“My mother’s name was Mercy Stone Goodwill” (opening line).
Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award (in addition to being shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries presents the fictional biography of Daisy Goodwill, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life unfolds across the twentieth century. Told in ten unique chapters depicting key moments in Daisy’s life, The Stone Diaries begins with her Manitoba birth in 1905 to an obese mother and an unknowing father (her mother suffers from eclampsia and dies in childbirth), then onto Daisy’s youth in Bloomington, Indiana, where she is raised by her Aunt Clementine and “Uncle” Barker. She later returns to live with her father, Cuyler Goodwill, a silver-tongued, suit-wearing stone mason. This is followed by an ill-fated first marriage in 1927 to Harold A. Hoad, a drunken buffoon who dies falling out an upper window while on their honeymoon in Paris (the marriage was unconsummated) By 1935, Daisy remarries, this time to an older man she once adored as a child and affectionately called her “Uncle” Barker Flett (the “male god of her childhood”) a professor of botany. She then becomes Mrs. Daisy Goodwill Flett. They have three children together: mean-hearted Alice, sullen Warren, and devious and secretive Joan “Joanie.”
Daisy is given a second wind in life during the 1950s when her husband Barker Flett dies of a brain tumor and she turns to writing, taking over his regular column in The Ottawa Record. With this job, she becomes a celebrated gardening expert known as “Mrs. Green Thumb” and finally finds satisfaction in her work and life. She has a brief romantic dalliance with the newspaper editor. But unfortunately, her column is discontinued and by the 1960s, Daisy falls into a middle-age depression, with many people speculating as to why. “These are frightening times for Mrs. Flett, when she feels herself anointed by loneliness, the full weight of it” (140). Many characters offer their own opinions on the matter, from Daisy’s children to her extended family and even her longtime friends, Eflreda “Fraidy” Hoyt and Labina “Beans” Anthony.
As Daisy grows older, her children and niece, Beverly, start their own families. We see brief glimpses of their struggles through child-rearing, spousal separations and divorces, education and careers, and all the while they gradually grow distant from their aging mother. Eventually, Daisy’s beloved grandniece, Victoria “Vicky” (daughter of Beverly), invites Daisy to join her on a trip to the Orkney Islands (off the coast of Scotland) where they hope to track down the grave of Daisy’s late father-in-law, a man with whom Daisy has always felt a distant connection. However, when they arrive they are shocked to find 115-year-old Magnus Flett still living in a senior facility. After some delay, Daisy gently speaks with the old crusty man, whispering in his ear about his late son while he recites lines from Jane Eyre.
Not unlike Daisy’s own father, Magnus Flett was once a master of his trade (stonecutting). He worked at the Tyndall quarry until he was sixty-five: “a man of muscle and skills, a working man. By all accounts he had no softness to him. He spoke but little, according to his sons. Unyieldingness is the reputation he left behind. Narrowness. Stone” (222). In old age he had grown fond of reading Jane Eyre and committing it to memory. He is an echo of the old stock who were once capable of committing long passages (and indeed entire books) to memory. And this notion of memory and recollection serves as a key theme in the book as characters periodically wrestle with finding things that actually endure, whether it is intangible memories or physical stone constructions, there is a tragic sense of impermanence in The Stone Diaries.
By the 1980s, Daisy grows frail in Sarasota, Florida. She suffers a heart attack, a bad fall, partial kidney failure, and even cancer: “she lives now in the wide-open arena of pain, surrounded by row on row of spectators” (229). She spends much of her time lost in thought and struggling over her memories before she finally dies at an unspecified date in the 1990s. In an obituary of sorts, we are given numerous different perspectives on her life and passing, as well as various lists, geographic locations that have changed, and of course recipes. Daisy’s final unspoken words are: “I am not a peace.”
