Daisy Goodwill Flett is “a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck.” In other words, a woman so commonplace that her story would seem barely worth remarking, were it not, perhaps, for her own determination to tell it. And in telling it, give it shape and meaning - even if she must supply these herself.

This is the problem that Carol Shields addresses in The Stone Diaries: how do small lives, the kind most women were once assumed to lead, assume significance and coherence? How closely do our versions of those lives correspond to objective facts? Can facts be said to exist at all in the context of something as changeable and arbitrary as a life? To what extent do “our” stories really belong to us, considering the tendency that other people - parents, spouses, children - have to intrude in them, interpret them, claim them?

Join us for a discussion of The Stone Diaries on Tuesday, May 20th @ 6:30pm. New members are eagerly awaited - we’d love for you to stop and in and visit!