeys. Only one person feels or knows who you are, and that person The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman’s life. Daisy Goodwill Flett comes into this world in a strange and tragic circumstance. The book follows her through her life to the moment of her death. You might say she has an ordinary life in many ways, and perhaps that is part of the point Shields is making, that all lives are the same because, no matter how different they are from their fellows, all lives are lonely, isolated journeys. Only one person feels or knows who you are, and that person is you.

Many of Shields' characters are consumed with looking backward, dwelling in their pasts and trying to unravel the lives they have led but hardly understand. They struggle with what it is to relate to others, what it is to love or to be loved.

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.

There is a theme of loneliness and isolation that runs through the book

...a kind of rancor underlies her existence still: the recognition that she belongs to no one. Even her dreams release potent fumes of absence.

The odd thing about the pictures that fly into Daisy Goodwill’s head is that she is always alone. There are voices that reach her from a distance; there are shadows and suggestions--but still she is alone.

She is alone, but not unique, among the people she encounters...for they all seem to me to be alone and struggling as well. And much of the loneliness on view here is self-inflicted, as if the fear of connection is stronger than the need to touch the others, to be joined.

Carol Shields makes one choice in writing this novel that puzzles me; that is her decision to have the opening chapter in the first person, the following chapter in both first and third person (but obviously the same voice), and then to tell the rest of the story in the third person until one fleeting comment that is made first person in the final chapter. I know it is a very intentional choice, a device that is meant to achieve something major in the structure of this novel, but I have failed to comprehend its purpose, and that is going to bother me for a while. It might just be an attempt to make us realize that even within ourselves there is an “other” that is separate, observing and virtually unknown to us. Perhaps the first person is the soul. It is the best explanation I have been able to come up with. If anyone else who has read this has a thought, I would be very interested in hearing it!

The metaphor of the stone--having things carved in stone, the building of monuments, the hardening of the heart and the soul, and the impenetrable walls that divides us from one another-- runs from the beginning of this novel to its end. It winds its way like a river through every major character and recurs in names, thoughts and physical manifestations.

One thing is for sure, no need to put R.I.P. on Daisy’s tombstone.

...more

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Jul 24, 2008 Suzanna rated it it was ok

I didn't like this book, but it was mostly because I didn't like the main character and her lack of personal substance. She never, ever, even once, feels any joy, passion, or grief. There is one period in her life where she appears to experience depression, but again, there is a lack of strong emotion, which really is typical of depression. A person who has three children, marries twice, and is widowed twice, usually experiences some sort of deep emotion. This flaw in her personality had me lack I didn't like this book, but it was mostly because I didn't like the main character and her lack of personal substance. She never, ever, even once, feels any joy, passion, or grief. There is one period in her life where she appears to experience depression, but again, there is a lack of strong emotion, which really is typical of depression. A person who has three children, marries twice, and is widowed twice, usually experiences some sort of deep emotion. This flaw in her personality had me lacking empathy with her.

It seems the author's basic premise is that the main character, Daisy, lacks strong emotion because she was not raised by her biological mother, who was herself an orphan, and that these things have some how caused both her and her mother to be inherently flawed. (Either that or Daisy has physically inherited this dysfunction from her mother, but I lean toward the former because of some passages in the story.) They lack passion and passionate expression. Daisy never hears she is loved, nor do you find love expressed by her; her mother, Mercy, never said she loved nor otherwise expressed love, although she was loved greatly and with deep passion by Daisy's father.

What I did like most was the author's use of symbolism. Stones and flowers are heavily used, perhaps overly so at times. There is the building of monuments by Daisy's father (of course made of stone), his life as a quarryman, Daisy's gardens, her second husband's love and knowlege of plants, names of characters, and much more. If that sort of thing excites you, you might love this book for that alone.

I would also like to say I'm surprised so many reviewers found this book "funny". I thought it was terribly depressing. There are a few amusing passages, but I couldn't see calling the book as a whole funny.

