Key themes
- The invisible life — the woman whose life is never quite fully seen
- Autobiography's limits — what the first person cannot see about itself
- The ordinary life as the site of everything
About this book
Daisy Goodwill Flett narrates her own life — from birth in Manitoba in 1905 through to old age — in a biography that uses documents, letters, photographs and others' perspectives alongside Daisy's own unreliable account. Shields's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel asks what a woman's life looks like when she tries to see it clearly.
Published in 1993, The Stone Diaries won the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General's Award. Shields said she wanted to write the biography of someone who was not worthy of a biography — someone whose life was entirely ordinary.
Discussion questions
- Daisy narrates her own life but frequently disappears from it — switching to second person, to others' perspectives, to recipes and photographs. What does Shields achieve through this self-erasure — and what is she saying about women's difficulty in making themselves subjects?
- The novel moves through the 20th century from Manitoba to Florida. How does Shields develop the period setting — as backdrop or as shaping force?
- The sections about Daisy's depression are told obliquely, through others' letters. Why does Shields approach the crisis this way — and what does the indirection add?
- The novel asks whether it is possible to fully know any life — even one's own. How does Shields use the documentary materials (recipes, letters, lists) to make this argument?
- The Stone Diaries won the Pulitzer Prize. What does it do that earns this — and is its formal experiment something that enriches or occasionally tests the reader?
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