There’s a chapter in this mostly illuminating and occasionally irritating book in which the author – the award-winning writer of The Hours and other acclaimed novels – explains why he no longer reads reviews of his work. The decision was prompted first by an ‘excoriating’ hatchet job by Michiko Kakutani, erstwhile lead literary critic of the New York Times. ‘A worse review is difficult to imagine,’ Cunningham notes, claiming that he has ‘mostly repressed the memory’ of its contents, though he does share his rather macabre plan for revenge: to slip a copy of the book into her coffin so that ‘extra-terrestrial archaeologists’ will assume she wanted to be buried with it. He doesn’t find good ones helpful either, ridiculing a ‘well-intentioned’ yet ignorant reviewer for praising him for what was in fact a ‘famous’ line from Flaubert that he slipped, unattributed, into a character’s inner monologue. So there’s no need to worry about Cunningham reading this…

Unsayable is a memoir of a life spent writing, of trying to ‘make [the world] more real for ourselves’. ‘My earliest memory is a lack of language,’ Cunningham begins, conjuring a vivid scene of his three-year-old self trying to reach a piece of Tupperware and not knowing the word for it. He goes on to describe how his early desire to name everything eventually led to his becoming a writer, prompting a beautiful evocation of his craft:

You could say that writing is a continuation of that effort to render and recognise everything and everyone by naming their qualities, ideally from an illuminating angle – by naming them in ways that are both recognisable and unfamiliar, by combining words unconventionally so that, coming into contact, they emit new sparks of meaning.

He also points out that writers are, almost by definition, doomed to fail:

We who write them know that any story, even the greatest of them, is an approximation of the unsayable – that which we all know but can’t express in language.

Alongside reflections on his writing life, Cunningham shares tales of love and sexuality. There are stories of adventure and of sentimentality, of childhood infatuation, of being a rent boy, of wearing a grass skirt as a bartender and flirting with customers, and of the tenderness he feels after a storm, towelling off the man who became his husband. ‘Can you bear it if I compare the writing process to being in love?’ he asks, rhetorically. It’s down to the individual reader whether they find these occasions of being addressed directly warm and engaging or cloyingly overfamiliar. I veered between the two.

Writers tend to be readers first, and Cunningham is no exception. He renders a high-school conversation with a ‘compelling’ older girl whose admiration of Virginia Woolf made him read Mrs Dalloway to impress her. He credits this as the moment that ‘produced a change in me’, turning him into a reader, which ‘initiated’ his becoming a writer. He quotes some Woolf, recalls his admiration for her ‘slightly off-kilter yet dead accurate phrases’, and compares her to Jimi Hendrix.

It’s one of many refreshingly informal pieces of practical criticism. Some of the book’s best moments are when Cunningham uses passages from other authors to demonstrate stellar writing. In a chapter on the ‘music’ of words, he shows the predominance of ‘the hiss of “s”’ in some Cormac McCarthy, and how Marilynne Robinson’s flowing clauses have an effect ‘more like a cello than a drum’. He turns his critical eye on his own work, too, which can be instructive, but can also risk seeming a little self-aggrandising. I’m not sure we need a whole chapter about his process of writing the first line of this book, listing the drafts he went through and his notes on them, or if we have to be told, over several paragraphs, why he decided to remove the word ‘brilliant’ from before ‘seawater’ in another sentence.

As a Yale creative writing professor, Cunningham is used to giving advice, and there is plenty of it in these pages. For his own ‘propensity for elaborate language’ he shares counsel from the novelist Hilma Wolitzer to ‘rewrite all the A sentences… the show-offy ones’, comparing this to how Coco Chanel would ‘look in the mirror and take one thing off’. The book is also flush with inspirational (or in some cases quite cringey) quotations pulled out between chapters. There is Chekhov’s ‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass’, and Toni Morrison’s ‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it’. At his best, Cunningham gestures at the magic in writing; at his worst, he risks breaking the spell.