Unsayable by Michael Cunningham

Review by Simon Thomas

When Michael Cunningham set out to write Unsayable, I wonder if it started as a book about writing that couldn’t keep out memoir. Or perhaps it started as a memoir which kept getting sidetracked into advice about writing. Or perhaps – the most likely, given Cunningham’s evident and enviable control over his writing – Unsayable is exactly the combination of the two that he intended.

Let’s think about autobiography first. This is as near as Cunningham is likely to get to one, and it certainly goes through his life in a roughly chronological manner – starting with his earliest memory. He is three years old and wants his mother to pass him a Tupperware – but does not know the word. With ‘toddler dignity’, he will not use the wrong word. Cunningham has, of course, made a career of never using the wrong word. I can think of few authors whose choice of language is always so precise, and so brilliantly revelatory. 

If you write a sentence often enough, if you keep trying it in different ways – find a less expected word in lieu of the obvious one, cut this or add that, look for resonances and associations that emanate beyond literal meanings, think in terms of a line’s rhythms and how it syncopates with the line that comes before and the one that comes after – if you zap the sewn-together corpse with enough electricity, it finally stirs, and opens its eyes.

More on his writing later… Along the way through Unsayable, we learn a lot about Cunningham’s life – albeit with the knowledge that (as he says late in the narrative) ‘this book is never intentionally false, but is threaded with exaggerations and, sometimes, invented stories I offer as true’. What exactly the difference is between an invented story and a false story is something perhaps only the professional author can say. Since it is told in snapshots, he is able to bob and weave through the memories that he wants to share – so we see moments from his youthful aspirations to be an artist, say, or his early beguilement by a friend called Elliott who is somehow seen simultaneously through the eyes of the infatuated teenage boy who doesn’t yet fully understand his feelings – and the 70-something man who knows how quickly he and Elliott lose touch. It is a beautiful portrait, with Cunningham’s trademark sensitivity and wit. At the same time, he is candid that there are some people who he won’t write about. Perhaps that is why his closest family members remain something of an enigma to me.

And just when you think you’ve got your head around the sensitive, artistic, somewhat directionless young man, you get to a section that starts ‘During my senior year at Stanford, I started going to San Francisco on weekends to work as a rent boy.’ And indeed he does, with some uncertainty and inelegance. Yet somehow he makes even these experiences seem like fascinating character studies, rather than anything sordid or prurient. 

His own sexual and romantic relationships are touched upon with wry fondness, and you get the sense the reader is occasionally the substitute for the older gay couple in Princetown who often gave him lavish dinners and enjoyed his tales of amorous conquests. (Of course, being the age and sexuality he is, there is also inclusion of the impact of AIDS on his community – and some tightly controlled fury at the way politicians treated it at the time. But Cunningham has perhaps said all he needs to say about AIDS in The Hours and other novels.) Later in the book there is a lovely, fairly fleeting, tribute to his husband Ken, a partner of almost 40 years.

I’m dividing memoir and writing advice, but they are not divided in Unsayable. Throughout his time as a bartender in a gay club, or even earlier, he knows he wants to be a writer and fills notebooks with work he doesn’t find satisfactory. Memory and advice interweave, and an anecdote from the past reminds him of cogent writing advice, or vice versa. Some of the resultant writing advice did, ultimately, lean towards well-worn truisms – show, don’t tell; try again and fail better – but there were some sections that felt more original. I enjoyed the chapter in which he picked a particular friend from the past, a colleague at a tiki bar, who read keenly but without any knowledge of literary history or the canon. She reads Crime and Punishment and puts Dostoevsky above Robert Ludlum and below Frederick Forsyth in her assessment. ‘After that,’ says Cunningham, ‘I thought of myself as trying to write a book for Helen – a book that would feel, to her, like sufficient compensation for her long, arduous days’. More specifically, I appreciated this piece of personalised advice from Hilma Wolitzer, at a Writers’ Workshop:

“Michael, when you’ve finished a draft of a story, go back over it and grade every line as an A or a B. The A’s are the stunning and fabulous sentences, the B’s are the more modest ones. We’ll assume there are no C’s.”
“Okay.”
“Then go back and rewrite all the A sentences.”
“Really?” I said.
“The A sentences are the show-offy ones. They’re the ones that demonstrate your own ability to write them. They’re about your precocity. They’re not in service to the story itself.”

Later, he has become the teacher, and shares some of the advice from his own experience running writing courses. For example:

I find myself working with a student who writes lavishly inventive prose, which is good, but is also enamored of elaborate, slightly off-the-mark similes, which is not good. I’ve told her, over and over, that a simile, the comparison of one thing to another, has to be perfectly accurate, and that it has to expand a reader’s experience of the object, or person, in question. It’s about honoring and complicating the object or person. It’s an act of veneration; it has nothing to do with your own cleverness.

I further suggested to her that she probably doesn’t want to fall into the habit of comparing all that she sees, hears, and smells to something else, lest it interfere with her ability to see, hear and taste directly. The world and everything in it is, first and foremost, itself.

There are gems along the way, but I think it’s a good thing that he didn’t write a book that was entirely guidance on how to write well. It is so much more interesting to see it in the context of his own life, and his own writing. Which makes it also all the more curious that we skip from him being an aspiring author to his reaction to a negative review for his ‘second’ novel, Flesh and Blood. I’ve put ‘second’ in inverted commas because it was his third novel – slightly bizarrely, Unsayable continues the pretence that his first novel, Golden States, didn’t exist. Perhaps that is why we don’t get to see what happened when he got his initial publishing contract, or his reaction to a novel first being out in the world. It’s a shame, because it would have been interesting to see his perspective – and unfair to disown Golden States, in my opinion, which is a fine debut. 

Along the way, he quotes from various of his own novels, as well as examples for other people’s – from James Joyce to Lauren Groff. And, of course, there is the thread of Virginia Woolf throughout. I loved reading the story – exaggeration or invention as it may be – of how he first read Virginia Woolf as a way to impress a girl, when he was yet to fully understand his own sexuality. 

Thank goodness for that misplaced crush, because Woolf has so clearly inspired Cunningham – not just in his masterpiece, The Hours, but in every sentence he writes. As I said earlier, I can’t think of an author writing today who is as exact in their writing, or who explores human relationships and human life with as piercing an eye. While nobody could live up to Woolf’s genius, Cunningham is a worthy disciple – and, of course, brings his own qualities and talents into the equation too. 

His brilliance, carefulness and insight at writing is on display in Unsayable as much as his novels – indeed, you often get the feeling that the real people who populate this book are as much in his hands as his fictive creations. He has taken the genre of autobiography and moulded it to his own designs, with precisely the sort of fluidity and elegance you would expect of him.

Simon was one of the founders of Shiny New Books, and has ranked all of Michael Cunningham’s books for your convenience.

Michael Cunningham, Unsayable (4th Estate, 2026). 978-0008836382, 279pp., hardback. 

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