Unsayable: A Life in Writing
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 ... Frustratingly coy ... 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.
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Unsayable would have been much more accurately if less catchily subtitled 'a gay life with occasional writing thrown in' ... Page 124 of your own goddam memoir isn’t the ideal time to discover discretion ... Fortunately, that subject, a life in writing, does crop up enough times to make for some intermittently interesting reading. In far less detail than any reader will want (particularly the many, many readers who rightly love this author’s fiction), Cunningham does spend some time discussing some of the practical aspects of the writer’s life.
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An intriguing combination of memoir and writing guide ... Fragility and contingency recur throughout ... There are plenty of observations that feel like familiar territory when it comes to writers on writing, most of them of the 'fail again, fail better' variety. But where Cunningham is most engaging, and in a much more offbeat way, is in his repeated depictions of himself.
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