The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. 

The Stone Diaries is one of the Pulitzer winners that I have put off reading because I had a feeling that I would not like it.  Well, it turns out that my hunch was right.  I kept reading it because I have committed to myself to read all of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  And I kept thinking that something interesting or exciting was going to happen.  The book is written as a diary of Daisy Goodwill who is born to a married couple in Manitoba, Canada.  Her mother dies the day she is born.  Father doesn't know his wife is expecting a child and he is busy as a stone cutter in the local quarry, so he goes back to work.  Daisy is raised by Mrs. Flett, a kind neighbor lady who liked Daisy’s mother.  At age 11, Daisy moves to Bloomington, Indiana with her father when he takes a job in a quarry in that locale.  She marries a man, Harold Hoad, when she is a young woman and he falls out of a window in Italy on their honeymoon.  Daisy is a young  widow and  remains single until she marries Mrs. Flett’s son, Barker, and moves to Ottawa,  Ontario.  They have three children and Barker eventually dies.  Daisy becomes an expert in gardening and raising plants.  She writes several newspaper columns on gardening, is popular in Ottawa for a while, and then she gets replaced by a newspaper journalist who wants the job.  Daisy gets depressed for a while and then moves to Florida and finds some of her old friends living there.  She is a grandma but her grandchildren live far away.  And  then  Daisy gets sick and old and eventually dies.   The book ends.

 

On page 340 of The Stone Diaries, Shields raises the question:  "What is the story of a life?  A chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression.”  I’m not sure what this means related to The Stone Diaries.  I wasn’t aware of much other than a chronicle of fact.  The impression I was left with is that the book is a story about nothing, like the TV show proposed by Jerry and George toward the end of the Seinfeld series.  But George and Jerry somehow made funny, entertaining stories based on nothing.  The Stone Diaries was about nothing without the entertainment.  But there may be another impression that I derived from reading The Stone Diaries.

 

After letting some time pass upon completing my reading of The Stone Diaries, perhaps the best thing I can say about the book is that it provides an example for living a life- an ordinary life of a good person. Daisy turns out to be a resilient woman who starts life without a mother, has a rather distant father, loses her first husband on the honeymoon, remarries an older man, has three children and raises them to be good people, is a popular gardening columnist until she’s replaced, gets depressed but doesn’t stay that way, moves to Florida, tries to be a good grandmother to kids who live far away, and ends up enduring several years of illness in her old age without becoming bitter.  The facts of her life allow us to form an impression of Daisy.  Maybe we need to be reminded of people who live ordinary lives well enough and endure hardships to the end- and hope that we too can be such a person.