And lastly, it is strange to me that this is considered a fictional autobiography. Most of the time it is third person narrative; granted, there are points when Daisy is apparently refering to herself in the third person (as Mrs. Flett or some such, which I found a bit disturbing). I suppose it helps contribute to that feeling of her lack of sense of self, the void within her life that she herself doesn't really fill - is not capable of filling. There are other times it does not feel like her voice, just narrative, and there is just a small portion of the book that is in first person. It does not feel at all like a diary, which again may be for the effect of distancing the main character from herself. Someone with this personality disorder might write a memoir in this manner and call it a diary, I suppose. And it does cover Daisy's life from beginning to end.

The novel's well written, and I think the author achieved what she set out to do. Overall, just not my cup of tea. ...more

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Jan 01, 2020 Betsy Robinson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is a slow, intricate telling of the life and death of Daisy Goodwill Flett. The glorious writing is so sensual, thick with substance, so original, wise, wise, and wise that I often had to stop to contemplate or just digest. Effortlessly Carol Shields shifts from third person to first, jumps subjects' stories, returns to the present, and sometimes even comments on the first-person protagonist, Daisy, and her ability to manipulate the truth. And finally she sticks it to any reader who is hone ...more

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Dec 06, 2007 Grace rated it it was amazing

This book won a Pulitizer Prize in 1995, and it was an honor well deserved. I'd never even heard of it, I just picked up up at the Goodwill because the description on the back cover intrigued me, but once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.

The story is a fictionalized autobiography of one Daisy Goodwill Flett. Born around the turn of the 20th century and living until the 1980s, Shield's Flett reflects simultaneously on her own tragic life and the life of a North American century. The mix and This book won a Pulitizer Prize in 1995, and it was an honor well deserved. I'd never even heard of it, I just picked up up at the Goodwill because the description on the back cover intrigued me, but once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.

The story is a fictionalized autobiography of one Daisy Goodwill Flett. Born around the turn of the 20th century and living until the 1980s, Shield's Flett reflects simultaneously on her own tragic life and the life of a North American century. The mix and overlap between these two subjects is fascinating, and Shields' writing is first rate, making this a pleasure to read.

Though it is written as if it's an autiobiography, The Stone Diaries does not limit itself to subject matter that its protagonist could have known. Starting on the day of Daisy's birth, with her mother, Mercy, and moving both backward and forward through time, the book gives perspectives and experiences of many of the supporting characters as well, including Daisy's father, the woman who raises her, her husband, and her children. Though the speaker is sometimes not clearly identified, the moves between perspectives are far less confusing than would be expected (don't worry, it doesn't read like As I Lay Dying or anything like that). The story is actually told in a way I don't think I've ever seen before, with a mix of omniscent and present narration, and constantly moving time and perspective. Shields deserves her award just for being able to pull that off successfully, nevermind the story!

But the story is compelling. Daisy's life is hard and full of tragedy (the childbearing death of her mother, twice widowhood, etc.), but the tragedy takes backseat the both Daisy's and the other characters' knack for reinvention of themselves when circumstances change. Both as a human story and as a parable for the countries in which the novel takes place (the U.S. and Canada), these reinventions work very well.

I was impressed enough by this book that I passed it on to my mother, and I will be on the lookout for more of Carol Shields' work. I'd definitely recommend it. ...more

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Oct 12, 2020 Joy D rated it really liked it

Shelves: friendship, reviewed, zck, literary-fiction, north-america, family-dynamics, relationships, boxall-list

This book tells the story of the life of a woman of the 20th century. She is born in Canada in 1905 and lives into the 1990s. Daisy Goodwill, born in Canada to a mother who dies in childbirth, grows up with a neighbor and her grown son before returning to live with her father at age eleven. It reads at times like a fictional autobiography, and at other times as if people close to her are contributing. She lives a rather uneventful life, punctuated by a few major decisions and events.

It is a tri ...more

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Sep 03, 2013 Julie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: o-canada, favorite-books, indiana-land-of-hoosiers, pulitzer-prize-for-fiction-winner

Wow, this novel is the perfect example of what happens when you least expect it.

I knew nothing about this book, I'd never heard of it or its author, and I found the cover unappealing.

And, yet, it's one of the best, most meaningful stories I've ever read.

It won the Pulitzer Prize for 1995, which is the only reason I picked it up. Then, I couldn't put it down.

This is one of those life-altering novels, a big picture story, upsetting and wonderful at the same time.

