It’s the birthday of the novelist Carol Shields, born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1935. She got married after college, moved to Winnipeg, and had five children. She said, “All I expected was a baby, a TV, a fridge, freezer, and a car.” But having children inspired her to write. She said: “Having children woke me up. I knew I had to pay attention. All my senses seemed sharpened. I seemed capable of more.”
Shields started writing poetry, then her first novel, Small Ceremonies. It came out when she was 41 years old. Her big success was Stone Diaries (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize. The book is a fictional biography of an apparently unremarkable woman named Daisy Goodwill Flett, who lives for more than 90 years, goes from rural Manitoba to Sarasota, Florida, marries several men, raises children, writes a gardening column, and whose final thought at the end of her life is, “I am not at peace.”
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