A Pulitzer winner wrote a short story without using the letter "I"
by Ellsworth Toohey · Boing BoingIn 1969, French author Georges Perec wrote La Disparition, an entire novel that does not contain the letter E. In 1994, Gilbert Adair translated it into English as A Void — also without a single E. I've only read portions of it, and I'm still amazed that someone could tell a coherent story without the most common letter in the English language.
Today, while reading one of my favorite websites, Futility Closet, I learned about a different kind of constraint. Carol Shields — the American-born Canadian novelist who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries in 1995 — wrote a short story called "Absence" without using the letter I a single time. It appeared in her 2000 collection Dressing Up for the Carnival, three years before her death.
The story is self-referential: a woman sits down at her word processor and discovers one of the keys is broken — "a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self." Rather than give up, she writes around it. She can't say "I," so she finds other ways to refer to herself. She resolves to write about the experience: "'A woman sat down and wrote,' she wrote." Dropping the letter E is a feat of vocabulary. Dropping the letter I is a feat of identity.
You can read "Absence" at the Internet Archive, or pick up Collected Stories, which collects 22 of Shields' short stories.
(Here's an idea: a book of 26 short stories, each of which is written without one of the letters of the alphabet. If you write it and get it published, let me know, and I will review it.)
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