THE STONE DIARIES - CAROL SHIELDS

WEEK 37




"The Stone Diaries" by Carol Shields
(from inside flap)
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 misconnections she discovers between. Daisy's struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era.

MY THOUGHTS: As I followed Daisy's life in this book, I was amazed at how much this resembled my mother's life. Daisy's mother dies the day she gave birth to Daisy. So Daisy doesn't have a mother to help her along the path. But she does have a good friend of her mother's, Clemitine, who takes Daisy to raise. When Daisy is 11 years old her father comes and gets her and they move to Bloomington, Indiana. Daisy is a smart girl and goes to college, which very unusual in the 1920's. Daisy also marries but her husband falls out a window on their honeymoon and dies. So Daisy is left wondering what to do with her life. She goes back to Canada, the country of her birth place, and meets and marries the son of her "Aunt" Clemintine. Has her children and raises them up. I don't want to give too much away so am stopping here. A really good book!!!