Unsayable - by Michael Cunningham (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Unsayable made me want to live (really live) and write (really write)--not by glamorizing either, but by taking such mesmerizing care with the humiliations, passions, accidents, and subtleties of both. This is such a generous book, essential for anyone wanting to relearn the arts of curiosity and devotion."--Miranda July, New York Times bestselling author of All Fours

"As I read these pages, I felt I'd taken up residence behind Michael Cunningham's uniquely sensitive retinas and seen the world as a great writer has seen it, from age three to age seventy-three. So this is how love and longing, imagination and wonder are transmuted into fiction! Unsayable is a mind-opening, heart-expanding, and insanely useful book."--Anne Fadiman, author of The Wine Lover's Daughter

"Gorgeous, engaging, and heartfelt, Cunningham's book manages to move gracefully between memoir and craft talk. The result feels like an intimate and deeply honest conversation with one of the great writers of our time, revealing who he is and how he writes. It's a joy to read."--Susan Orlean, author of Joyride

"What a shimmering memory lane we readers get to walk down in this book, led by one of the most enchanting stylists of our time. Any moment we stretch a mind's hand out, our fingertips meet the weightless touch of a hummingbird. Is that hummingbird Michael Cunningham's memory or our own? It doesn't matter. The joy is for everyone who reads with memory and imagination."--Yiyun Li, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of The Book of Goose

"Pulitzer winner Cunningham (Day) offers eloquent reflections on life, love, and literature, as well as valuable pointers on craft and storytelling, in this sterling memoir. . . . Fans curious about the source of Cunningham's ideas, writers seeking inspiration, and readers hungry for gorgeous prose will find all three here. . . . This is a treasure."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

About the Author

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.