Michael Cunningham, UNSAYABLE: A Life in Writing
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked.
[0:02]I'm Zibi Owens.
[0:04]I've interviewed more than 2,000 authors on this show
[0:07]and learned endless amounts about storytelling,
[0:10]reinvention, and life itself.
[0:11]Because when you talk about books,
[0:13]you're really talking about life.
[0:15]So get ready to hear from today's best authors,
[0:18]the best-selling and the not yet discovered.
[0:20]Come find your next great read and the story behind it.
[0:24]Enjoy.
[0:26]Michael Cunningham is the author of Unsable,
[0:30]A Life in Writing.
[0:31]Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator.
[0:35]His novel, The Hours, received the Penn Faulkner Award
[0:37]and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999.
[0:41]By the way, I'd love to the hours read it for a book club.
[0:43]He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College.
[0:46]He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University.
[0:50]Welcome, Michael.
[0:51]I'm so honored to have you on my podcast, Totally Booked.
[0:54]Talk about your book, Unsable, and memoir, Congratulations.
[0:58]Thank you for having me.
[0:59]I read, I mean, I'm sure you hear this all the time,
[1:01]but I read The Hours years ago and just never forgot it.
[1:05]I loved it so much.
[1:06]Read it with a book club.
[1:07]It was just amazing.
[1:09]So I've kind of been following you ever since.
[1:11]Thank you.
[1:12]Thank you.
[1:12]No, I believe me.
[1:14]I'm not at all tired of hearing that.
[1:16]It's just a thrill and an ongoing surprise
[1:22]that that book speaks to people.
[1:24]The way it does.
[1:25]So thank you, great.
[1:27]Having now read your whole trajectory to getting there,
[1:30]to being the author of it, I feel this like investment
[1:34]into you and your career.
[1:35]And I'm so happy to see that it's made off
[1:38]when I think of you getting dropped off at college
[1:41]and just all the all the beats on the path.
[1:44]So interesting.
[1:45]So why don't you tell us, and there's
[1:47]a little bit about why you decided to write Unsable at this point
[1:52]and what they can expect to get out of it.
[1:55]Wow.
[1:55]I will do my, give it a shot.
[1:57]With that, I'll give it a shot.
[1:59]I'll give it my best shot.
[2:01]Moving on from what you just said, it's not exactly a memoir.
[2:08]It's being called a memoir.
[2:11]What we call it is a life in writing.
[2:14]And what it is really is a book I've been storing up
[2:18]for decades as I have been trying to learn how to write
[2:25]myself and you keep learning how to write all your life
[2:29]and being.
[2:31]And then for some time now teaching literature
[2:35]and writing to brilliant young people
[2:39]which has sort of led me to think more deeply and incisorably
[2:46]about what writing is.
[2:48]How does it work?
[2:49]What reading is?
[2:51]What do we read it for?
[2:53]And it is a chronicle of the two related processes
[3:01]trying to figure out how to write on my own
[3:04]and then trying to talk to gifted young people
[3:07]about how they might do it in their own way
[3:12]with encouragement and some direction from me
[3:14]but without me trying to pretend like I know how you,
[3:21]young aspiring writer should do this.
[3:24]Well, it was really neat to see all of the two threads
[3:28]really of the book where you have excerpts, paragraphs,
[3:33]sentences, things for us to contemplate and learn from
[3:36]and that you point out to us and so that was great
[3:39]because I felt like I was smarter just reading all of that part
[3:42]and then diving deeper into your life
[3:44]and you had a lot of surprises.
[3:46]I mean, I guess everybody's life essentially
[3:48]is a surprise to strangers, right?
[3:50]I guess that's just part of the course
[3:52]but it starts with the fact that Michael Cunningham
[3:54]is not even your name.
[3:55]So maybe touch on that.
[3:57]What about that?
[3:58]What about that?
[4:00]I don't know that if you scratch a lot of Americans
[4:07]you get pretty quickly from American nests
[4:11]to something other and for me as it turns out
[4:17]I have been Michael Cunningham most of my life
[4:20]and we found out about 10 years ago
[4:24]that my father's father had changed his Croatian name
[4:30]which you'd pronounce it Greg is like,
[4:32]you know, it's Croatian, it's like three Gs and four Rs
[4:36]and he just decided that a sort of Anglo-Irish name
[4:41]would be better for his career
[4:44]and so he just changed it without going through a legal process
[4:48]or anything.
[4:49]So all this time, I have been a Croatian guy
[4:54]named Michael Greg, masquerading as a sort of Anglo-Irish guy
[5:01]named Michael Cunningham.
[5:03]I wish I'd learned about it earlier
[5:04]because, you know, I love the name Greg.
