Unsayable: A Life in Writing

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 Folded into the narrative are a handful of previously unpublished short stories, suffused with melancholy and too personal to share until their real-life subjects had died.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. Agent: Frances Coady, Aragi Agency. (July)