The Stone Diaries is unique biography that spans the length of the twentieth century. It notably does not dwell too heavily on the major events of the century, such as the world wars or ascendant technologies. Instead, it is more of a domestic history, a biography of one woman, her struggles and trials, a familiar American life that is all-too-easily overlooked or forgotten. Carol Shields offers the life of Daisy, which is both ordinary and extraordinary. In many ways, The Stone Diaries is a meditation on domesticity and women’s lives in the twentieth century in a biography situated among kitchens, recipes, and gardening magazines.
There are many noteworthy characters in The Stone Diaries. One in particular is a character simply referred to as “the old jew,” a kindly but ostracized old man who is often quietly judged by the people around Manitoba. However, one day he happens to be passing Daisy’s mother when she unexpectedly goes into labor and he accidentally winds up helping deliver baby Daisy. In fact, “the old Jew” ends up being the last person Daisy’s mother lays eyes upon before she dies. We later learn his name is Abram Skutari when he is finally humanized in a passage told from the perspective of his granddaughter. Many characters seem to come and go like this, forgotten until we are reminded of their humanity, and the fact that they do, in fact, face the same doubts, struggles, and hardships as the rest of us.
Of The Stone Diaries as a whole Penelope Lively writes: “It can be seen as a discussion of the nature of evidence – the way in which there is no single truth about anyone’s life, but as many truths as there are observers.” In many ways, I agree. The Stone Diaries is a beautifully written fictional biography, with impressing prose, and rich passages contemplating the nature of religion, marriage, family, sex, and the ordinariness of life. Naomi Huffman’s 2020 essay in The New York Times called it “The Radical Ordinariness of Carol Shields’s Literary World.” In this world, we are given a great many details, facts, and perspective on Daisy Goodwill’s life, enough to fill a whole novel, however Daisy still remains a somewhat elusive character –she is somehow still mysterious and beyond the scope of full comprehension. It is a reminder that people are strange. People keep secrets. And others speculate about those secrets. What does it mean to be “somebody” (i.e. not forgotten, or unimportant)? Is a person like Daisy worthy of remembering?
I spent some time pondering the meaning of the book’s title “The Stone Diaries.” The title was perhaps derived from Pat Lowther’s poetry collection A Stone Diary (1977), yet there may be a deeper meaning at work here. Daisy was born in the town of Stonewall in Manitoba. Her father, Cuyler Goodwill, was a revered stone mason, and everal other key characters are also stone masons like Daisy’ father-in-law Magnus Flett. He appears several times throughout the book, often forgetful of his only daughter. He settles down with an Italian woman named Maria, but he never fully lets go of the memory of his late wife Mercy.
“Occasionally he will wake from sleep with his body trembling and his head soaked with the sweat of memory. There, dancing in the darkness, as plain as life, are the walls of the resurrected kitchen with its tumult and confusion, its circle of shocked faces, and the silent sheeted body of his dear Mercy… While the others stand and stare like statues, he runs out the kitchen door and throws himself on the ground, rolling over and over, shouting and weeping and pounding his fists on the baked earth. ‘She didn’t tell me,’ he roars to the vacant sky, ‘she never told me’… This is what he is unable to comprehend: why his Mercy had seen to guard her momentous secret… He supposes he must look upon her silence as a kind of betrayal, or even an act of hostility, but he is reminded, always, of her old helplessness with words and with the difficult forms the real world imposes. He tries to imagine what she felt while his ball of human matter was growing inside her, how she accommodated its collapsed arms and legs and beating heart, whether she feared its intrusion or if she perhaps loved it so deeply she was unable to speak its name, to share its existence or plan for its arrival… He admits to himself that his love for his dead wife has been altered by the fact of her silence. More and more her lapse seems not just a withholding, but a punishment, a means of humbling him before others who see him now, he imagines, as an ignorant or else careless man. What manner of husband does not know his wife is to bear a child?” (44-45).
