Unsayable: A Life in Writing: Michael Cunningham
As a writer, you occasionally come across a book which has you thinking, pausing, wryly smiling and nodding, as you slowly make your way through each page. Unsayable by Michael Cunningham is that book. This is not an instruction book that tells you how to write or to publish stories but eloquently shows the struggle to get those stories right and the fundamental need we have for them.
Both memoir and a reflection on the craft of writing, Unsayable, begins with how, as a very young child, Cunningham recognised the importance of knowing the right words to communicate his needs, with the acquisition of language making his world more negotiable and understandable; ‘ I became intent on learning the names of everything.’
The issue of finding the right words becomes a motif throughout the book; bridging that gap between experience and language, finding the words to express the unsayable. The pages spill into a series of vignettes: ‘piloting a pumpkin-coloured Dodge Dart across the deserts’, walking ‘among cliffs and pinnacle of red rock’, watching a boy in a swimming pool; what can be shown through language, what can be left unspoken. ‘Don’t reach for the words to convey the colour of the late summer sky, or the shape of the gulls as they glide by….’ Have it. Just have it… Feel comforted by it and grateful. Now let it go.’
Unsayable traces Cunningham’s discovery of language, literature, his recognition that he would be and was a writer and his portrayal of a life spent finding the words to represent and bring awareness to human experience. Powerful and sharply insightful, the book challenges the writer to: ‘Go ahead. Try using language to slit the skin of mortality to see what’s on the other side.’
Reviewer: Paddy Richardson
Harper Collins
