Only anecdotal: Diane Williams, loneliness and short story form

Abstract

Traditionally, the short story has been understood as almost synonymous with loneliness, characterized by theorists and writers like Frank O’Connor as the quintessential ‘lonely form’. Contemporary short story writer Diane Williams stands out for her idiosyncratic challenge to the conventions of short story structure, drawing deliberately on the partiality and contingency of the anecdote. Analysing the structure and style of Williams’s 2016 collection Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, this article explores how a turn to anecdotal structures might shift the short story form’s traditional polarity towards loneliness ‐ a particularly urgent question in an increasingly lonely culture.