[5:07]If you jump off that first, that first hard gene
[5:09]kind of sail over the R, then bam.
[5:12]You hit by that second G, you know, cutting it
[5:15]with just sort of a series of speed bumps
[5:16]that dawned over them.
[5:18]Then it becomes really amazing.
[5:21]Well, throughout the book, you're sort of self-analysis
[5:25]and the analysis of the writing itself
[5:27]and how you teach us through different paragraphs
[5:30]there was one instance where you were trying to tell yourself
[5:35]not to write too much to keep it simpler.
[5:37]I think it was about the, you know, take your A,
[5:41]the advice you got not to put some of your A sentences
[5:44]into literature and that you should be like stick with the bees.
[5:47]So it's not overly flowery or anything.
[5:49]And how even in the book you were like,
[5:51]and that's why I'm not going to write about like
[5:53]the bird fluttering in or whatever it was.
[5:55]That's why I'm going to stick to this right here.
[5:58]Yeah.
[5:58]Yeah.
[5:59]Yeah.
[5:59]Just briefly, it was the best advice I ever got from a teacher
[6:03]him all, it's ever to whom I still bow down
[6:08]who essentially told me to try to learn to distinguish
[6:12]between strong sentences that are in service to the story
[6:16]and strong sentences that are a sort of demonstration
[6:19]of my ability to write strong sentences
[6:22]with three parentheticals and four semicolons
[6:27]and as he pointed out to me when I was in graduate school,
[6:31]those stories, those sentences are about your talent.
[6:34]They're not, they're not about the story
[6:37]and keep it high out for them, which which I still do.
[6:40]But yeah, yeah, a big part of this book is not only my attempt
[6:49]to figure out my own writing process,
[6:52]but once I started teaching writing,
[6:55]I realized that there's nothing you can say about fiction
[7:00]that cannot be contradicted by a great work of fiction.
[7:04]Not even show, don't tell.
[7:06]You say this is a rule and then and then you,
[7:09]well, yeah, but what about that great book?
[7:12]So what I have been doing all this time and talking to students
[7:17]about writing and literature, but especially about writing
[7:20]is trying to get a sense of what they're trying to do
[7:25]and talk to the best of my ability to each student
[7:29]about what's the story you're trying to tell
[7:33]and how might I help you find your way to a voice and a vision
[7:39]that is your own.
[7:41]Could we tend to, it's funny, it's got a little counterintuitive,
[7:44]but we tend to start out most of it,
[7:46]many of us want to write writing relatively conventional stuff.
[7:49]When I first started teaching, oh, I'm going to have to really
[7:52]tame these critters down, but it's absolutely awesome.
[7:55]And it was true for me too.
[7:57]It just seems so impossible to write at all that you
[8:01]without consciously deciding to, you try to write something
[8:06]like what you've read.
[8:08]And my job, maybe the heart of the heart of my job,
[8:13]is to try different ways to tell different students
[8:15]we've already got those stories.
[8:17]Like that.
[8:18]Take us somewhere new.
[8:21]Amazing.
[8:22]You took us to lots of new places, I feel, in this book,
[8:25]and you shared a lot about your sexuality,
[8:29]about some of your experiences, even as a prostitute
[8:34]in San Francisco for a little bit.
[8:36]You want to talk about that?
[8:38]Yes, yes.
[8:39]I put it in the book, which means we can talk about it.
[8:43]I'm naturally debated about putting that,
[8:46]that when I was in college, I worked as what we now called
[8:52]a rent boy.
[8:53]What we think called a hustler.
[8:56]I was at Stanford, I would go from Palo Alto and sort of
[9:00]work out of the front of the St. Francis Hotel.
[9:04]Do I put that in?
[9:07]Yeah, because leaving it out would, would sort of imply
[9:13]that I felt like there was something shameful about it.
[9:16]I believe me, I do not recommend that anyone,
[9:20]become a sex worker, unless you really want to do.
[9:23]But in writing about it, I focus way less on these sort of
[9:30]religious details and more on the question of why
[9:35]would I want to do that?
[9:37]And reflecting on it, it felt really clear that I wanted to
[9:42]do that because I hoped I was wrong about this,
[9:47]but I had hoped that it would turn me into somebody other
[9:51]than who I was, which was a privileged,
[9:56]a trusted white boy from Southern California who went to a
[10:00]fancy university. And I just felt like, what am I going to mind about? I need to take a walk in
[10:07]the wild side. And I know I know anyone who hasn't read it can jump ahead to the lunchtime. Of
[10:15]course, you can't become another person. You can become a person who did that. That's the best
[10:20]you can be. And that's what I really, really focused on. The whole idea, which is not entirely
[10:26]exclusive to being a teenage prostitute, the whole idea of what do you need to know in order
[10:34]to be able to write about life, your own and others. How far do you need to stray from who you
[10:42]understand yourself to be? But experiences, can you seek out and to what degree are they useful
[10:48]if you're just seeking them out to write about them? By the way, I am still a round boy,
[10:54]just my client base is really strong and my prices are very low now. Maybe you've changed
[11:03]hotels that I don't know. Yeah, you know, I, you know, I, there's not much business anymore.