I can't quite recommend it enou ...more

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Jun 29, 2015 Marc rated it really liked it

Shelves: american-literature

Finishing this book, I thought "What a gloomy novel, what a futile life ...". Shields wrote a sort of biography of Daisy Goodwill, from her remarkable birth up to her last fading moment of life, in 10 chapters, each with an interval of about 10 years. But it's not a linear story: sometimes we hear Daisy speak, sometimes an unknown narrator, at other times immediate family and friends, whether through letters or otherwise. This very variegated approach creates a dynamic and exposes the contradict ...more

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Dec 24, 2020 Sue K H rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, pulitzers-to-read, pulitzer-s-fiction

“Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place.”

Why yes Ms. Shields, too many times to count in your beautiful book. If only I'd have read this on my Kindle, I could have highlighted the many perfectly written simple truths of the Stone Diaries. I'm not one to “Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place.”

Why yes Ms. Shields, too many times to count in your beautiful book. If only I'd have read this on my Kindle, I could have highlighted the many perfectly written simple truths of the Stone Diaries. I'm not one to take the time to write passages down but, I did grab a sticky note pad to mark them for when I wrote a review. The problem is, there are way too many to choose from! Thankfully after my sticky notes are reluctantly removed and the book begrudgingly returned to the library, many of the passages can live on via Goodreads under the "Quotes from..." section which is sometimes lacking but contains most of the ones I marked in this case.

In her part autobiography, part biography complete with a family tree and pictures, Sheilds memorializes a fictional everywoman born in 1905 who died sometime after 1985 (the actual date purposely undisclosed). Our everywoman has her own set of unique circumstances, of which many are tragic. Every life has its own tragedies, and Sheild's makes you feel that hers are similar to yours or like those of someone you know.

A special treat for me was how even though the story takes place mostly in Canada, there's a midwestern feel since part of it takes place in Indiana and she mentions the central IL town of Ottowa which is in the same county where I have relatives, and at one point she visits the Morton Arboretum where my Mom's ashes are spread. I figured that she must have been from around here and looked it up and she was born in Oak Park IL and moved to Canada in her early 20's when she got married.

I had a hard time putting this down because the captivating prose managed to make not only this ordinary life extraordinary but every life extraordinary.   I'll be reading more of Carol Shields's books. I'm so thankful for my Pulitzer reading challenge because without it I'd probably never have read this one which most certainly deserved its Pulitzer. ...more

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Apr 02, 2016 Bam cooks the books ;-) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die, i-own-it, dusty-bookshelf-reads, canadian-writers, 2016-aty-reading-challenge, 2016-reading-challenge, favorites, pulitzer-prize-winner, 2016-2017-usa-geography-challenge

#2016-usa-geography-challenge: INDIANA
#2016-aty-reading-challenge--week-15: a book set in the past (100 years ago)

I seem to have an affinity for novels about women's lives set in the past century. Perhaps it is because they give me glimpses about what my grandmother's and mother's lives might have been like. Some of my favorites include So Big and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

The Stone Diaries now takes its place among these favorites. It is written as part autobiography/part biography by an omnisc #2016-usa-geography-challenge: INDIANA
#2016-aty-reading-challenge--week-15: a book set in the past (100 years ago)

I seem to have an affinity for novels about women's lives set in the past century. Perhaps it is because they give me glimpses about what my grandmother's and mother's lives might have been like. Some of my favorites include So Big and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

The Stone Diaries now takes its place among these favorites. It is written as part autobiography/part biography by an omniscient narrator, about the life and times of Daisy Goodwill Flett, who was born in 1905 and died in 199_. "Biography, even autobiography, is full of systemic error, of holes that connect like a tangle of underground streams." And this telling of Daisy's life as daughter, wife, mother, is full of holes, gaps in the narrative, letters that present only one side, etc. And these holes perhaps represent the huge, gaping hole in Daisy's life that should have been filled with her mother's love.

