Stone Diaries Research Articles

Narrative Agency and the Critical Potential of Metanarrative Reading Groups

AbstractThis article lays out the theoretical-analytic framework of narrative agency, three central dimensions of which are narrative awareness, narrative imagination, and narrative dialogicality, and presents a model of metanarrative reading groups, which aims at amplifying narrative agency. It argues that an important form of self-reflexivity in contemporary literary fiction is metanarrativity—self-aware reflection not only on the narratives’ own narrativity but also on the significance and functions of cultural practices of narrative sense-making. It analyzes how reading together metanarrative fiction, which critically engages with the roles of cultural narrative models in contemporary society, can shape narrative agency—that is, the ability to navigate narrative environments. The article illustrates the metanarrative reading-group model through the analysis of one reading-group session, which focuses on a metanarrative excerpt from Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries. The article suggests that a creative, dialogical space of a metanarrative reading group forms a productive environment for exploring the affordances, limitations, and power of narratives. It argues that working with narrative agency has the potential to help participants gain critical awareness of—and thereby more agentic power over—their narrative environments, and to engage with them in more critical and creative ways.

A study of Ageism in Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries: Narrative and Body Foregrounding the (old) self

This paper looks at the (re)presentation of ageing in Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries. In an attempt to unmask society’s ageist attitudes towards its elderly, the research attempts to analyse ageing through the prism of gender as surely ageing is worse for women than it is for men. The research sheds light on how the old person is viewed just as an old body which is also genderless and therefore expected to be devoid of any carnal desires. As the novel revolves around a narrative within the novel’s narrative, the paper also sees how Daisy, the ageing protagonist, loses her self behind her narrative. Her self is also in perpetual submersion due to her hyper-visible ageing body. Her sagging skin and wrinkles are the only assertions that the world registers from her side while her selfhood and identity are either erased or ignored. The novel’s story follows Daisy through her tumultuous life but this paper attempts to live it with her. So while Daisy composes her life story, her life composes her story which eventually begins to foreground her to the extent that she is completely submerged in her story and ultimately dies in a nursing home in Florida. Her death bringing relief to her family is the peak of ageism that the story throws in our faces. She lived as an association— a mother, a grandmother, an aunty, a wife, a widow; and died as an old woman and nothing more.

Written in Stone: subverting the authoritative (auto)biographical voice—Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

ABSTRACTDiaries imply true confessions, and readers wish to believe Daisy Flett’s life story in Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries (1994), but her layered narration, alternating first- and third-person narrative, proves problematic. “Death,” the final chapter, is particularly puzzling, as third-person accounts of Daisy’s demise are punctuated by her comments, such as, “I’m still in here” (320). But how does a first-person narrator relate her own death? The secret to Daisy’s death narrative, as David Williams observes, is the correspondence between Shields’s postmodernist gem, The Stone Diaries, and Laurence’s modernist masterpiece, The Stone Angel (1964), published three decades earlier, as Shields’s title clearly references Laurence’s. Two decades after Williams’s insightful essay, we can extend the parallels (and delineate the differences) between the two—and explore their implications. Such intertextual resonance illustrates Shields challenging the borders between fiction and biography and parodying canonical texts.

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

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-

(Re)Constructing Memory with “Imagination’s Invisible Ink” in Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries

The Stone Diaries illustre l’intérêt de Carol Shields pour l’écriture d’une vie et la façon dont cette vie est remémorée et narrée. En prenant en compte le concept d’identité narrative de Paul Ricœur, cet article considère comment et pourquoi Daisy Goodwill, la narratrice, (re)construit les souvenirs de sa propre vie en ayant recours à son imagination. Nous montrerons d’abord que la dimension rétrospective est problématisée par le biais de l’hybridisation des genres puis comment la mémoire apparait en perpétuelle (re)construction, avant d’étudier cet aspect du roman en relation avec la question de la finalité.

They Will Talk About Our Life in Front of Our Body: Writing as the Subject's Self-Appropriation and Transcendence in Carol Shields's 'The Stone Diaries' (Hablarán de Nuestra Vida Delante de Nuestro Cuerpo: La Escritura Como Autoapropiación y Trascendencia del Sujeto en 'The Stone Diaries') (Spanish)

This paper is an analysis and commentary of Stone Diaries, a novel by Carol Shields, seen here as a reflexive exercise in the representation of life stories, eschewing the narrative fallacies attending totalization, the reification of character, and the hindsight bias inherent to retrospective accounts. The novel's ironic stance and metafictional narrative structures provide a way of simultaneously appropriating and transcending actual life experience and the identity associated to it, through an experiment in representing oneself as an-other.