At one point in his old age, Cuyler Goodwill struggles to remember the name of his beloved first wife, a woman he once truly loved. He pores over his memories, desperate to recall her lovely name. He remembers a memorabilia box he placed underneath a stone tower he once dedicated to her. Despite being a builder of great stone constructions, many of which have been designed to last through the ages, the memories imprinted in his mind still seem to dissipate. It is a frustrating labor for him to remember things. And by now, many years later, only he alone remembers what it was like to be close to his dear Mercy. Thus, throughout the book, the act of physically constructing stone edifices is compared to the act of mentally constructing memories. Hence why these diaries are called “The Stone Diaries.” After all, what else is a biography if not a constructed memory of one person’s life, an attempt to carve out their life in stone?
But how shall we wholly and completely capture the story of one person’s life? We cannot possibly etch the immense gravity and nuance of a living human being in one single summary. Perhaps we can look to their diaries, their reflections, their letters, and even photographs (there are a handful of photographs included in the novel), yet the true identity of Daisy Goodwill remains just out of reach. As Carol Shields writes in The Stone Diaries: “The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence” (20-21), and also: “Life is and 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!” (27).
Cuyler Goodwill makes this stone metaphor explicit during his commencement address at Long College in which he compares all the graduating women to the great stone carvers like himself:
“And I say to you young women as you go out into the world, think of the miraculous freestone material as the substance of your lives. You are the stone carver. The tools of intelligence are in your hand. You can make of your lives one thing or the other. You can be sweetness or bitterness, lightness or darkness, a force of energy or indolence, a fighter or a laggard. You can fail tragically or soar brilliantly. The choice, young citizens of the world, is yours” (85).
The Stone Diaries reminds that there is a delicate, unspoken vanity in trying to hold onto something forever (much like trying to grab ahold of the mythological god Proteus in Homer’s Odyssey). Things change, buildings crumble, people forget, and time marches ever onward. By the end of The Stone Diaries, after Daisy has passed on, we are treated to a lengthy passage describing all the buildings and landmarks, many of which we have come to know throughout the novel, which have now been condemned, torn down, converted into apartment complexes or office buildings and so on. The great work of the old stone carvers is eventually undone and forgotten. One wonders if anything will ever truly last. Like Daisy Goodwill, we all have anxiety over losing things, forgetting people, and forfeiting bygone memories, especially when even stone carvings fade with time.
Perhaps this is indulgent, but it reminded me of Prospero’s somber soliloquy in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep” (IV.i.148–158)
Notable Quotations
“My mother’s name was Mercy Stone Goodwill” (opening line).
“What did food mean to a working man like himself? A bother, a distraction, perhaps even a kind of price that had to be paid in order to remain upright and breathing” (1, on Daisy’s parents).
“Her inability to feel love has poisoned her, swallowed down along with the abasement of sugar, yeast, lard, and flour; she knows this for a fact. She tries, she pretends pleasure, as women are encouraged to do, but her efforts are punished by a hunger that attacks her when she’s alone… She seems always to be waiting for something fresh to happen, but her view of this ‘something’ is obscured by ignorance and the puffiness of her bodily tissue” (5, on Daisy’s mother).
“God sees her, of course. He must. God observes her at the window where she stares and stares at the shadows of the caragana blowing across the path, or sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, locked into paralysis over her mending basket, watching a fly creep across the table. The minutes tick by, become an hour, sometimes two” (8, on Daisy’s mother).
“She is a woman whose desires stand at the bottom of a cracked pitcher, waiting” (11, on Daisy’s mother).
“Even now, hanging out the wash, she is faint with longing, but for what?” (12, on Daisy’s mother).
“There’s nothing ugly about this scene, whatever you may think, nothing unnatural that is, so why am I unable to look at it calmly?” (17, Daisy reflecting on the scene of her birth).
“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 seasons or the conspicuous 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” (20).
“Life is and 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!” (27).
“For days at a time he is able to forget that he is the father of a child, a little girl named Daisy, then something will jangle a bell to remind him” (43, on Daisy’s father).
“The religious impulse, as everyone knows –certainly I know—is hard to pin down. There are ecstatics, like my father, who become addicted to the rarefied air of spiritual connection, and then there are cooler minds who claim that religion exists in order to keep us from feeling our own absurdity… For Cuyler Goodwill, a man untrained in conventional theology, the human and the divine are balanced across a dazzling equation: man’s creation of God being exactly equal to God’s creation of man, one unified mind bending like a snake around the curve of earth and heaven” (48).
