This book features a scene that perfectly mirrors my own thoughts as a young girl. It involves Daisy, the focus of The Stone Diaries, languishing in bed due to a long-term illness. During one of her many hours in a dark bedroom, she comes to realize how fixed she is in her life, in the present, even as she feels completely outside her body and alien on Earth. Moments like this come to me every so often, as I realize how strange and wonderful it is to even exist, and seeing those reflected back at me in writing was a comfort. After reading that passage, I knew I would easily grow to love this novel the further along I got in Daisy's life.

Of course that wasn't surprising, really. Carol Shields wrote one of my favorite opening chapters to a book in Larry's Party--it describes the days of young Larry after he's accidentally taken the wrong jacket from a diner he frequents; feeling the fancy wooden buttons and silky pockets of the jacket make Larry evaluate his life, and realize he loves and wants to marry his girlfriend. Shields excels at painting portraits of personalities living in decisive and crystallizing moments. She even opens The Stone Diaries with such a portrait of Daisy's father, and it is those moments that stick in my brain, more than Shield's fascinating structures.

However, I should mention the unique structure at play here. Shields tells us Daisy's life story through secondary sources and unidentified narrators, and thus generates a mosaic that complements the images of flowers and stone that dominate the woman's life. Daisy's search for meaning may never have been expressed outside her own head as clearly as on that day in her dark bedroom, but the detailed sum of Daisy's accomplishments as a wife, mother and career woman make the reader see that all her extraordinary moments of self-reflection were packed into every act Daisy completed, making her remarkable, as we are all in the end, since the paper trails and family connections result from seeing how uniquely special our very existence is.