An intimate memoir portraying a life spent trying to describe the indescribable—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist 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.
About the Author :
Michael Cunningham is the author of six novels, including ‘A Home at the End of the World’, ‘Flesh and Blood’, ‘The Hours’ (winner of the PEN / Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), ‘Specimen Days’ and ‘By Nightfall’, as well as ‘Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown’. His most recent novel is ‘The Snow Queen’. He lives in New York.
Review :
'A luminous meditation on writing and on life, and how the two entwine, Unsayable is a memoir like no other, from one of the great writers of our times' TASH AW
'From one of our great living masters comes a book about making sense of a life through writing. In true Cunningham fashion, it is also a book about time; how time's passage shapes our understanding of ourselves, our desires and our capacity to articulate our experiences. I read this book in a single, astonished sitting. There are insights, and anecdotes, contained in Unsayable that I will treasure and return to for the rest of my life' JORDAN TANAHILL
'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
