Michael Cunningham is a phenomenal writer who has steadily built momentum ever since the publication of his beautiful 1990 novel, A Home at the End of the World, followed by his masterful works The Hours and Specimen Days. Though I previously knew very little about his personal life, I have long loved his fiction. In Unsayable, Cunningham adopts a memoir format to present his first book on writing, interweaving personal history with advice on craft to create a tapestry of what it truly means to develop as a writer.
“I’ve grown up to be someone who tends to write ever so slightly hyperbolically about ordinary objects and events…”
He begins in childhood, observing the inherent power of words—specifically the endless ways we can form and rearrange them. His early years are peppered with the act of naming objects, much like Adam in Genesis: an oak tree as opposed to a generic tree, a Chevrolet in a sea of other vehicles, Tupperware, tulip, finch. These specific names make a chaotic world feel manageable. He captures the origin of his writerly spark in one simple, foundational experience and his verbalization of it:
“I am a boy bouncing a ball on an afternoon in November.”
This deep-seated interest carried into his adolescence on California’s Pasadena Coast. One of the most moving parts of the book is his exploration of his relationship with his best friend and compatriot—a intense, beautiful male bond he couldn’t easily define at the time, but an admiration for a partner he simply couldn’t chase from his mind. Though they parted ways for college, Cunningham’s identity as a queer man became clear—a truth that resonates through the underlying themes of A Home at the End of the World (which directly addresses complicated relationship dynamics and the AIDS crisis), as well as The Hours, Flesh and Blood, and Specimen Days.
“Different writers do it for different reasons, but I suspect that a romantic relationship to reality is common to all of us. I do it because you, as you read this sentence, are listening to me as I am trying to listen to you, to imagine you, however distant we are to each other in time and space.”
His personal life unfolds through a series of successes, failures, relationships, and odd jobs, all dancing around the precarious nature of a young writer’s life. Eventually, he meets his husband—resulting in one of the most beautiful chapters I have ever read about finding a soulmate—all while moving from California to Iowa to New York City in a whirlwind of excitement and loneliness. Some of his most poignant moments of community and belonging occurred in one of my personal favorite places on earth: Provincetown, Massachusetts.
“This is a book about teaching something that can’t be taught.”
Interspersed throughout the memoir is sharp, accessible writing advice—the kind of wisdom you get for the cost of a modest book, no Iowa or Yale degree required. My biggest takeaway (among many) is that a writer’s job is to serve the story rather than their own ego.
“…I wasn’t quite in love with (books), not until, on an ordinary night, a dead man in the guise of a book stood up out of the past, and kissed me.”
While readers with formal literary training might consider this obvious, it reminded me of reading Stephen King’s On Writing back in college, where I was struck by the power of clean, approachable prose. Cunningham offers similar wisdom, sharing advice from his mentor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Hilma Wolitzer, alongside an analogy borrowed from Coco Chanel: rewrite the “glittery,” show-offy lines first. We aren’t in the business of performing cleverness; we are in the business of respecting readers who choose to spend their hard-earned free time on work that matters. The subtle, unpretentious sentences are the ones that actually carry the narrative forward.
“You learn more from one genuinely intimate relationship than you do from meeting avalanches of people. A crown can only teach you about the nature of crowds. What you need is access to the ways in which people explain themselves to themselves.”
Additionally, Cunningham encourages writers to draw heavily from their own lives because authentic experience grounds a story—even if you sprinkle a little “fairy dust” on it, as he does in a memorable scene involving a sliding glass door in A Home at the End of the World. (The man can break your heart.)
“I’ve lived my life, so far, with a sense of purpose, of sustainingly impossible ambitions, that might (who knows?) not have arrived by any other means.”
Ultimately, I loved Unsayable both for its narrative grace and for what it reflected back to me about my own work. Cunningham’s body of work echoes the narrative scope of David Mitchell—the Cloud Atlas author, not the Peep Show comedian—like a binary star. As awakening as it is instructional, Unsayable is a brilliant memoir on the writing life, and I hold out hope that I might one day meet Cunningham as a peer.
Garrett Zecker 