I first met Carol Shields in the fall of 1990. That was the year my own first novel came out, and as part of the promotional activities for the book my publisher had arranged for me to do a reading at a small bookstore in Winnipeg.

Now it just so happened—and it has since been my experience that there are many things of this sort that just so happen in that gauntlet of humiliation known as the Book Tour—that another reading had been scheduled in the city on the same evenings as my own, featuring a writer much more famous than I was. I later heard that this other writer had attracted a crowd of some three hundred or so. But back at my own little bookstore, the appointed time arrived and what had seemed at first just the lingering end-of-day remnant of uncommitted browsers turned out in fact to be my audience—a total of six, as I remember, including the store's owner and my publisher's book rep. Among the rest, however, were two people whose presence I had no right to expect: one was Sandra Birdsell and the other was Carol Shields. Coming from Toronto, I was not accustomed to seeing writers of stature attending the readings of two-bit first-time novelists. But there they were, mucking in like that to show a bit of support for the new kid. What struck me in Carol was the complete lack of any pity or embarrassment on my account for the poor showing—we're all here, her attitude seemed to say, so let's have a reading. In the end, rather than feeling sorry for myself for my meagre draw I felt sorry for the poor sod across town who hadn't managed to pull in Birdsell and Shields. That night still stands out for me now as one of the first times, with my intimate audience of six, that I felt myself to be a real writer, and also as a time when I understood what it might mean to be such a thing, to form part of a community that cared about words and took the trouble to support other people in their similar care.

Some two years passed before I saw Carol again, this time in the much different venue of the International Festival of Authors' Hospitality Suite. Any of you who have ever been near the Festival Hospitality Suite will know the strange, heady air that breathes out from the place, at once exhilarating and oppressive, the room so volatile with liquor and talent and ego you hardly dare to light a match. Somehow, in amongst all the luminaries packed into the room, Carol and I managed to come together at one point. There, amidst the flowing gin and the talk of New York agents and the drunken sixty-year-old poets pursuing young Harbourfront interns, Carol had the audacity to actually talk to me about writing, asking me, in her frank, down-to-earth way, how my own work was going. Again, living in Toronto, I was not accustomed to other writers ever making enquiries about one's work, much less listening if one dared to reply. But something in the directness of Carol's question and then in the unfaltering gaze she held me in, as if she wasn't anxiously waiting to move on to someone more important than me but actually expected, or more correctly demanded, a response, led me to set aside the usual evasion I tended to reserve for such questions and to offer an honest answer.

At the time I was well into the writing of my second novel and was encountering some serious problems of structure that had to do with trying to tell a story from the very beginning to the very end rather than starting in medias res, in the middle of things, the favoured method since Homer. We talked about the matter for a bit, and then Carol said something that floored me.

“Have you thought about starting over?” she asked, without a trace of irony.

No, I bloody well haven't, it was on my lips to say, thinking as I was about the years of work I'd already put into the thing and how I'd better get another book out soon or everyone would forget about me. None of these concerns, of course, had much to do with writing; while Carol's question, in fact, had been very much to the point. She hadn't hesitated to ask the obvious, namely was I committed enough to my own work to put everything about it into question.

I finally stuttered some response to her along the lines of not being able to bear the thought of such a thing, which was more or less the truth. But afterwards I felt strangely honoured that she had taken me seriously enough to put such a question to me, and felt confirmed again in the sense that I stood before a true writer, who put the writing, and its voracious demands, first.

In our discussion, Carol had referred only in passing to her own project of the moment, which turned out to be a novel called The Stone Diaries. I read it when it came out and was at once reminded of the discussion we'd had in the Harbourfront Hospitality Suite—it was a book that solved brilliantly all those thorny problems of structure that I'd felt so daunted by, beginning at the very beginning and ending at the very end but still managing to capture, in that framework, not only the movement and drama of a life but more importantly the spirit of it, what seemed to remain when what was inessential was stripped away. And it did all this with a seeming casualness and ease that belied the novel's delicate layering of nuance and emotion and with no trace of the plodding inevitability to which many beginning-to-bitter-end narratives are prone.

