Longtime members of the Books on Writing Are Useless Club might want to carve out an exception for Unsayable, Michael Cunningham's charming hybrid that is part memoir, part how-to, and exquisitely refined. In an opening moment of self-flagellation, he admits he was so bad with words at age three that he didn't know what to call the green Tupperware container he wanted for his toys. Today, Cunningham (The Snow Queen) identifies "that brief interlude as the moment I first became determined to learn the names of everything." He eventually discovered that "writing is a continuation of that effort to render and recognize everything and everyone by naming its qualities, ideally from an illuminating angle," an effort he has pursued with uncommon elegance.
Short chapters alternate between scenes from Cunningham's life and trinkets of writing advice. Aside from his stint as a rent boy during his senior year at Stanford, the personal chapters cover his California upbringing, his first attempts at composing stories, his never-requited infatuation at 16 with a beautiful male classmate, his two years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and his eventual move to New York with Ken Corbett, his partner of 40 years. Writing tips are plentiful and useful, as when he cites the importance of finding details that "are going to most powerfully stand in for the whole" of a character, adding, "A thoroughly envisioned character, who wants something, will always produce a story." Unsayable is one of the best books on writing one will ever read. That it's immensely entertaining doesn't hurt, either. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer