She was gone way too soon
Carol Shields, summer reads, a couple of quick reads and (sniff) HoJo's
It’s summer and it’s SATURDAY! Just click to see how happy that makes us.
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Just curious…
Is there a writer you loved whose death left you bereft, wanting more? How do you fill that need, by re-reading or by seeking similar voices?
Carol Shields: I Wish She Were Still Here
This week was Carol Shields’s birthday. She would have been 87 on June 2nd. I remember the sense of loss that swept over me when I learned of her death in July of 2003. She was only 68. My first reaction was: I want more.
When I first encountered Carol Shields, I was barely a writer but I was a committed reader. I started with The Stone Diaries, the Pulitzer Prize winning story of Daisy Goodwill Hoad Flett, that begins with her birth on her mother’s kitchen floor in 1905 and ends decades later in a Florida nursing home. In between we come to understand the way a person regards her own life can be startlingly different from the way her life is viewed and assessed by others. The arc of this story is the arc of a life. The ten chapters are labeled according to the stages of a woman’s life: birth, childhood, marriage, love, motherhood, work, sorrow, ease, illness and decline, death.
You would think that a story structured this way, about a middle-class, educated woman who did nothing more remarkable in her life than make her way through as best she can, would lack the propulsive plot that can make a book difficult to put down. You would be wrong. I was wrong.
When I picked up The Stone Diaries in the bookstore, I was searching for escape in the Borders bookstore that was only five minutes from my front door back in the late nineties. I remember almost putting it back down. Then I opened to the first page and I was gone.
“My mother’s name was Mercy Stone Goodwill. She was only thirty years old when she took sick, a boiling hot day, standing there in her back kitchen, making a Malvern pudding for her husband’s supper.” - The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
What was a Malvern pudding and why on earth would this be the beginning of the story? A few paragraphs later, I understood not only the ingredients for the pudding but every important thing about Mercy Stone Goodwill’s life and therefore every important thing that shaped her daughter Daisy’s future after Mercy went into labor and died shortly after right there on the kitchen floor.
The story is not without incident: after Daisy is born on a kitchen floor, she is raised by Clarentine Flett, a neighbor who leaves her marriage and takes Daisy with her. Daisy later reunites with her father, marries and then is widowed on her honeymoon when the tipsy new husband topples from the window of their hotel in France. Nine years of widowhood later, she marries the much older son of the neighbor woman who raised her. And we come to understand why the chapter “Love” follows “Marriage” instead of the other way around.
Yet it is no “hero’s journey” like the wonderful Amor Towles’ novel The Lincoln Highway I recently finished. The question that drives The Stone Diaries, at least for me, is equally compelling though. Will Daisy ever fully enter her own life or permit herself to say out loud what she thinks about, what she wants, or even what strikes her as funny or sad? We see her life through the eyes of others - her extended network of friends and family which contrasts so sharply with her loneliness. Some of them love her but fail to truly see her because, in part, she doesn’t let them. In the last chapter, a snatch of conversation around her deathbed captures this:
“She was evasive.”
“Yes, but evasion can be a form of aggression.”
“Come again?”
“You heard me.” - From The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
Daisy herself also chimes in as a narrator who observes herself. In fact, by the end of the novel, we understand that the entire story was constructed by her as she lay on her deathbed, free to roam through space and time, to tell the story she finds and pieces together. Even then, we are treated to the often comical snatches of conversation surrounding her, those who see her and weighing what they know, what they don’t, and who she is. They do not hear her “final (unspoken) words: “I am not at peace.”
Carol Shields was a master observer of people who could capture both the light and the dark, the comedy and the tragedy of an ordinary life. Her contemporary and friend, Margaret Atwood put it this way:
“This ability to strike two such different chords at once is not only high art, it’s also the essence of Carol Shields’ writing – the iridescent, often hilarious surfaces of things, but also their ominous depths. The shimmering pleasure boat, all sails set, skimming giddily across the River Styx.” - Margaret Atwood, from the introduction to Carol Shields: Collected Stories
Which explains why laughter burst from me the first time I read the passage of The Stone Diaries in which the newly-wedded Daisy closes her eyes to sneeze and opens them to find her husband absent from the window where he had so lately lounged, followed a few seconds later by “crashing sound like a melon splitting, a wet injurious noise.”
Like many women writers Shields was dismissed by some critics who found her work “light” or were too willing to consign her to the ghetto of “domestic” fiction where the conflicts, adventure, and mythology of the hero’s journey give way to stories of ordinary people as observed by women. Yet as a woman and as a writer, this is the world that has always pulled me in. Carol Shields, perhaps because she lived the life of a mother, wife, as well as writer and teacher, understood the rich material that even the most ordinary of lives can offer if I am willing to be curious, to observe, to dig down and find it.