There is no shortage of novels, of course—some of them great classics—that like The Stone Diaries simply follow the lives of their protagonists from the cradle to the grave. A life, in fact, is in some ways the very model of narrative form: it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; every part in it tends to build toward the subsequent parts; and there is always a death in the final moments to bring an appropriate sense of closure. But novelistically, the recounting of a life in such a dogged, linear way poses certain often intractable problems. For instance, there is the problem of making the story sufficiently dramatic, so that you end up not with dull summaries of the endless series of events that make up a life but instead with a few select and vividly realized single moments, which must be illustrative of all that has been left out without seeming forcedly or artificially so. Then there is the problem of the connective links between these single moments, of imposing meaning, structure, and narrative drive on an entity, a human life, that often lacks such things, and again of doing so in a way that seems natural and inevitable, but not predictable. The virtue of beginning in medias res is that most of these problems are removed by virtue of having a plot: the Trojan War begins, rages, then ends; Odysseus sets out, has many adventures, arrives home. Within such boxes there is room for a hundred characters and themes and for a thousand flashbacks to whatever bits of background we need to make sense of things, all of this swept along by the rush of dramatic action. A life, on the other hand, has events, but generally no plot; it takes the art of the writer to sort one out, and to arrange things so that they seem to lead us in some sort of meaningful direction.

What struck me when I was reading The Stone Diaries, however, was how lightly it seemed to wear its cradle-to-grave structure, indeed using it as an opportunity for a playfulness and inventiveness that help give the book its peculiar air of buoyancy. More than that, it somehow managed to be a page-turner, though certainly not in the usual way of piling dramatic event on dramatic event, or of holding back some terrible secret which must at last be revealed, or of leading the protagonist along a trail of increasing dissipation or hubris that must inevitably lead to her demise. Rather, the novel seemed exactly to work against such conventions: the most dramatic event in the book is over by the end of the first chapter, and happens before the protagonist is even conscious; much of what happens to the protagonist afterwards is in the way of missed opportunities and small successes and not-quite-realized hopes that would have to be described, if they were told in simple summary, as decidedly unnovelistic. Along the way the protagonist has no overwhelming insights, makes no great contribution to civilization, commits no memorable act of humanity; and then finally she dies, slightly muddled and dissatisfied and embittered, and not at peace.

Of course, any life can be the stuff of a novel if it is well-told. But even in this, The Stone Diaries seems to defy the usual logic. Structurally the book is a dog's breakfast, a hodgepodge of recipes and letters and epigraphs and floating snippets of conversation and reflection, with a shifting point of view that, in defiance of contemporary fashion, is forever flitting from character to character, hardly ever alighting, in the end, on the consciousness of the main one, Daisy Goodwill Flett. Then even in the more traditional narrative sequences there is almost nothing like the standard dark-and-stormy-night setting of scene and building of tension that is fiction's stock-in-trade. Instead, the most dramatic moments pass nearly unremarked, and many of the narrative passages are filled with the sort of introspection and editorial commentary that in a lesser writer would soon have fallen beneath the editor's red pencil. Indeed, the novel seems to break almost every rule that we writers traditionally trot out whenever we give writing workshops. Except that in the end it fulfils the only rule that really counts: it works.

What makes it work would be the stuff for a book at least as long as the novel itself. But even then we would be left inarticulate before the simple genius of the thing, the spirit that moves through it like the throb of our own unexpressed selves. Somehow it is exactly through its mess of broken rules and illegal devices, its mongrel heaping up of the flotsam of a life, that the novel seems to overleap those dilemmas I had felt stymied by, finding the elusive balance between the general and the particular, the summarized and the dramatized, the individual moments of tragedy and joy and fear that mark an existence and whatever it is that floats above them, and makes a life whole. It was this that most impressed me when I first read the novel and that still impresses me now, that sense in the book of seeing the entirety of a life spread before us, not artificially synthesized and made dramatic or instructive but kept in all its bumps and irregularities and indigestible fragments. And the magic of the book is how it still imbues such a life, despite its pettinesses and its disappointments, with its own beauty and mystery and grace.

When I first read The Stone Diaries I wanted to write a letter to Carol to tell her how moved I was by it, and how much I had learned from it. But the time passed and I did not write; and then the book was being so continuously showered with accolades that I hardly dared anymore to add my own little voice to the chorus. I regret now that I did not write that letter, and so am glad to have had this chance to redress, in part, that failure. I'm glad as well of the excuse this evening gave me to reread The Stone Diaries. What struck me in this recent reading was how much the book is about reinvention, about the possibility of reinvention, of one day turning a corner, or picking up a pen, or stepping on a train, and becoming new. And it seems to me that Carol's life is one that has been marked by her own ongoing reinvention, from academic to mother to poet to novelist to playwright to University Chancellor, and from someone doggedly working away for many years somewhat at the fringes of the Canadian literary establishment to Pulitzer Prize winner and international best-seller. But throughout it all she has remained what she first seemed to me when I met her: a true writer, someone who has stayed dedicated to her work through good times and bad, and who serves as a model to all of us in her unflagging commitment to the written word. It is that commitment that we celebrate tonight, for when most others would have been content to rest on their laurels and their legacy she has given us instead the gift of another book, for which we thank her.