[11:11]I actually found that not, I shouldn't say actually, I found that portion of the book quite moving
[11:17]because one of the conclusions you draw is that the men who were hiring you really long for that
[11:24]the hug at the end, the snuggle, the connection, just being side by side with someone else,
[11:31]and it spoke to the loneliness of them in their own lives, which you theorized at the time
[11:36]that they may have been, you know, married to a woman with a job and a golf club and did it
[11:42]and yet this is who they were inside. And this was a little window into who they, they really were
[11:48]that you got to envision. So in that way, it was almost like getting insight into character
[11:55]and more about relationships and what happens when you cycle your true wants in life and that was
[12:03]a very tender moment. Yeah, it was really meaningful for me and what finally became sort of intolerable
[12:11]doing something like that. But it's, um, it's actually the structure 20, it's in roles,
[12:17]you have your fun coding in their car rolls off you if you're a certain kind of 20 year old,
[12:21]but yeah, yeah, yeah, that I'm going exposure to these men's sorrow.
[12:29]Wait a minute, this is a long time ago. I, I, I, I, I actually don't know who a red boy's
[12:36]my answer would be now, but this is San Francisco over 50 years ago. And you know,
[12:42]they were mostly men in town on business. They were mostly positive. They mostly had
[12:48]and went out wives and children and launch tomorrow and jobs to go to and that began to be
[12:56]unbearable to me to have this access to the size of these strange men and then an hour
[13:05]they were gone. So I didn't, you know, it wasn't like it got to know them. I just sort of got a
[13:09]blast of their desire to, yeah, well, you know, as you point out, the sex with one of the geo,
[13:17]but it was also kind of secondary with math, you know, everyone did, they were totally all the
[13:23]same person, but there was a certain consistency and a lot of these guys just wanted to
[13:29]unfit the sex over with and be in a bed with a boy in a room. And, you know, you age out of the
[13:37]profession for your early anyway, but I, I realized after listening here that I couldn't do that
[13:44]part of it. Well, I appreciated you putting it in. I'm glad you made that decision. You also wrote
[13:51]so beautifully about your first real love, essentially the Adonis next door, your friend who
[13:59]it became nothing more than that when he dropped you off a college and yet your feelings for him
[14:05]and the way that you wrote about those feelings was really exquisite and captures what I'm sure
[14:13]many people feel about a crush or about someone who has an outsized presence in their mind and
[14:20]maybe they don't even know. Like, yeah, yeah, I don't think you knew. I know he didn't know,
[14:26]but he didn't, he knew we were best friends in high school. He didn't know that I was going to
[14:31]think about him for the rest of my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything in the book is on one hand
[14:40]true to the best of my ability, but a lot of it is, I must say exaggerated, that's not what the word
[14:48]but everything happened, but not like the way I write about it. And I write about that in the
[14:56]book, the impossibility of rendering a living person in post. And the first thing you find yourself
[15:07]doing is sort of taking what actually happened and trying to sort of crack it open
[15:15]and give it its full resonance, which usually means well, it didn't happen exactly that way,
[15:23]right, but it could have. Yeah, and conversations with friends who've read it about this, about
[15:32]if it's so cold and that more, even though it isn't really to what degree do you have license to
[15:39]lose its heads around? Yeah. And you talk about if fiction is autobiographical, how people always ask,
[15:46]like, well, what in the what in this novel is actually true? You're like, none of it, but most of it,
[15:51]because it's all in my brain in some way, how does it get into our brain so that we can process it
[15:57]turn it into fiction? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I think of the question after question,
[16:07]is this autobiographical, is this literally true, is maybe a question that's gained in popularity
[16:15]over time with the implementation that we all of us feel so lied to too, that we have become
[16:26]more suspicious than we once were of anything that didn't actually happen? And we're
[16:34]suspicious of that too, but the first question is, okay, can I at least deal with this as fact?
[16:39]And the best answer I have to that is how about fact adjacent?
[16:47]I like that. How about facty? Facty. Factish, maybe.
[16:53]Yeah, that, that ask. Yeah, I like it.
