This story was first shared and discussed on the podcast Bookish Flights: Books That Have Impacted You - Part B. Listen to it here.
It’s unusual for a book with no plot to change a life.
But it changed mine.
A few years ago, I attended a writers’ retreat with a group of both established and emerging writers. Naturally, as we got to know one another, we began to share not only what we wrote, but also what we read, and a little bit about our favourite authors. When I mentioned The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, most people hadn’t heard of it, but one woman in my small group had even read it. That’s the book where nothing happens, she said a little more bluntly than I was prepared for. She wasn’t exactly wrong.
But on the other hand, she was.
In many ways, everything happens in this novel.
I first discovered The Stone Diaries in my university library in 1993 after it had just won the Governor General Award here in Canada. It later won the Pulitzer too. I remember standing in the dim lighting about half-way down the tall row of books, pulling it off the shelf, and flipping it open to read the first few words. I could have moved to one of the bright orange chairs at the end of the aisle, but instead I just stood there for a good ten minutes, completely immobilized and instantly immersed in the story of Daisy Goodwill.
What happens to Daisy? Well, life does. It’s as simple as that.
Daisy comes into the world on a kitchen floor in 1905, the same time her mother leaves it. The novel is set in a number of places and is written as an autobiography of sorts. It follows Daisy through ten chapters of life, starting with birth and ending, fittingly, with death. In between are the chapters of a life we might expect – childhood, marriage, motherhood, work. But there are also chapters that round out our time on this earth - like love, sorrow, ease, and in Daisy’s case, her ultimate illness and decline. With a superficial glance at Daisy’s life, it might be seen as quite ordinary, especially for her time. But, like most people, her life is speckled with the extraordinary. For me, that is precisely what makes this book so compelling. Yes, her first husband is a drunk who falls to his death from the hotel window on their honeymoon. And yes, she is later a domesticated wife and mother who folds pillowcases at the kitchen table while her son asks questions about the war and wonders if his parents will have more babies.
My own grandmother, Ruby, was born only five years earlier in 1900. I don’t know the details of her birth, or much about her life at all. But I do know that when she died in 1986, the pearl ring my mother brought home (and later passed on to my sister), was first offered to another woman as an engagement ring by my grandfather. Somehow, my mother knew that story. Did my grandmother share it? Or was it my grandfather? Were emotions high, or was it just a little tidbit of their past that they laughed about around the kitchen table?
I also know that Ruby lost a child at age seven from a ruptured appendix.They homesteaded on farmland in northern Saskatchewan, and they simply waited too long to make the journey to a hospital. Other than an overabundance of caution whenever any of us had a stomach cramp, my mother didn’t talk much about that time. But once, I remember her saying quietly that my grandmother was never the same after that. I thought I understood what she meant back then, but now, as a parent, those words reach a vastly different part of me. Of course, Ruby wasn’t the same. How could she possibly be? To dive further into a place of unimaginable truths, a few years after the ruptured appendix, another of my uncles was killed in a car accident in his early twenties.
I will never know exactly what Ruby felt or thought in those years, such buckling grief complicated by many mouths still to feed, all through years of war and poverty and doing without. I will never know the conversations she had with her young children as they asked after their brothers, or with my grandfather in the opaque moments before sleep. How many years did it take Ruby to settle into still and peaceful sleep – no longer dreading the dreams that would take her to places of what if and if only? Did those years of ease ever come? Or was some part of her always riddled with questions and guilt and unresolved sorrow, making her into the person my mother struggled to recognize? And just as importantly, did anyone ever ask her?
So few stories of ordinary women are truly told. Ruby, like Daisy, was an ordinary woman. On the surface, she was just a farmwife and mother in rural Saskatchewan. She was uneducated and poor. She didn’t do anything spectacular, and neither did any of her children. Many would see her life as much too simple, much too forgettable to really matter. Women have been depicted as many things in literature – romantic pursuits and victims and rebels and go-getters, just to name a few. But so rarely do we lift up and examine the truth of regular women. The term regular, of course, has no real meaning here, because when you look closely enough, there is no such thing as a regular life. There is only the extraordinary that has been, simply - unobserved.
So, is The Stone Diaries plotless? Perhaps. Does anything actually happen in the story?
Well yes, Daisy’s life happens.
And what’s more important than that?
Growing up in a tiny town in rural Manitoba, it was easy to dismiss the value of the women in my life. They were mostly housewives or clerks or bank tellers. They were the invisible kitchen workers at funerals or the clean up crew after someone’s silver anniversary party. At the time, I was watching shows like Who’s the Boss? where Angela owned her own advertising agency, and Family Ties, where Elyse was an architect –strong, powerful women who were deemed important. As far as I was concerned, the real-life women around me didn’t have stories.
At least none worth telling.
But as a nineteen-year-old standing in my university library, something shifted. Not only could I see Daisy’s life from her own telling, I could feel her, sense her, claim her. Daisy was born almost seventy years before me, but still, she reached me with an immediacy that I couldn’t ignore.
The world continues to tell me that regular women who live ordinary lives are not worth noticing. Their tasks are mundane and tedious, so their experiences and thoughts and feelings must be too. Like my mother and grandmother, I too am an ordinary woman. My life is overflowing with commonplace responsibilities like driving kids to activities and cleaning toilets and filling squares on the kitchen calendar, in addition to my paid work. Just like the women in my family before me, my life is not spectacular. Yet, I can see the truth of my existence differently because of The Stone Diaries and all the books like it. I can see the complexity and nuance of the female experience at every stage in life. I can question it and celebrate it and hold space for it, both for myself and for others.
Thank you, Carol Shields, for seeing this truth so many years ago and for bringing us Daisy Goodwill Flett. She will live with me forever.
Note: The photo at the top of this post is of the farmhouse in Saskatchewan where my mother was raised, and where Ruby lived out much of her extraordinary life.
© 2024 Shirley Hay