“How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut: nothing can be added or subtracted.
How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future. Ask Clarentine Flett.
We say war is ended by a surrender, an armistice, a treaty. But, really, it just wears itself out, is no longer its own recompense, seems suddenly ignoble, part of a vast discourtesy of the world… Things begin, things end” (52-53).
“When we think of the past we tend to assume that people were simpler in their functions, and shaped by forces that were primary and irreducible. We take for granted that forebears were imbued with a deeper purity of purpose than we possess nowadays, and a more singular set of mind, believing, for example, that early scientists pursued their ends with unbroken ‘dedication’ and that artists worked in the flame of some perpetual ‘inspiration.’ But none of this is true. Those who went before us were every bit as wayward and unaccountable and unsteady in their longings as people are today” (67).
“Canada is a country where nothing seems ever to happen” (68).
“The real troubles in this world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women –that’s my opinion, my humble opinion, as I long ago learned to say” (89).
“She is powerless, anchorless, soft-tissued –a woman. Perhaps that is the whole of it, that she is a woman. Yes, of course” (111).
“What happens to men when their work is taken from them” (120).
“Their sleep, Barker Flett likes to think, is made up of softer denser stuff than other people’s sleep. There’s something clean about it like scrubbed fleece. Is this what love is, he wonders, this substance that lies so pressingly between them, so neutral in color yet so palpable it never be mentioned? Or is love something less, something slippery and odorless, a transparent gas riding through the world on the back of the breeze, or else –and this is what he more and more believes—just a word trying to remember another word” (121-122).
“Mrs. Flett’s three children always seem to be quarreling –that’s the impression she has anyway. It breaks her heart, she says, she who grew up without any brothers and sisters to play with” (128).
“Common sense, that prized substance, seems to have disappeared from the world” (198).
“…there are chambers, he knows, in the most ordinary lives that are never entered, let alone advertised, and yet they lie pressed against the consciousness like leaf specimens in an old book” (207-208).
“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” (210).
“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” (220).
“Magnus, the wanderer, the suffering modern man –that was how she’d thought of him all these years. Romantically. And believing herself to be a wanderer too, with an orphan’s heart and a wistful longing for a refuge, for a door marked with her own name. And now, here was this barely breathing cadaver, all his old age depletions registered and paid for. A tissue of skin. A scaffold of bone; well, more like china than bone” (226).
“Suddenly her body is all that matters. How it’s let her down. And how fundamentally lonely it is to live inside a body year after year and carry it always in a forward direction, and how there is never any relief from the weight of it, even when sleeping, even when joined, briefly, to the body of another” (229).
“Something has occurred to her –something transparently simple, something she’s always known, it seems, but never articulated. Which is that 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 up against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. A person can go on and on tuned in to the daily music of food and work and weather and speech right up to the last minute, so that not a single thing gets lost” (254).
The 1995 Pulitzer Prize Decision
For the 1995 Fiction Jury, two members (Joel Conarroe and Charles Johnson) previously served on prior Pulitzer fiction juries:
- Chair: Joel Conarroe (1934-2024) was an American arts administrator and professor. He was the head of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from 1983 to 2003 (the third president of the organization). He was also a trusted personal confidant to countless writers, most notably Philip Roth. He previously served as executive director of the Modern Language Association and president of the P.E.N. American Center. He served as a chairman of the National Book Award fiction jury and also the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury and other similar roles. He published analyses of the poetry of William Carlos Williams and John Berryman and edited multiple poetry anthologies, including “Six American Poets,” a widely circulated 1993 survey of works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and others. He received a bachelor’s degree in English from Davidson College in North Carolina in 1956, a master’s degree in English from Cornell University the following year, and a doctorate in English from New York University in 1966. A gay man, he developed a long-term relationship with the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici. He died at age 89 in 2024 due to advanced melanoma.