For Daisy's mother, Mercy Stone Goodwill, died giving birth to Daisy. She was such an obese woman that she didn't even realize she was pregnant. And poor baby Daisy was laid on a cold stone table, alone in the world for her first breaths. "Remember this poor child is motherless, and there's not one thing worse in this world than being motherless." Her father is too distraught over the loss of his beloved wife to care for the infant so Daisy is raised by the neighbor lady, Clarentine, who abruptly deserts her husband and moves to Winnipeg to live with her son, Barker, a professor. Daisy stays with them until Clarentine's death when Daisy is eleven. Her father, a virtual stranger, finally takes charge of her then and they move to Indiana to start a new life together.

"And the question arises: what is the story of a life? A chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression? The bringing together of what she fears? Or the adding up of what has been off-handedly revealed, those tiny allotted increments of knowledge?" This novel does a masterly job of revealing all through bits and pieces, through impressions.

Shields' writing can be blunt, sometimes funny, often poignant: "Nor, though she knew she had been loved in her life, did she ever hear the words 'I love you, Daisy' uttered aloud (such a simple phrase), and only during the long, thin, uneventful sleep that preceded her death did she have the wit (and leisure) to ponder the injustice of this." My kind of book! ...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Nranger7 rated it did not like it

I guess I cannot stand Pulitzer Prize winning books. I have yet to read one that I've enjoyed. I actually was disappointed that the author passed away simply because I couldn't tell her how much I disliked this book.

I'm guessing the changes from first person to third person were delibrate and artsy-fartsy, but I found it annoying. I barely got through the first chapter because I was sick and tired of the constant explanations of how the character of Mercy was a large woman. (I get it! She's fat ...more

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Dec 18, 2008 Elizabeth rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, canada

It's ironic that I read this book while I was reading Sex and the City. The two novels are as disparate as different planets. One book is a about an ordinary housewife struggling with life's little trials, the other, a place peppered with big names and obscene money, fur coats and Lear jets.

This book is phenomenal. It's probably the best book I've read in the last year. And it's funny to think about because there is no person, or plot twist, or moment that makes it memorable. Each and every pag ...more

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Oct 22, 2011 Dianne rated it did not like it

Shelves: 2011

I know this won't win me any friends among Canadian readers, but I don't like Carol Shields writing. Granted I've only read this one through to the end. A few years ago I started another one and didn't like it either so I quit about a quarter of the way in. I suspected at the time I was not a "good" reader and that her books were over my head. I've gained some "reader confidence" since then and learned that it's ok to not like certain styles of writing just on the basis of personal taste. Hence I know this won't win me any friends among Canadian readers, but I don't like Carol Shields writing. Granted I've only read this one through to the end. A few years ago I started another one and didn't like it either so I quit about a quarter of the way in. I suspected at the time I was not a "good" reader and that her books were over my head. I've gained some "reader confidence" since then and learned that it's ok to not like certain styles of writing just on the basis of personal taste. Hence the freedom I feel to hate Ulysses by James Joyce without guilt, but that's a whole other story.

This novel follows the life of Daisy Goodwill from her birth in her mother's kitchen in 1905 to her death in the 1990s. It wasn't an ordinary life, if there even is such a thing. She never knew the mother who died bringing her into the world. She was raised by a neighbour until circumstances changed, requiring Daisy to go home and live with her father. At that point she is eleven years old and she and her father are complete strangers to one another. Each chapter is titled for a specific stage of her life: Birth, Childhood, Marriage, Love, Motherhood, Work, Sorrow, Ease, Illness and Decline, and Death.

I found the gaps too long between some of the chapters. For example, the "Childhood" chapter ends in 1916, just as she reconnects with her father, then that chapter comes to an end and the next one "Marriage" begins with her as a bride-to-be at 22 years of age. I think gaps like that are what prevented me from arriving at a place where I would care about the characters and how things would turn out for them. The story itself is good and the writing as well, I just couldn't get invested in any of the people in the story.

I found some rather odd figures of speech in this book. They're in the right places and at the right times; my problem is that I don't understand them. There must have been fifty times throughout the book that I came to a metaphor and stopped, wondering what the heck did that mean. I love creativity, but I think this authour and I are on different wave lengths. I'll give you a few examples:

1. In talking about a professor she said "He rides straight up the walls of his sentences."
2. "For Abram Skutari......religion is an open window as well as the curtain with which he darkens the window"
3. "...the word 'woe' made them fall over laughing, such a blind little bug of a word"
4. "...if she says 'So you two gals are out on the town, huh?' then aunt Daisy will say, shaping her mouth into soft ovals of confederacy...."
5. "Vanity refuses to die, pushing the blandness of everyday life into little pleats, pockets, knobs of electric candy."

