Unsayable by Michael Cunningham review – The Hours author on the insecurities that powered his creative life

As an eight-year-old in comfortable, solid, suburban California, Michael Cunningham felt compelled to make art before he quite understood what it was, or could do: a painting of souls ascending to heaven, for example, in which paradise resembled the Griffith Park Observatory and the dead were all depicted in profile because their creator felt unequal to the challenge of full faces. There was also a cigar box covered in gold-sprayed macaroni and a clay representation of the animals on Noah’s Ark – anything, in fact, that would challenge the painting of a placid white chicken that hung in a gilt frame on his parents’ wall. If Cunningham moved on fairly rapidly from the visual arts, either sparing or denying us the fruits of a more fully formed talent, it wasn’t because the impulse to create had withered. Rather, it was that the experience of making material art had functioned as a temporary outlet, being less painful, less embarrassing – both emotions he ascribes to his young, sensitive self – than attempting to capture the world in words. Unsayable, an intriguing combination of memoir and writing guide, asks us to consider what causes those feelings of embarrassment and pain, and what powers them. Do they proceed, almost inevitably, from the gap between language and the vast, mysterious terrain it tries to describe? Cunningham’s writerly insecurity, from childhood to maturity, seems to live in that gap, and to feel it as an ever-present judgment on his endeavours, impossible to expunge. Success is no antidote and, he points out, might even contribute to a feeling of isolation from other writers, or a quickening fear of a return to obscurity. Cunningham did become successful, and extremely so, when in 1998 he published The Hours, a triple-stranded, time-shifting riff on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; his celebrity increased four years later, when Stephen Daldry and David Hare released a film adaptation starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Juliann…