The Stone Diaries

By Carol Shields

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for 1995.

This is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett. She was born in 1905 in Canada and her life started out not so good. Her mother died giving birth to Daisy and a few months later her father walked out of her life, leaving his baby daughter with a neighbor woman. Soon after this, the neighbor woman moves in with her grown son and together they raise Daisy until she is eleven when the woman dies in an accident. The son has lustful thoughts about young Daisy and so he sends her off to live the father she doesn't remember. The father, a stone cutter, has done well for himself and he manages to give Daisy a good home. She goes off to college and marries soon after graduating but her husband dies on their honeymoon, falling out of a window while intoxicated. Daisy moves back home, still a virgin, and lives with her father until she is about thirty. She moves out when her dad remarries and Daisy finds she is uncomfortable with the new wife. So she goes back to Canada to visit the man who helped raise her and they decide to get married. He has a good job and Daisy bears three children for him. Of course, he is a lot older than she and he dies when she is in her fifties. She then gets a job writing a gardening column for the local newspaper, and she really enjoys it and is very crushed when, after doing the column for about nine years, the newspaper gives the column to someone else. Daisy becomes very depressed but eventually recovers and moves to Florida to be with her two best friends from childhood, Beans and Fraidy. By this time Daisy is getting old and the novel concludes with the circumstances of her death.
Daisy is just an ordinary woman who lives an ordinary life, but who goes through her life marked by the absence of love in it. Her mother dead, her father gone, her foster mother dying and her foster father sending her away, her first marriage a tragedy and her second marriage almost a marriage of convenience, Daisy never feels truly loved, and never experiences a grand passion. Even with her own children and grandchildren there is a sense of distance and estrangement. All through her life she searches but never finds much sense of purpose or fulfilment, mainly she just goes through the motions, doing what is expected, doing her duty, being a good mom, a good wife. But in the end satisfaction still eludes her, as she admits on her deathbed that she is not at peace.

This was a pretty interesting read, though I can't really say why. The book has no plot to speak of, just the details of an ordinary life. But the story just grabs you from the very start with the strange and sad beginning of Daisy's life, in the kitchen of her parent's house as her obese mother gives birth to a baby that she didn't even know she was carrying.

Review by Publishers Weekly.