I could think through some of these and figure out what she might have meant, (the word "woe" is bug-like though I don't know how it's blind, and maybe I have some idea what "a soft oval of confederacy" looks like) but I can't come up with any connection between "the blandness of every day life" and "electric candy" (electric candy?). As something that should paint a clearer picture for the reader or help us understand a situation more easily, these metaphors and others in this book didn't work for me.

I don't know if I'll read anymore of Carol Shields' books or not. I think I'd like to try one more, but it's way down on my priority list now. I know that a lot of people love her writing so definitely give it a try. I didn't "get" her at all, but you might not have that problem. Would love to hear what you think.
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Sep 01, 2014 Sara rated it really liked it

Shelves: novels-and-shorts, book-group-reads, pulitzer-prize

“My mother’s name was Mercy Stone Goodwill.” And so begins what appears at first to be an autobiography of a woman named Daisy but yet as the pages unfold, it becomes something unique, an outsider’s observation of someone’s actions or inner thoughts (though at times even the narrator, be it Daisy or another does not seem to know exactly what is going on). It seems at times to be a pseudo-biography, or perhaps (more apt), to be a philosophical treatise on human nature and a woman’s psyche, or may “My mother’s name was Mercy Stone Goodwill.” And so begins what appears at first to be an autobiography of a woman named Daisy but yet as the pages unfold, it becomes something unique, an outsider’s observation of someone’s actions or inner thoughts (though at times even the narrator, be it Daisy or another does not seem to know exactly what is going on). It seems at times to be a pseudo-biography, or perhaps (more apt), to be a philosophical treatise on human nature and a woman’s psyche, or maybe it is a somewhat humorous yet sad look at the place of a woman in the twentieth century. The novel explores what one thinks as one is dying or ill or going through the loss of a loved one but then explains that although it has the appearance of truth it might just be all made up. However, as the author makes clear, if we are told it is the truth we can accept it.

The ins and outs and ups and downs in the life of an ordinary woman could have been told in an even, flat tone with perhaps exclamations when a milestone is reached (age 31! Marriage! 3rd child!), but instead the narrative meanders, always going forward but yet constantly looking back over its shoulder at certain places so we can peek into the minds of others and be a part of their going forth into the world apart from Daisy. One chapter is told entirely in letters (only letters TO, never FROM) and another chapter is a series of interviews with people who “knew Daisy when”. Although it is doubtful these interviews happened, they ring of truth, and because Daisy is never very forthright herself about what’s going on, the opinions and insights of others are important to the narrative.

In the end we are left with a shopping list, a bridal trousseau, school awards, a collection of books, fingernail clippings, and a memorial write-up of a life lived. Daisy’s thoughts about life and what others perceived about her life (sometimes wrongly, but that would only be natural) are also left with us.

As I read this book, I would often think – this is a strange novel. Sometimes it made me wince, sometimes it made me laugh. This book touched on subjects not often analyzed or seen in the fiction that I normally read. “Mom! Tell me where babies come from!” Then, “Ooo, yuk!” come to mind as one great scene. The inclusion of pictures (!) was definitely a pleasant surprise. The different writing styles was interesting and although I sometimes wondered if I actually liked this book, I did find I had to read to the end. The observations made by the author were sometimes painful but very perceptive. If at times it seemed to get wordy and bogged down in too much analysis, the author changed the style and started a new chapter in Daisy's life.