Carol Shields for Readers
I’ve since read all but two of Carol Shields’ novels and her Collected Stories multiple times. When I read the two novels I have not yet read, Swann and Happenstance, Two Novels In One About A Marriage in Transition, I will be closing a loop but I will not be finished. I don’t think I’ll ever be finished with Carol Shields. You can find the following novels and collections by Carol Shields at our page on bookshop.org or by clicking the links below:
Carol Shields for Writers
I come to her fiction not just as a reader but as a writer who wants to learn everything she has to teach me about observation, structure, the nature of time, the mystery of another human being, and particularly encouragement for writing by women about any subject they choose. I was grateful to find the collection of her speeches and letters and writing assembled by her daughter, Ann Giardini and her grandson Nicholas Giardini published in 2016. It’s not available at bookshop.org but you can find Sparkle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing on Amazon.
Then there is the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. To learn more about the prize and who can submit, here is more information.
For Readers: Find Some Summer Reads, Part II
Last week I shared a few of the resources I found helpful when I was putting together a list of books to read this summer. I found them all in our Resources for Readers & Book Clubs. Last week I shared some beach reads, romances and more with you. Here is the second installment. Take a look, add to your list, or share what you’ve found to read this summer.
A YA Novel I’ve Wanted to Read. Lupita Reads: The Lost Dreamer by Lizz Huerta - Lupita Reads - Lizz Huerta lives here in San Diego and her novel The Lost Dreamer has been on my TBR list since it launched in March. This interview with her was fun and the excerpts from the book pulled me in.
Coming of Age. Three excellent coming of age novels – I’d read two of the three books in this issue of Anna Bonet’s Well Read newsletter but I hadn’t read Dominicana by Angie Cruz and want to based on the first few pages alone.
Ending with a Bang. The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard (Books on Gif) - I was scrolling through last summer’s recs on Books on Gif when I read this issue about Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus. “I said I plan to tell everyone to read this book. It left me exhausted but fulfilled, and I want to read it again. If you’re looking for an intense, beautiful and heartbreaking book to close out your summer reading, I strongly urge you to read ‘The Transit of Venus.’
Getting real. I put off reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s book the Sixth Extinction but after reading about her latest book Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future in “What to read next (No. 244): Nature and Engineering the Internet” from Read More Books by Jeremy Andenberg, I want to read both.
For the Kid in Us. It takes a village (to read good books) - from Can We Read by Sarah Miller. A king who won’t get out of the bathtub, a child who is lost but is never far from loving hands - these are the kinds of books I want to have on hand even if they were meant for far younger readers. This issue includes It Takes a Village by Jane Cowen-Fletcher, King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub by Audrey Wood.
Reading The Austen Connection is sending me back to my shelf of Jane Austen novels for one to re-read. I still haven’t decided but it’s between Sense & Sensibility and Persuasion.
Quick Reads For Right Now
There’s No Coming Back From This. I love it when writers give us a peak of what’s coming next. Here is a sneak peak from the opening of Ann Garvin’s upcoming novel, There’s No Coming Back From This. It intrigued me. Check it out now (it goes away on Wednesday, June 8) and while you’re there, check out Ann’s other novels and the work she does with her organization Tall Poppy Writers, recently added to our Resources for Readers & Book Clubs page. The Tall Poppies are women writers who band together to support each others work and their books. It’s a way to get to know authors you may not know and some stories you wouldn’t like to miss.
Open the Window by Kelly Simmons. Looking for something to occupy your ear while you are doing something with your hands? Here is one Kelly Simmons’ latest thrillers, Open the Window, issued in ten-minute episodes narrated by the author (who has the perfect voice for this - she’s amazing.) You can binge or stretch them out. The suspense is ridiculously difficult to resist. Check out her other books here.
That’s it for this week. What would you like to talk about next week? Amor Towles anyone? How about the books you’ve read during the first six months of 2022?
I hope you are off to a healthy, happy summer. Let me know how you are and let us all know what you’re reading. Wherever possible the books mentioned here are available on the Spark Community Recommendations Page at bookshop.org where every sale supports local bookstores. If we earn enough commission we will donate it to a literacy program chosen by the community.
Ciao for now.
Gratefully,
Betsy
P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…Good Bye to HoJo’s
Ahh the memories. Every visit to my great aunts’ house involved a trip to Howard Johnson’s where we dined on fried clam strips and waited impatiently for the adults to finish so we could get our ice cream. Now the last one has just closed. Here’s a little story about the hopes and dreams of one last shot at keeping the orange and blue dream alive.
Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”
What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.
Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed.
I can’t wait to see what you send!
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Glad to be reminded of The Stone Diaries, one of my favorite books.
My husband and I just finished listening To The Lincoln Highway and I'm in love with it. Makes me want to go back and re-listen to A Gentleman In Moscow which we also shared (we listen together during and after dinner). Would love to talk about Amor Towles!
And I have to vote forSense and Sensibility as your next Austen read. Persuasion is a fine book but S&S is everything!
A former coworker told me about Iain M. Banks, a science fiction writer who died at 59 of a rare cancer. His announcement came in April 2013 and he was gone in June 2013. No time for anyone to really grasp it.
It had only been maybe a year when he told me and he wept when he found out. The author had such an impact on his life.
I haven’t heard of Carol Shields. I’ll check her out.