Narrative Genres and the Administration of Consciousness : The Case of Daisy Goodwill's Rebellion

The Stone Diaries (1993), a novel by Carol Shields, examines the strategies characters use to render their selves accountable: they turn life into an ensemble made up of historical, scientific, novelistic or biographical discourse. In contrast, Daisy Goodwill, who is the subject-matter of this fictional autobiography, remains close to the epistemology of the short story, whose potential has been described by critics as a challenge to knowledge or synthesis (Cortázar 1973; Bayley 1988; Leitch 1989, May 1994; Trussler 1996). There seems to be agreement that the only condition of coherence necessary for the short story is a pointing to the evasion of meaning in life, also that the genre allies itself to the way in which the past is attached to our memory (Kosinski 1978; Hallet 1998; Lohafer 1998; Wolff 2000). This essay will analyze the implications of its protagonist’s stance with a view to pinning down some of the ideological grounds of the novel and of the short story in their approach to the question of identity.

Turning the Pages: Rereading Atwood’s Novels

DESCRIBING A BOOK AS A PAGE TURNER is often taken as an insult: a dismissal of the book on the grounds that its primary, and possibly only appeal is at the level of plot. But all fiction attempts to appeal to its readers, and those readers should be tempted to turn the pages. In the case of Margaret Atwood's fiction, however, readers are tempted to turn the pages both ways. Her fiction urges first-time readers forward, forward toward richly satisfying, if not entirely conclusive, moments of closure. But her fiction also demands readers to turn backwards, to turn the pages in the other direction as well: to go back to read again and reassess in light of the new insights they have gleaned as they have read forward. Think, for instance, of the difference between a reader's first encounter with Offred in The Handmaid's Tale and that same reader's return to the novel once s/he understands that Offred's story has been pieced together by the insidious Pieixoto. Similarly with each new addition to the oeuvre of this prolific author, while readers find themselves moving on to meet new fictional characters and landscapes, they also find themselves returning, turning back as it were, to earlier Atwood works in order to read those works through a new lens and with new insights. Take, for example, Blind Assassin, which, upon first reading, appears to be a character study of a woman's journey through life to age, occupying thereby a similar position to The Stone Angel in the oeuvre of Margaret Laurence or The Stone Diaries in that of Carol Shields. As readers reach the concluding pages, however, they recognize that the is one of the titular blind assassins;' as she confesses both her crime and the complex nature of her culpability This is a novel-length version of Robert Browning's My Last Duchess; a poem that becomes the focus of explication in Atwood's 2007 short story of the same name, where the central characters disagree to such an extent on the nature of the Duke's that it contributes to a growing distance in their relationship to one another (Moral Disorder, 63-95). In Margaret Atwood, A Critical Companion, I argue that Blind Assassin is the third of Atwood's villainess novels, the first two being The Robber Bride and Alias Grace. As such, it differs in kind from the old lady novels of Laurence and Atwood, and its protagonist more closely resembles Alice Munro's crafty Et, who confesses both her crime and exposes her cunning to the reader in Something I Have Been Meaning to Tell You:' Compared with these other heroines of the Canadian canon, The Blind Assassin's Iris scales greater heights of villainy (Cooke, 155), but also wins greater sympathy than the other villainess, Munro's Et. I suggest that, with more time and critical distance, Iris of The Blind Assassin will come to be compared at greater length with the villainesses of Roman and Greek antiquity The figure of Ismene in Sophocles' Antigone strikes me as one fruitful avenue of critical inquiry for future scholars (Cooke, 153-54). The recent stripping away of veils from Atwood's fictional villainesses has also invited us to recognize acts of violence in some of her earlier works. In this issue of English Studies in Canada, for example, Kiley Kapuscinski holds up to scrutiny both the national myth casting Canadians as pacifists, as nonviolent victims rather than victimizers, and the very binary structures upon which such meta-narratives are based: pacifism and violence, victim and victimizer, Canadian its seeming antithesis (as articulated in Surfacing at least), American. Kapuscinski locates violence in the acts of Atwood's female characters--the titular protagonists of the villainess novels, The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin, and the antagonist of Cat's Eye--and ascribes to them the role of challenging myths of vulnerability and other narratives central to the Canadian imaginary:' The specific focus in Kapuscinski's article, however, is on the unnamed protagonist of Surfacing: on her growing awareness of her own complicity in acts of violence, on the inaccuracies of equating the Canadian imaginary only with pacifism, and on the surfacing more generally of her awareness that the binaries of victim and victimizer, Canadian and American, no longer hold. …