From “The tide of fertility and the consolation of fruit salts” to “her faltering pendulum heart, her stiffened coral lungs” the descriptions and comparisons in this book are beautiful and poetic and some I had to read several times so I could fully appreciate them. It's 4 stars instead of 5 for me as at times I was impatient for the story to move forward but the book is incredible for the observations the author makes about our lives.
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Jul 28, 2011 Rebecca rated it really liked it

Shelves: booker-shortlisted, buddy-read, pulitzer-prize, reviewed-for-blog, blog-tour, epistolary, mental-health, gardening

Is it possible to capture the complete course of a life, whether looking from the outside or telling it from the inside? What is set in stone and what is fleeting? These are questions Carol Shields addresses in her 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner, which plays with perspective and forms of storytelling as it conveys the extra/ordinary life of Daisy Stone Goodwill Flett. What with the family tree and section of black-and-white photographs, you might expect this to be a family saga; with the chronologic ...more

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Mar 17, 2009 Sally rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Sally by: Lewis Eng

Shelves: mostly-literary-fiction

This Pulitzer Prize-winning book was suggested for the Mostly Literary Fiction book group that I lead at the Hayward Public Library, and we read it for our May 2009 discussion. A poignant and extremely creative approach to the imagining of one fairly ordinary (and extraordinary, in its rendering) individual. My reading of this novel coincided with my 85-year-old mother's illness and hospitalization. I read parts of it while waiting with her in the emergency room, and the following day sitting by ...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Gill rated it really liked it

I've just finished reading this for the second time, the first time being several years ago. The more I read by Carol Shields, the more impressed I am by her writing skills. I think the structure of this book is excellent, and very, very skilled. ...more

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Apr 22, 2020 Beth Bonini rated it it was amazing

Shelves: canada, coming-of-age, family, fictitious-biography, orphans, death-and-old-age, scotland, 20th-century-canadian, pulitzer-prize-winner

Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other accounts are required; other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies - birth, love and death - are secured by whomever and whatever is available. What chance, what caprice!

Birth, 1905; Childhood, 1916; Marriage, 1927; Love, 1936; Pho

Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other accounts are required; other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies - birth, love and death - are secured by whomever and whatever is available. What chance, what caprice!

Birth, 1905; Childhood, 1916; Marriage, 1927; Love, 1936; Photo Album; Motherhood, 1947; Work, 1955-1964; Sorrow, 1965; Ease, 1977; Illness and Decline, 1985; Death.

In this chronicle of a woman’s life, the complete ‘birth to death’ account of Daisy Goodwill Hoad Flett, author Carol Shields uses all of the biographer’s tools to build up her character. She delves into the lives of Daisy’s parents, she offers up the ‘evidence’ of facts, of lists and photos and details; she includes her sources - the letters and newspaper clippings, the speeches from important moments - and she takes into account the views of first-hand witnesses. Occasionally, she even ventures into the interior monologues of her subject. Occasionally, the first-person voice of Daisy peeks out and the object (of the novel’s attention) becomes subject. Even so, the reader is left with the impression that she doesn’t really know Daisy Goodwill very well at all. I would even suggest that Daisy does not know herself very well. “She has a talent for self-obliteration.” “Daisy’s own thoughts on her marriage are not recorded.” “She just let her life happen to her.”

The structure of this novel takes a straightforward chronology of a life and turns it into something so originally wonderful and strange. The stages of Daisy’s life, (or the lives of other characters, for that matter) seem entirely unconnected. “Things begin, things end.” Daisy is the epitome of an unremarkable 20th century life, and yet one is left with the impression of how eccentric people are - how unknowable - how mysterious.

I first read this book in 1994 or 1995, when it was newly published. I was a young mother, with the feeling that the best part of my life was all in front of me. To reread it in 2020 was a kind of ‘deja vu’ of familiarity, without any memory of what would come next. I remembered mainly that I had loved it. I still love it, although Daisy herself remains elusive.

And the question arises: what is the story of a life? A chronicle of fact or a skilfully wrought impression? The bringing together of what she fears? Or the adding up of what has been off-handedly revealed, those tiny allotted increments of knowledge? She needs a quiet place in which to think about this immensity. And she needs someone - anyone - to listen.

Never mind, it means nothing; it’s only Mrs. Flett going through the motions of being Mrs. Flett.

Stone is how she finally sees herself, her living cells replaced by the insentience of mineral deposition.

Read for the The Pulitzer Project. 4/12 ...more

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Oct 27, 2014 Jeanette rated it really liked it

Oh, how utterly substantial this ordinary life tale runs. Having read this in my middle years, I now reread it within a completely different life period and enjoyed it even more. How rich the language, without having to use foul chorus calls of trite ranting or other slurs. It's absolutely delightful to read words such as "larky" again.

