Unsayable: A Life in Writing

An intimate memoir portraying a life spent trying to describe the indescribable, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours and Day.

Go ahead. Try using language to slit the skin of mortality to see what’s on the other side.

At the age of three, Michael Cunningham began obsessively collecting the names of things: oak, Chevrolet, finch, tulip, Tupperware. . . . Each word rendered the world ever so slightly more understandable, more describable, kicking off a lifelong love affair with ...