The story of one woman's life, vivid with incident and yet leaving her with a sense of powerlessness She listens, she observes and through sheer force of imagination becomes a witness to her own life her birth, death and the troubling misconnections she discovers between In the end, her most signal accomplishment is to write herself out of her own story The reader must decide if Daisy's life is a triumphant act of resistance or a surrendering to circumstance