The WD Interview: Michael Cunningham
This interview first appeared in the January/February 2024 issue of Writer’s Digest.
Michael Cunningham writes for an audience, but it’s not the audience you’d expect. The typical piece of writing advice is to “write the book you’d want to read,” but an experience Cunningham had while working at the Boom Boom Room in Laguna Beach between getting his BA and his MFA made him consider what would make his older co-worker Helen pick up a book. A single mom of three trouble-prone children working multiple jobs, Helen was “a huge reader” according to Cunningham. “At the end of every long, hard day, she would get into bed and read for an hour. That’s what she was moving toward …” After recommending she read Crime and Punishment, “as only a pretentious 22-year-old could,” her assessment of the novel (“it was pretty good”) had an impact on Cunningham: “I kind of loved it that no one had told Helen what she was supposed to like better than what she was supposed to like less. … it would be something to write a book that would feel like something to Helen, that would be alive enough and interesting enough and compelling enough to be the book on her nightstand with her pills and her glasses and her Kleenex. That really changed things for me.”
Cunningham still writes for specific people, a select group close to him “who stand in for all people.” He says, “I’m fortunate in having friends who are exactly who I have in mind as readers. And yet they’re nobody’s fool, but neither are they always expecting the worst. They’re generous readers, but also discriminating readers.” The first reader of this small group is Cunningham’s husband of 37 years, Ken Corbett. “He is a fantastic reader, a fantastic editor, and is able to be entirely frank with me, because he takes me that seriously. I know he’s not backing away from anything in order to spare my feelings. I like having my feelings spared, but this is too important.” Writing books that he believes certain people in his life would want to read “translates as much as anything into striving for a certain vividness.”
And Cunningham’s novels live up to this goal. Whether he’s tackling the AIDS epidemic in his early work, as he did in A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood; exploring the lives of three women connected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway in The Hours, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999; or detailing a marriage on the brink of collapse (By Nightfall), his writing brings to life all of the hope, wonder, and heartbreak of the human condition through the relatable, yet intense experiences of his characters.
Now, with Day, his newest novel, he does the same. On April 5, 2019, Dan and Isabel’s marriage is on rocky ground, their children Nathan and Violet grapple with the challenges of childhood, and Isabel’s brother Robbie, who lives with them, needs to get over his most recent boyfriend while looking for his own place to live. A year later, on April 5, 2020, readers see the family in the earliest days of the COVID-19 lockdown with Robbie stranded in Iceland. Finally, on April 5, 2021, when the effects of the previous year have brought their lives to a breaking point, readers see the fractures that a global crisis can cause, in the way only Cunningham can craft. We began our conversation with his inspiration for the novel.
What was the inspiration for Day and when did you start working on it?
I was about a third of the way through another novel entirely, a big, long, multi-generational, I won’t call it a saga, but you know what I mean. There came the pandemic, and I felt like there was no real way to work the pandemic into the book I had started. It felt both important and nearly impossible to write somehow about the pandemic. Nearly impossible in that, how do you write a novel, write anything that takes the pandemic into account, without being a book about the pandemic? How do you keep it from overwhelming the novel in more or less the way it overwhelmed the world? I was really stumped for a while, but I just couldn’t go on with the novel I’d started. I couldn’t think of where to go from there.
I don’t always know where any novel comes from. It seems to sort of burble up somehow, and plenty of never-to-be-written novels burble up, are examined, and then sort of burbled back down. So, I always wait and live with the idea for a while. The idea being: What if we were to see a group of people through the pandemic from before to after, which is a little unusual for me. I don’t usually start with a relatively abstract notion like that. It’s more like: two best friends in high school, one’s gay, one’s straight, an answer grows out of that. Or in the case of The Hours, it was originally going to be a gay version of Mrs. Dalloway, which burbled out and was a really bad idea, but then it evolved into something else.
So anyway, it’s a long answer to a simple question. This novel was unusual for me in that it started with an ambition on my part to write the novel that neither belittled the pandemic nor was overwhelmed by it. And then one thing leads to another.
That’s interesting because I was rereading your earlier work, and I was thinking about how you included the AIDS epidemic as it was happening, and this novel does that with COVID. I wonder, just generally speaking, what are the challenges with writing about events that are current and still unfolding?
Fate is much too fancy a word for any person to apply to themselves, but I have, as a writer, so far survived, not one, but two pandemics. And it’s not over yet! So, knock wood, right? But I think all writers who are roughly my contemporaries, which is almost all living writers—or certainly people past a certain age—those of us who were in not one, but two of them … I don’t know if that makes us writers of the plague generation, but it is somewhat unusual historically speaking to find most of your writing career dominated by two catastrophic events in the form of communicable diseases. Go ahead, see what you can do with those two!
My first, A Home at the End of the World, was difficult in that I was writing it as the AIDS epidemic was raging around me. I was working in the mornings, then volunteering with GMHC and then with ACT UP in the afternoons. This is not so much about art as it is about the atmosphere in which you’re trying to produce something that resembles art.
The nature of the AIDS epidemic kept changing. I started A Home at the End of the World when there were no tests for HIV, and I finished it before there was effective medication—“Oh, there are tests for it. Oh, this is how we get it.”—and I had to keep revising that book as I went along to just keep up with the events as they unfolded.
With this one, well, let’s just say we all hope that the worst of the pandemic is behind us. If that proves to be untrue, it’s still a little bottle rocket from the years 2019 to 2021.
So many of your books have specific timeframes … Do you plot them out and know this timeframe in advance? Or are you more of a write, explore, and work it out in revision writer?
