Unsayable
A Life in Writing
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- Forudbestilling
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- Forventes 21. jul. 2026
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- 95,00 kr
Udgiverens beskrivelse
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Cunningham (Day) offers eloquent reflections on life, love, and literature, as well as valuable pointers on craft and storytelling, in this sterling memoir. Much of the account focuses on the intersection of Cunningham's private and artistic lives, as when he traces how a memory of observing his mother baking a cake at age seven emerged decades later in The Hours. Cunningham recalls his mid-20s as "a lonesome, increasingly discouraged writer" who bartended in a grass skirt in Laguna Beach for the freedom of "late nights and early mornings, straining for one sentence and then another." He also goes deep on process, offering up a list of discarded opening lines for this memoir and analyzing exemplary passages from authors including Cormac McCarthy and Marilynne Robinson. Folded into the narrative are a handful of previously unpublished short stories, suffused with melancholy and too personal to share until their real-life subjects had died. Fans curious about the source of Cunningham's ideas, writers seeking inspiration, and readers hungry for gorgeous prose will find all three here. Despite Cunningham's early warning that "any story... is an approximation of the unsayable—that which we all know but can't express in language," he expresses his knowledge with confidence and depth. This is a treasure.
