UNSAYABLE: A Life in Writing, by Michael Cunningham
In 2017, I left the lab where I had been a graduate student in order to pursue a writing career. At my going-away party, I was presented with a copy of Yiyun Li’s “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life” along with a note from my boss and lab mates that explained that they had gotten me the book because Li herself had once been a graduate student in science before embarking on a literary career. Though I wasn’t graduating, the gift did have something valedictory about it, even though the book itself contained many harrowing descriptions of a life broken apart and remade through literature. I imagine there is a whole genre of books that people buy and give to the aspiring writers in their lives when those aspiring writers reach certain milestones.
To this genre of graduation literature, I would add “Unsayable,” Michael Cunningham’s new book, which presents itself as a memoir of the writing life. The book takes us from Cunningham’s earliest memory to the present-ish day, though in classic Cunningham fashion, it is not so much a straight line as a set of revolving doors through which the reader passes from straightforward biography to thinly philosophical meditations on writing and back again. The insights on writing and creativity that “Unsayable” offers are of the trite variety that you might find on a coffee mug in a bookstore. It will do absolute numbers at writing conferences and in gift bags to undergraduates on their way to M.F.A. programs.
As a memoir, though, “Unsayable” is frustratingly coy. We are asked to imagine Cunningham as a kind of wide-eyed innocent stumbling his way out of suburban California into Stanford, where he briefly dabbled in sex work as an undergraduate, and later San Francisco. Then he goes on a kind of Kerouacian odyssey across the country, driving from place to place in an orange Dodge Dart with “no plan beyond what struck me as the obvious one: head out into the mad American night.”
He stops in various places where he works various jobs and sees various things that are kept tantalizingly, maddeningly vague and distant. “I’d driven for miles behind a flatbed truck piled with the bodies of a half-dozen dead mountain lions, stacked like rolled-up carpets,” he writes in a typically elusive passage. “I found my way, somehow, to a drag bar in Memphis, and was still picking specks of glitter off my skin a week later.” Dead mountain lions! Drag queens! In the next sentence he overhears people claiming they’ve been abducted by aliens. Does this happen in the same drag bar, or in another city? Who knows! But I would like to!
Writing about his years in California and New York during the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, Cunningham offers a few names and a few places, but for the most part, everything feels deeply recessed and occluded, as though the quality of the memory itself had been somehow compromised. This can be frustrating for the reader, particularly the queer reader, who yearns to walk the streets alongside Cunningham.
One can be forgiven for going into “Unsayable” expecting to witness the formation of one of the most underrated American stylists of his generation. What we get instead is the dense scrim of Cunningham’s nostalgia and sentimentality, through which it is hard to discern much of anything at high resolution.
There are exceptions, moments in the book when he allows himself to grow specific, and the memories to coalesce. He vividly conjures his time working in a tiki bar in Laguna Beach, Calif., deftly laying out the dynamics between locals with both sharp irony and real tenderness. Another moving section concerns Cunningham’s time as a young writer in Provincetown, Mass., where he “squandered” a residency and gets adopted into a circle of an older gay couple who host brunches and dinner parties. (A fictionalized version of the couple later appears in a short story that Cunningham includes in the memoir.)
These sections summon, if only for a few pages at a time, a whole world of queer men that is rapidly vanishing with the generation who lived it. This is part of my frustration with “Unsayable”: Though the author never asked to be among this generation nearly wiped out by AIDS, he is. It feels somehow like a dereliction of responsibility to call this book a memoir and then refuse to do much remembering in it.
If the book is aphoristic, it is elegantly so; and it continues to demonstrate Cunningham’s longstanding interest in formal play, alternating autobiography with meditations on craft and examples of the craft itself, injecting anecdotes out of chronological order.
Michael Cunningham is a beautiful writer. We know that already. I came to this book hoping to hear him tell all the stories I am still waiting to hear.
UNSAYABLE: A Life in Writing | By Michael Cunningham | Random House | 283 pp. | $30
The post Recalling His Life and Work, Michael Cunningham Is Maddeningly Vague appeared first on New York Times.