The "Invisible" Woman: Narrative Strategies in The Stone Diaries

The "Invisible" Woman:Narrative Strategies in The Stone Diaries Katherine Weese (bio) To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself—inasmuch as she is on the side of the 'perceptible,' of 'matter'—to 'ideas,' in particular ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by masculine logic, but so as to make 'visible,' by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. It also means 'to unveil' the fact that, if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply reabsorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere. . . . (Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 76) Giving voice to the voiceless and making visible the invisible are two prime maneuvers in feminist poetics. (Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, 41) 1. Introduction Carol Shields's novel The Stone Diaries presents the reader with a challenging narrative puzzle: the extraordinary violations of storytelling conventions include not only rapid shifts between first- and third-person narration but also a first-person narrator who both recounts details of her birth to which she could not realistically have access and appears to speak [End Page 90] even after the moment of her death. Generated from a seemingly impossible narrative perspective, the novel prompts the reader to wonder who is telling this story. Many of the novel's critics have concluded that the main character, Daisy Goodwill Flett, is simply not a sophisticated, self-conscious enough narrator to have generated the whole of The Stone Diaries, positing instead that multiple voices weave the story of her life. However, reading the novel through feminist theories of narrative and theories of women's autobiography provides a different answer to the question of who tells this story. I would like to consider The Stone Diaries as a fictional autobiography, narrated throughout by Daisy herself, who adopts multiple voices in the act of employing various feminist narrative strategies to restore voice and visibility to her apparently voiceless, invisible character. Although Daisy initially appears to be thwarted by social constructions of femininity, she might instead be viewed as a highly self-conscious narrator of her life story who distances herself from the character "caught in a version of her life, pinned there" (147). In Irigaray's terms, she ultimately "remains elsewhere" in the narrative, outside of the conventional definitions that she seems at times to adopt. The plot of The Stone Diaries is difficult to summarize because so little of it focuses directly on the main character, whose narration contains countless digressions into the lives and minds of other characters. But suffice it to say that Daisy's story begins with her own birth and her mother's death during the process of childbirth, and then progresses through her childhood. Before being reunited with her father, Cuyler Goodwill, at age eleven, Daisy is raised by a neighbor, Clarentine Flett, and the neighbor's son Barker, whom Daisy later marries, following a disastrous first marriage. The sections of the novel that recount her childhood and two marriages also give a great deal of information about Daisy's friends, about the Flett family, and about Cuyler Goodwill. The novel then turns to Daisy's experiences as a mother, her subsequent work as a gardening columnist, the death of her husband Barker, a period of depression in Daisy's life, her later travels with her niece to pursue family history, her move to a retirement community, her old-age illness, and finally her death. Each section of the novel, each major segment of Daisy's life, modulates in its narrative perspective, at times seeming to generate from Daisy's first-person, autobiographical voice, and at other times seeming to generate [End Page 91] from the other characters and/or from a third-person, omniscient narrator. For readers to make their way through the narrative maze of The Stone Diaries, the work of Simone Vauthier on point of view and the curious shifts between first- and third-person narration in...

History, literature, and the writing of the Canadian prairies

The Canadian Prairie has long been represented as a timeless and unchanging location, defined by settlement and landscape. Now, a new generation of writers and historians challenge that perception and argue, instead, that it is a region with an evolving culture and history. This collection of ten essays explores a more contemporary identity, and reconfigures prairie as a construct that is non-linear and diverse, responding to the impact of geographical, historical, and political currents. These writers explore the connections between document and imagination, between history and culture, and between geography and time. The subjects of the essays range widely: the non-linear structure of Carol Shield's The Stone Diaries ; the impact of Aberhart's Social Credit, Marshall McLuhan, and Mesopotamian myth on Robert Kroetsch's postmodernism; the role of document in long poems; the connection between cultural tourism and heritage; the theme of regeneration in Margaret Laurence's Manawaka writing; the influence of imagination on geography in Thomas Wharton's Icefields; and the effects on an alpine climber of pre-WWII ideological concepts of time and individualism.