- Nancy Huddleston Packer (1925-2025) was a short story and memoir writer, who won two O. Henry Awards and was awarded a fellowship at Stanford University’s creative writing center for (1959-1960), studying under Wallace Stegner and alongside writers like Ken Kesey and Wendell Berry, before joining the faculty in 1961 as a professor of English and creative writing. She began her full-time teaching career at Stanford after Philip Roth suddenly opted out. She later directed the creative writing program at Stanford and served as the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Humanities. She taught the likes of Michael Cunningham (a fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner) and she served as chair of the Pulitzer fiction jury in 2002. She retired from Stanford in 1993. Her father was Alabama congressman George Huddleston. She had graduated from Birmingham–Southern College in 1945 and earned a master’s degree in theology from the University of Chicago in 1947. Nancy Huddleston Packer was married to Herbert L. Packer, a law professor and criminologist at Stanford who died in 1973 (he committed suicide after suffering a stroke that left him paralyzed in 1969). They had two children together, both writers, Ann Packer and George Packer. Nancy Huddleston Packer died of Alzheimer’s Disease in April 2025 at the age of 99.
- Charles Johnson (1948-present) is a scholar and author of many works, including works of fiction, philosophy, nonfiction, and even collections of political cartoons. He was born in Evanston, Illinois, and spent much of his career at the University of Washington in Seattle where he was the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of English until his retirement in 2009. He received his BS degree in journalism, his MA in philosophy from Southern Illinois University, and his PhD in philosophy from Stony Brook University. His early goal with writing was to contribute to and enrich the tradition of “African-American philosophical fiction” and he was mentored by the novelist John Gardner. Johnson’s novel Middle Passage won the National Book Award in 1990, making him the first African American winner of the prize since Ralph Ellison in 1953. He has received numerous other accolades throughout his career, including a MacArthur genius grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has served on three different Pulitzer fiction juries as well as three National Book Award juries (twice chairing the fiction panel for the latter).
Along with The Stone Diaries, the other two nominees selected by the jury and submitted to the Pulitzer Board in 1995 were: What I Lived For by Joyce Carol Oates and The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.
The 1995 jury report was sent to then-Pulitzer Prize Administrator Seymour Topping on December 31, 1994. In it, the jury’s three nominees were listed alphabetically (as an inquisitive Pulitzer nerd, I cannot help but wonder what discussions might have taken place that led to the ultimate selection of Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries).
The jury wrote the following assessment of The Stone Diaries in the report:
“Short-listed for the Booker Prize two years ago, Carol Shields’ seventh novel takes the form of an unconventional autobiography in which a Canadian woman imaginatively ponders –and in some cases invents—the details of life from birth in 1905 to her death ninety years later. By turns lyrical and prosaic, The Stone Diaries illuminates both the intimate history of one quite ordinary individual and the texture of everyday life in Manitoba. Even though the author does not sustain the brilliance of her opening chapters, the book as a whole is clearly praiseworthy, though not, we all feel, so obviously prizeworthy as our more artistically integrated nominees.”
Years later, nearing the end of her life, Carol Shields reflected on her Pulitzer Prize victory during a wide-ranging interview in 2002 on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross: “Someone sent me a list of all the Pulitzer Prize winners since something like 1915, I think, and half of them I’d never heard of. So I don’t think literary reputations live on, very few of them. … I don’t have a sense of leaving anything permanent at all.” What a fitting comment considering the key themes of The Stone Diaries.
Who is Carol Shields?
Carol Shields (1935-2003) was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1935, the third child of Robert Elmer, a candy factory manager, and Inez (Selgren) Warner, a schoolteacher. Her elder siblings were fraternal twins. She attended Hanover College in Indiana, and after earning a bachelor’s degree in 1957, she married Donald “Don” Hugh Shields, a Canadian civil engineer. They met while she was on a study-abroad program in Britain and settled together in Winnipeg. They had five children: John, Anne, Catherine, Meg, and Sara.
