Unsayable: A Life in Writing

Unsayable: A Life in Writing - Hardcover

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Unsayable: A Life in Writing
  • Unsayable: A Life in Writing
Unsayable: A Life in Writing - Hardcover

Unsayable: A Life in Writing - Hardcover

by Michael Cunningham
$30.00
$30.00

Book Overview

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.
ISBN9798217198337
Author Michael Cunningham
PublisherRandom House
GenreBiography and Education
FormatHardcover
PublishedJuly 2026
LanguageENG- English
Pages304
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Biography & Autobiography Language Arts & Disciplines Nonfiction

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More by Michael Cunningham

Specimen Days

Specimen Days - Paperback

Specimen Days - Paperback

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About Michael Cunningham

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of seven 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 The Snow Queen, as well as Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown. He lives in New York City and teaches at Yale University. YUKO SHIMIZU is a Japanese illustrator based in New York City whose work has been featured in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Her self-titled monograph was published by Gestalten in 2011, and her drawings appeared in Barbed Wire Baseball, written by Marissa Moss. Shimizu teaches illustration at the School of Visual Arts.

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