Refiguring Identitites: Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction, and: Where Are the Voices Coming From?: Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History (review)

Reviewed by: Refiguring Identitites: Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction, and: Where Are the Voices Coming From?: Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History Christl Verduyn Coral Ann Howells. Refiguring Identitites: Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003. 230 pp. $59.95 cloth. Coral Ann Howells, ed. Where Are the Voices Coming From?: Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2004. 266 pp. $81.00 cloth. Two new books by Coral Ann Howells make welcome additions to the international scholarship on Canadian literature that has grown in leaps and bounds alongside the burgeoning international readership of Canada's writers. A well-known and respected literary critic, Howells has written extensively on Canadian literature, in particular on women writers and most notably on Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. In Refiguring Identities: Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction, Howells turns her critical eye to the work of a younger generation of writers, while in Where Are the Voices Coming From?: Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History, she extends her editorial interests to Canadian film as well as Canadian literature. In both books, Howells draws on the theoretical frameworks of feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism with the dexterity, insight, and nuance of an experienced and well-read critic. Readers and students of Canadian literature everywhere will find these two publications useful. In her Introduction to Refiguring Identities, Howells recognizes the significant change in Canada's literary profile since the early 1990s, forged by the increased number of Canadian writers of diverse, non-European ethnic and racial backgrounds. Her interest lies in how this has changed the concept of Canadianness and refigures the perennial Canadian question of national identity. Taking up her position as "a reader and critic working outside Canada" (1), Howells sets out to explore the complexities of identity construction in recent Canadian literature through the analysis of "a representative range" (1) of texts by Canadian women. These include a short story collection by Alice Munro—Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage—and nine novels—Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood; The Stone Diaries and Larry's Party by Carol Shields; Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald; The Electrical Field by Kerri Sakamoto; Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo; The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz; and Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson. Each of these writers, Howells asserts, raises the question of "how much of anyone's identity is authentic and dependent on inheritance, and how [End Page 232] much is performative, subject to circumstances, and so redefinable in different contexts" (2). Her aim is to investigate continuities and differences of emphasis from one text to another and in this way to chart the changes that have taken place in Canadian literature in recent years. Acknowledging that her study focuses on Anglophone perspectives and writers most widely read outside of Canada, Howells proposes to make the case for the place of Canadian women's writing in the broader picture of contemporary political and cultural realities in Canada. These realities, she argues, together with a host of Canadian critics such as Barbara Godard, Smaro Kamboureli, Arun Mukherjee, and Charles Taylor among others, may best be thumbnailed today by the question of what constitutes Canadianness. Howells wishes to assess and establish the contribution of women's literary texts and cultural criticism to the "process of reimagining Canadianness" (10). Assessment of this contribution involves the key concepts of multiculturalism, feminism, and nationalism, each within the postcolonial context. Though these are given "different inflections" in the different texts Howells has chosen, she finds and demonstrates that each work contributes to re-imagining Canadian identity, often by revisiting Canadian history. Thus for example, historical fictions by Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin) and Ann-Marie MacDonald (Fall on Your Knees) revise the image of earlier-day Canada as being a more homogenous and unified society than today. These writers, Howells writes, open up possibilities for "a revised rhetoric of Canadianness" (52), possibilities taken up in compelling ways by the other authors in her study. That the project to re-imagine Canadian identity is not limited to work by writers from Canada's...

Fictional Fossils: Life and Death Writing in Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries

[T]he 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 against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. 1 C. Shields, The Stone Diaries (Toronto, 1993), p. 342. Further references will be given in the text, as page number. R egarding life and death as ultimate opposites, as two irreconcilable extremes, is a “distortion” 2 challenged by texts, and in particular by life writing. Jeremy Tambling calls all writing “potentially posthumous since it cannot have a punctual relation to a life of writing”. 3 Michel Foucault, too, in his essay “What Is an Author?”, emphasises writing's relationship to death, which he sees as twofold: on the one hand narrativity has always been “intended to perpetuate the immortality of the hero”; on the other hand, it is “designed to ward off death”. 4 In Ivan Callus' words, “to memorialise a life in writing […] is to play with death's deferral”: 5 the text assumes eternal life in the place of the protagonist or writer, and thus allows her or him to live on in their stories. (Auto)biography as a genre thus “challenges a life–death distinction” 6 by softening the delimitations between the two, breaking down the seeming opposition between life and death. Life writing preserves aspects of past lives that would otherwise dissolve without trace, but, in the act of preservation, it destroys the very features which make “life” into the activity of living 7 – so as text it constitutes a contradiction in terms: it extracts life from life in order to conserve it. This is the reason why “the language of monuments [and] epitaphs […] pervades biographical and autobiographical discourse and testifies to the tensions between a posthumous memorialisation of a life and the attempt to grasp the ‘life’ as it was lived.” 8 Laura Marcus quotes W. H. Epstein, who asserts that the “cultural function of biography” is to “turn life into text and text back into life”. 9 I. Callus, “Comparatism and (Auto)thanatography: Death and Mourning in Blanchot, Derrida, and Tim Parks”, in: Autobiografictions: Comparative Essays , ed. L. Boldrini & P. Davies, Comparative Critical Studies Vol. I, No. 3 (2004), p. 337. J. Tambling, Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 8. M. Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, in: The Foucault Reader , ed. P. Rabinov (London, 1984), p. 102. Callus, p. 337. Tambling, p. 7. L. Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourse: Criticism, Theory, Practice (Manchester & New York, 1994), p. 100. Marcus, pp. 27ff. Marcus, quoting from W. H. Epstein, Recognizing Biography (Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 27ff.