The life far less molded by electronic, media cultural standards. A life begun in great sorrow and also having patches of unsought fulfillment scattered along th ...more

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Jul 28, 2018 Claire Fuller rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: re-read, read-in-2018, whole-life-ficiton, booker-shortlisted

I read this when it first came out in paperback in 1994 (in fact it still has the Dillons sticker on the back), but I couldn't remember anything about it, except that I'd loved it. This time I read it as a writer, and although I found some faults with the story (it's the whole life of Daisy Flett) - too many extraordinary things happen, and yet not enough happens - I also really appreciated how well written it is, how Shields keeps us in suspense by using backstory, how she seamlessly flits arou ...more

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Sep 27, 2020 Kiran Bhat rated it liked it

A fairly prosaic and standard novel detailing the life of a woman named Daisy Flett. Admittedly, on a sentence level, it's quite good, but I don't feel that Shields lifts her concept above the simplicity implicit in her tale. It's good for people who like the comforting style of Ann Beattie or Anne Tylor, but not for those who like to see storytelling and language taken further than that. ...more

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Apr 13, 2012 Alena rated it really liked it

Shelves: dusting-off-the-bookshelf

A true case of better late than never, I am so glad I finally read this book. It's both epic and humble, quiet and bold, a true masterpiece in both content and style.

We meet Daisy the moment she is born in 1905 and follow her life until it ends sometime in the 1990's. The book reads almost like an in-depth memoir, except that other perspectives (or versions of Daisy's story) keep breaking into the narrative. Shields also chooses the third person, even when we are reading Daisy's thoughts, which ...more

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Mar 30, 2009 Madeline rated it liked it

Shelves: the-list

"My mother's name was Mercy Stone Goodwill. She was only thirty years old when she took sick, a boiling hot day, standing there in her back kitchen, making a Malvern pudding for her husband's supper. A cookery book lay open on the table: 'Take some slices of stale bread,' the recipe said, 'and one pint of currants; half a pint of raspberries; four ounces of sugar; some sweet cream if available.' Of course she's didvided the recipe in half, there being just the two of them, and what with the scar ...more

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Jul 02, 2014 Thomas Strömquist rated it liked it · review of another edition

I've very ambivalent feelings about of this book. At places I think it's marvelously written and captivating as well as containing a number of nice and unusual narrative grips, such as telling an entire decade of the main characters life by only random correspondence (and only incoming letters, saved and read by the character herself).

At the same time, this and similar narrative techniques does not allow the reader to get to know the main character (and those around her) very well. A lot of act ...more

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Jul 30, 2011 Linda Hart rated it it was amazing

The ordinary life of an ordinary lady told in an extraordinary way. The characters develop and scenes unfold beautifully with nuances of language shifting from 1st to 3rd person and back again. In one instance the main character is describing her feelings and then you go on and read how her family and friends interpreted the same thing. The publisher calls it "seductive prose" which is fitting description, It won the 1995 Puitzer prize. ...more

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Jan 15, 2009 Stuart rated it it was amazing

this is a terriffic novel. it is beautifully written and addresses some interesting ideas: the offhand catastrophes of everyday life; the way one person can casually devestate another without feeling a thing; the crime - and inevitability - of wasted time; the ability of women to suffer in silence to their dying breath; the impossibility of accurate autobiography; the sad ridiculousness of the idea that there is any justice to be had in this world.

the author treats her characters in this book a ...more

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Play Book Tag: [Poll Ballot] The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields - 4 stars	1	6	Oct 12, 2020 11:54AM
Reading 1001: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields	5	13	Sep 06, 2020 09:08PM
Play Book Tag: The Stone Diaries \| Carol Shields \| 4 stars	7	24	Nov 12, 2018 10:50AM
USA Geography Cha...: The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields	2	8	Apr 21, 2016 07:55AM
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About Carol Shields

Carol Shields

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Carol Ann Shields was an American-born Canadian author. She is best known for her successful 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award. Her novel Swann won the Best Novel Arthur Ellis Award in 1988.

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