[16:59]Play, where people don't always realize if you wouldn't want to read the literal account,
[17:06]it doesn't spark enough. It doesn't produce narrative arcs and the writer comes along and
[17:13]one more time, we'll try to honor the truth. You sometimes write about the truth inside the truth,
[17:19]and that's one of your job as a fiction writer. And I guess what I may not say when I
[17:24]question comes up is, you wouldn't want the facts, not because we're shocking, but because
[17:30]they're, as readers, myself included, you need it, you need it to be story eyes. So we're
[17:38]in here, we've got, we've got factish and story eyes to the English language.
[17:44]It's true. I mean, being a storyteller is not just a recounter of the day, like at dinner,
[17:50]you don't talk about every single moment of the day, you excerpt the details that you think
[17:55]will be relevant and try to entertain everybody or, or relate or confess, right? You have to be
[18:01]able to do that. That's the job of the writer. I play a game sometimes with just a small group
[18:08]of very close friends and recall it my day. And you go around the small circle of intimate friends,
[18:18]and you, you tell everything that happened that day, every single thing from, I, I, I, I stopped
[18:28]by the deli and, and the tissues are disgusting. I couldn't say, but you know, things like that,
[18:33]to I was crossing the street at two o'clock and I suddenly felt this weird despair. So it's,
[18:39]it's every single, recountable hour. And it's kind of revelatory because as you say, you realize
[18:48]that even with your, your, your, your most intimate people, it's highlights only. It's, it's,
[18:56]what stories do I have about today? And you don't play this game very often, but it can
[19:04]veer into the profound because it, it sort of reminds you that you may not quite fully
[19:11]understand the depth and complexity at the molecular level of another person's life.
[19:18]You know your own, but you just don't get that about anybody else until you play the game.
[19:23]Because the game is kind of like the hours part two. What really happens? Exactly. Exactly.
[19:30]It's all, it's all about aiming the microscope and so, yeah. Is there anyone who you're
[19:38]worried about reading this book, who you're like, oh gosh, I'm kind of nervous for this person to
[19:43]read it. I was so many people. If my parents were alive, I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't publish it.
[19:52]My sister's going to be good. I'm going to have to talk to her a little bit beforehand. It should be
[19:56]fine. And I,
[20:00]I included some people who are living and who I call by their names and I showed all of
[20:07]the intersection and said in essence this may or may not feel exactly right to you. It probably
[20:16]won't. But let me know if it feels sort of in the ballpark of right. Let me know if you feel like
[20:24]I've sort of gotten the drift of you. And everybody said yes. If I'm praying this isn't
[20:31]book who said yes, but I remembered her. We met in college and I remembered her as a sort of
[20:38]tortured Catholic. And she responded and said yeah, it's fine except I don't remember myself
[20:47]as an especially tortured Catholic, which let us talk about why would I thought, well yeah. But I
[20:52]I remember you that way. Why would I project that on to you? And we sort of got to the notion
[20:58]that I was very secular from suburban Los Angeles and she was the first deeply intelligent,
[21:09]unutterly unbrainwashed, practicing Catholic I'd ever met. And the way you think about this
[21:15]slightly invertible nature of this book is I could just leave my original account of her and then
[21:21]add that. And this is the conversation we had about how I wrote my own version of you, which is
[21:28]not exactly your version. Yeah, it's all it's all about subjectivity. Sure. Very true. I guess we could
[21:36]debate that. Yeah, we did. In your teaching just to wrap up like do you believe everyone could be
[21:46]a great writer or do you believe it's the few and far between? It's a good question course. I guess
[21:53]I would say that I don't categorically believe that anyone at that age could not be a great writer.
[22:02]It would be disingenuous for me to say that I don't have some students who seem seriously gifted
[22:09]in other students, not so much. But I've seen people who are my students. I've seen people who
[22:15]were other other teachers, students who didn't seem all that impressive when we worked with them,
[22:23]but they did it and did it and did it and wouldn't give up and wouldn't give up. And one day
[22:31]10 or more years later you see their book. And you were reminded yet again that
[22:37]you don't want to falsely encourage anyone, but you don't want to discourage anyone either because
[22:41]you just don't know. And you can't know as I sometimes quote Marilyn Monroe to my students who
[22:51]once said I wasn't the prettiest. I wasn't the most talented. I just wanted it more than anybody else.
[22:57]So, you know, in my class we quote, go or enjoy and we also quote Marilyn Monroe.
[23:06]Amazing. Well, thank you for trying to say the unseeable in this book and for spending the time with
[23:13]me today. I really appreciate it. I have a very good time. Thank you for the conversation.
[23:19]You're welcome. Thank you for the conversation. Thank you. Take care. Thank you for listening to
[23:24]totally booked with Zibi, formerly momstone have time to read books. If you loved the show,
[23:29]tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens, and spread the word.
[23:36]Thanks so much. Oh, and bye the books.