A New Language of Aging: "Deep Play" in Carol Shields's "The Stone Diaries" and Alison Lurie's "The Last Resort"

A New Language of Aging: "Deep Play" in Carol Shields's "The Stone Diaries" and Alison Lurie's "The Last Resort"

In the Subjunctive Mood: Carol Shields's 'Dressing up for the Carnival'

Abstract The concept of the carnivalesque is redefined in Carol Shields's recent short story collection, though its traditional promises of celebration, disruption, and excess are nevertheless obliquely fulfilled. Focusing on the title story and 'Dressing Down', this essay argues that Shields's postmodern versions of carnivalesque are written not in the indicative but in the subjunctive mood, signalling openness and unrealized possibilities. Her stories trace subjective patterns of fantasy and desire, and social collectivity is reconstructed through narrative frameworks. Diurnal surfaces could be observed by a fiction writer with a kind of deliberate squint, a squint that distorts but also sharpens beyond ordinary vision, bringing forward what might be called the subjunctive mode of one's self or others, a world of dreams and possibilities and parallel realities.[1] Any fiction with 'carnival' in its title promises some kind of challenge to traditional structures of social order and possibly of literary convention, 'dressing up' in anticipation of celebration and festivity, where for a brief space of time dailiness is transcended, split open to allow other more chaotic energies to express themselves. These celebratory gestures may be collective and robustly corporeal as Mikhail Bakhtin has shown in his study of Rabelais,[2] or they may be more individualistic and subjective in our own fragmented contemporary world, which Carol Shields calls 'this torn, perplexing century',[3] though in either case resistance to prescribed limits is the promise of the carnivalesque. In her most recent short story collection Shields acknowledges the impulses towards celebration and (modest) abandonment, by writing in what she has described as the 'subjunctive mode', looking at what human beings may do or might have done or would do, which is the territory of 'dreams, possibilities and parallel realities'. In the language of traditional grammar describing the modalities of verbs, 'The indicative presents an event as a fact, whereas the subjunctive expresses it, as for example, a possibility or an aim, or calls it into doubt or denies its reality, or expresses a judgement on it.'[4] By invoking the subjunctive, Shields opens up possibilities for shifts of emphasis, not only cracking open the 'diurnal surfaces' of realism but also writing beyond the 'phantom set of rules about what a story should be and how it must be shaped'.[5] It is the odd association between the carnivalesque and the subjunctive mood that I shall explore in my readings of the two stories framing Shields's most recent collection, 'Dressing Up for the Carnival' (the title story at the beginning) and 'Dressing Down' at the end. Carol Shields is a Canadian writer, an immigrant from the United States, born and brought up in Oak Park Illinois, who met her Canadian husband when on a student exchange to Exeter in the late 1950s and who has lived in Canada ever since (in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Winnipeg) interspersed with longish visits to Britain and Europe. Since the first British publication in 1990 of her novel Mary Swann,[6] Shields has gained a wide readership this side of the Atlantic. The Stone Diaries was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993, Larry's Party won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1998, and all her fiction (seven novels and three short story collections) are currently available in Britain. Her fictions cross national borders, moving easily between North American and European locations, just as her novels cross generic borders (between fiction, history, biography, and popular romance) and between genders (Happenstance, The Stone Diaries, and Larry's Party). However, it is with her experiments in the short story genre that I am concerned here. Shields has written about how in the early 1980s she broke away from the traditional short story structure, which she describes with a sly hint at its gender affiliations as 'that holy line of rising action that is supposed to lead somewhere important, somewhere inevitable, modelled perhaps on the orgasmic pattern of tumescence followed by detumescence, an endless predictable circle of desire, fulfilment, and quiescence'. …

How Does a Protagonist Grow?

This paper began with one question: why are the big female protagonists in novels by Shields, Swan, and Atwood quite so big? What purpose does this excess serve? Back then, I was thinking especially of Anna Swan, the titular giantess of Susan Swan's The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, of the early Joan Foster of Atwood's Lady Oracle, and Mercy Goodwill of Carol Shields' Pulitzer prize winning novel, The Stone Diaries. My musings and various critical concoctions did not help me to serve up a clear answer on a silver platter. Instead, then, I am going to take you into the kitchen, so to speak, and offer up a sampling of culinary possibilities.

Ruptures in Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries

Ruptures in Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries