Unsayable: A Life in Writing

An intimate memoir portraying a life spent trying to describe the indescribable, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours and Day.

Go ahead. Try using language to slit the skin of mortality to see what’s on the other side.

At the age of three, Michael Cunningham began obsessively collecting the names of things: oak, Chevrolet, finch, tulip, Tupperware. . . . Each word rendered the world ever so slightly more understandable, more describable, kicking off a lifelong love affair with language—one that would, eventually, maybe inevitably, lead him to become a writer.

In Unsayable, Cunningham’s memories spill forth, and with them reflections on the craft of writing. He is fifteen, in a swimming pool at night, gazing at the first boy he ever fell in love with, who is lost in contemplative silence. He is a new college graduate, setting off for nowhere in a Dodge Dart, hoping to pull meaning (and a novel) from the expanse of America. He is on Cape Cod, regaling an elderly couple with invented tales of sexual escapades. He is in an art gallery, unwittingly having the first in a lifetime of conversations with the man he would marry. A thread ties each beautifully wrought moment to the next: what is unspoken, what won’t yield to language, what is embellished beyond recognition, what is still left to say.

Luminous, perceptive, and powerful, Unsayable is an ode to literature, a meditation on craft, and an intimate account of a life spent trying to put into words that which resists depiction. This, it turns out, is the lifeblood of the fiction writer: the impossibility of capturing the human experience, and the relentless desire to try.

Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University.