UNSAYABLE

A combination memoir and craft-of-writing book from the celebrated novelist.

Cunningham, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Hours (1998), tells a charming story about how he encountered Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, around which his prize-winning novel revolves, as a high school sophomore. Having not yet completely accepted that he was gay, he read it in hopes of impressing Natalie, a striking classmate who, when asked what she was reading, said she was being “so completely transformed by Virginia Woolf.” Cunningham faked his way through the rest of the conversation, located the only Woolf in the school library, and found he couldn’t make sense of it at all. So while he “was never cured of [his] homosexuality,” he did have the insight that Woolf “was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix did with a guitar”—a comparison he stands by to this day. Another key moment in his formation as a writer happened at “age five, maybe six,” when, while bouncing a rubber ball, he realized that “I am a boy bouncing a ball on an afternoon in November.” He remembers this moment, he says, “as vividly as I remember anything else that’s occurred, throughout my life. I’ve grown up to be someone who tends to write ever so slightly hyperbolically about ordinary objects and events.” The book continues to wend its way through autobiographical moments, mining them for their role in his formation as a fiction writer, which he portrays as a lifelong attempt to distill into language the fundamentally unsayable experience of living. Sprinkling his brief chapters with quotes from favorite writers about writing, he issues related observations fully worthy of copying down in one’s notebook. “Although there are no official qualifications for the not-quite-job of novelist—not when its practitioners include Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, and James Baldwin—that list might very well include the phrase Candidates should possess an unusually acute sense of mortality, which should not extinguish their availability to pleasure or beauty.” Each reader will find their own favorites, and all will likely enjoy reading of his experiments with working as a “rent boy” prostitute while he was in college at Stanford.

A pleasant and often quite inspiring recap of a life devoted to the practice of fiction.