Writing is hard work. Maintaining focus through a long project is difficult, to say the least. To actually produce something worth publishing is almost impossible. To win a Pulitzer Prize, teach at an Ivy League university, and have a career worth looking back on while it is still thriving is insane. 

Yet Michael Cunningham has done all of this and more. This entire escapade began when he desired a certain piece of Tupperware at the age of three. That specificity reared its head in his collection of words as he grew: Tupperware, tulip, Chevrolet --- letters put together that had meaning and a place in the world at large and in his own intellectually ambitious world. 

Cunningham, who has written such exceptional books as A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD and THE HOURS, puts these and many more beginnings in UNSAYABLE, a memoir of his life in pursuit of all things literary. It is a precious gem of a look inside the mind of an emotive modern American author.

"How refreshing to find a book this introspective on the shelves during these hot summer days when people might have the time to reflect on the chaos of their own life and how reading has contributed to their growth."

The moments are significant --- first loves and first unrequited loves, cross-country drives and college tries, conversations that lead to the most important relationship in one’s life. Cunningham is all about these moments and gives readers a compendium of the ones that most shaped his writing, whether used verbatim or as a slightly exaggerated incident in one of his novels. 

In between his words of wisdom and his soul-baring descriptions of key times in his writing life (which does not exist outside of his physical life as they are one), Cunningham also looks at the works of literature that inspired him, as well as the lives of writers who have offered him (both directly and indirectly) words of wisdom about the writing life --- why it matters, why it is difficult, and why writers try so hard to create an amalgam of the world at any one time in history as they attempt to make sense of the chaos of life on Earth.

As he switches the discussion to larger issues pertaining to the mind of the writer, Cunningham’s vignettes are confessional. Then he manages to analyze some perfectly attuned aspect of writing literature in order to cast a spell of true understanding over it all. This is a book for writers, for those who feel completely drawn to the inevitably heart-wrenching endeavors that give the highs and lows of the planet’s activities some credence and depth.

Cunningham has had success since his earliest days of writing. His command of language and the thoughts that constantly saunter through his mind are quite admirable. However, UNSAYABLE feels like the work of a writer who is becoming acquainted with the wonderful and horrible aspects of his life’s work, as if some special part of his mind is just developing and finally he can use it to see into the whys and wherefores of the craft of writing and his personal say in it. 

Many memoirs have been written so that writers can attempt to figure out why they are who they are and why they do what they do. Cunningham has clearly grown up a great deal through his literary work and is ready to reach a place where his need is different from his desire to write, and where his own life can be viewed from the telescope (or microscope) of his latest perspective on the world.

Like Jayne Anne Phillips’ recent memoir, SMALL TOWN GIRLS, Cunningham’s voice is calm yet searching, analytical and accepting when looking at his literary output through the veil of his childhood. How refreshing to find a book this introspective on the shelves during these hot summer days when people might have the time to reflect on the chaos of their own life and how reading has contributed to their growth. UNSAYABLE does all of this and more, in a way that will fly by, just like our own human lives feel as if they do in this insane and ever-changing place.