She earned her master’s degree in literature at the University of Ottawa in 1975, writing a thesis on the Canadian writer Susanna Moodie. Unused material from her thesis later became part of her first novel Small Ceremonies (1976), about a woman writing a biography of Moodie. At the time, Shields was in her early 40s. She went on to publish nine more novels, five short story collections, three poetry collections, several plays, and a biography of Jane Austen. The Stone Diaries won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and received Canada’s prestigious Governor’s General Award. Throughout her career, Shields was eligible for numerous awards thanks to her dual citizenship in Canada and the United States.
She later became a professor at the University of Ottawa, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Manitoba, before later serving as chancellor of the University of Winnipeg. In 1998, she was diagnosed with breast cancer which eventually resulted in her untimely death on July 16, 2003 at the age of sixty-eight. She was survived at the time by her husband and eleven grandchildren.
In 2020, a literary prize was endowed in Carol Shields’s name, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. It was established by Canadian novelist Susan Swan and editor Janice Zawerbny (along with a founding committee that included leading literary lights like Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Jane Smiley, among others). The prize honors works of literature penned by Canadian or American women as well as non-binary writers. The annual winner receives an award of $150,000 and the shortlisted finalists each receive an award of $12,500 (as of 2026). Thus, making the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction one of the more generous literary prizes. Submissions are judged by a jury composed of at least one Canadian, one American, and one international judge. The first winner of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction was awarded in 2023.
Film Adaptations:
- None.
Further Reading:
- I am interested in one day exploring Carol Shields’ early fiction, like her novel The Box Garden, as well as some of her shorter fiction. However, if any passing reader happens upon this website and would like to offer me a particular recommendation, I am all ears.
Literary Context 1994-1995
- 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature: awarded to Japanese novelist Kenzaburō Ōe (1935–2023) “who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.” This made Kenzaburō Ōe the second Japanese Nobel laureate in the literature category.
- 1994 National Book Award Winner: A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis.
- 1994 Booker Prize Winner: How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman (a highly controversial selection).
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1994 was The Chamber by John Grisham. Other notable bestsellers that year included: Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy, The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield, Insomnia by Stephen King, Disclosure by Michael Crichton, and several books by Danielle Steele.
- This year Penguin Books offered Peter James’s novel Host on two floppy disks, billing it as “the world’s first electronic novel.”
- The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren was posthumously published.
- Kevin J. Anderson published his Jedi Academy of Star Wars novels.
- Neil Gaiman continued his Sandman series with the seventh and eighth installments.
- John Gardner published his next James bond continuation novel Seafire.
- Joseph Heller published Closing Time.
- James A. Michener published Recessional.
- Tim O’Brien published A Lake in the Woods.
- V.S. Naipaul published A Way in the World.
- John Updike published Brazil.
- Louis de Bernieres published Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.
- Haruki Murakami published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
- David Guterson published Snow Falling on Cedars.
- Nelson Mandela published Long Walk to Freedom.
- Anne Lamott published Bird by Bird.
Did the Right Book Win?
Charming, tender, and thought-provoking –I was captivated by The Stone Diaries. This is a unique biography that wrestles with the very notion of biography itself. How do we come to know a person? Can we ever fully understand a life? Carol Shields explores these questions through a unique domestic lens peering into the life of Daisy Goodwill, wherein Shields peppers the pages with recipes, lists, quotations, comments, and observations from a variety of other characters, and Shields frequently switches narrative styles and character perspectives in attempt to grasp some depth in Daisy’s life. In fact, the whole life of Daisy Goodwill is told in ten unique chapters, each depicting a distinct era in her long life, and yet by the end of the book, readers walk away from The Stone Diaries with a newfound solemnity for the staggering complexity and depth to human life.
Shields, Carol. The Stone Diaries. Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, New York, New York, fifteenth anniversary edition (originally published in 1993). “For my sister, Babs.” The book features an epigraph quoting a poem entitled “Grandmother Cycle” by Judith Downing.
Click here to return to my survey of the Pulitzer Prize winners.