The Work of Ambiguity: Writerly and Readerly Labor in Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries

Abstract

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995, Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries has fascinated and frustrated critics of the novel for nearly twenty years. The fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill—which includes a detailed family tree as well as, in the original edition, an eight-page section of “family” photographs—Shields’s novel in its very form blurs the lines between truth and falsehood, documentation and invention; it raises productive questions about the empowering possibilities of women’s autobiography while, at the same time, cutting those questions short in its status as fiction. And though it is deceptively linear in structure and chronology, following Daisy’s life from birth to death, The Stone Diaries is also disrupted by major formal shifts: the text oscillates from straightforward recounting of events, to collections of letters, to sections listing the various “Things People Had to Say” and multiple “Theories” about Daisy’s actions, to the final chapter’s disintegration into lists and frag-