Very much the latter. I start with an idea or a scene or, well—I can’t imagine anyone simply writing a sentence and then writing another sentence without any sense of what kind of book you’re writing, or where it’s headed. But I keep that a little bit vague in my own mind because I know amazing writers who plot it all out in advance and stick to the plot. I, however, find, like a lot of my sister and brother writers, that if I know where a novel is headed, the characters tend to become employees of the story, whose job it is to convey it to its destination. Every book turns out to be something other than what I had expected it to be when I started writing. Again, Day is a little unusual for me in that the structure came early, and I saw no reason to break up the structure, though within that format there were endless possibilities.
It’s a great question, and I’m glad you brought up “time” because I teach. I was just in class yesterday, and I talk to my students two days a week about narrative and how it works and what it’s for. We were just talking about how certainly fiction, as opposed to poetry, is anchored to time. It would be hard to name a novel—there’s always some novel that defies whatever category you try to put novels into—but I think it is pretty safe to say that 99 out of 100 novels are subvertly about the passage of time and what happens over time. A poem doesn’t have to do that. You could pick just about any book on the bookshelf behind me or any book on the bookshelf behind you and give it to somebody and say, “I hope you like this—it’s about the passage of time.” That’s sort of fundamental. It doesn’t mean chronology. It doesn’t mean sequence, but it can only be read sentence by sentence.
So yeah, I probably do know fairly early on about the time span I’m looking at, and really ever since Mrs. Dalloway, I seem to have been focusing on naturally, follow your instincts, smaller increments of time. Even Specimen Days, the book after The Hours, is three distinct time periods, albeit set in different places, in different genres.
One of the things about surviving to a certain age and having written a certain number of books is, at a certain point, you begin to see patterns that were invisible to you as you were writing because you were just writing the best book you could. And you don’t think of yourself—I don’t think of myself—as any kind of writer in particular, but when you look back … you have inclinations, you have a fingerprint, there are ways your mind works that are not something you’re really aware of until you begin to see a smallish pile of books and see that they all have something in common.
“Over time, you come to feel like the appellation writer is one that actually does apply to you because early on you just feel like a huckster.”
Writer’s Digest
Yes, so many of your stories are explorations of family and creating the family that you need and the different ways that love shows up in those families. There’s a great quote in Day where Isabel and her co-worker Derrick are looking at some photographs, and he says, “This is a story about extending the boundaries of family.” I thought that encapsulates your novels. What fascinates you about that topic of family and how it shows up?
I think families are inherently interesting, but so are a lot of human and other phenomena. My particular interest and attraction to the unconventional family, probably, was driven into me by surviving the AIDS epidemic during which untold numbers of people, of course, died. Among those numbers, there were a lot of people—gay men—who called their parents and said, “I have two things to tell you: I’m gay, and I have AIDS.” Often, their parents rallied. More often than you would think, they hung up the phone, and we formed kamikaze families.
The person who was mortally ill, we were already friends, but suddenly there was a whole other kind of crunch on. We did for each other the kinds of things that many of us had grown up being told only your family will do. When the shit hits the fan, there’s only one porch light that’s on, there’s only one body of people who are going to sit by the bedside and make the funeral arrangements. And guess what? That role can be equally filled by a disco bunny, a motorcycle dyke, and a drag queen. As I saw that happening over and over again, then the disco bunny would get sick, and the drag queen, and that had a real effect.
I felt that I don’t want to romanticize the unorthodox or queer family, and I hope I haven’t in any of my books. It’s been really important to me to not hold out a family comprised of a disco bunny, a drag queen, and a motorcycle dyke—it’s not like your troubles are over if your biological family is out of the picture. But I wanted to, and this seemed more urgent 30 years … I wanted to acknowledge those families. I didn’t want them to be pushed to the side or underestimated. And then it’s how many novels later? It still stays with me.
There are some beautiful descriptions in Day. There’s a scene where Violet is waiting for the little white dog to come to the park, then toward the end of the book, a character describes a feeling of queasiness that’s not love, but may or may not not be love. The way those are written is so specific and real that they evoke something unique to those characters, yet we can all identify with them. I wonder about how you craft these sentences. I would love to think that over time it would get easier to write that way, but I also imagine there’s a lot of time and revision that goes into it.
Over time, it gets a little easier if only in that over time you have a little more confidence than you did. Over time, you come to feel like the appellation writer is one that actually does apply to you because early on you just feel like a huckster, which can last through the first couple of novels. So yeah, a little less of a sense that I am skating out onto very thin ice, and it’s helpful to feel like almost literally you have the right to do this.
It’s something I talk to my students about. At our first meeting—I teach a literature class and an advanced writing class—and I asked them a number of questions. The one that really freaks them out is What do you think you’re good at as a writer? They’re perfectly willing to talk about all their shortcomings. I say, “OK, you’re going to need this: Let’s talk about what you’re good at.” And it’s really interesting to see them struggle that way.
Which is a long way of saying that I guess you could say I’m no less frustrated by any given days’ work, but I’m less fearful than I used to be. …
When I was at the [Iowa] Writers’ Workshop many years ago I had one great teacher, a writer named Hilma Wolitzer, mother of Meg Wolitzer, also a fantastic writer. Hilma took me aside about midway through the semester and said, just to me, not to the other students, “Here’s what I want you to do: I want you to, when you’re finished with a draft of the story, go through it and grade every line either A, or—let’s say there’s no Cs—the really great ones get As, the perfectly OK ones get Bs. Then I want you to go back and rewrite all the A sentences because those are the ones about your precocity. Those are the ones in which you are doing triple flips in the run-up to the Olympics, and they’re not in service to the story.”
So, any novel of mine, certainly any paragraph, most paragraphs, has shed a skin of overwriting that you don’t see, that no one sees but me.
That’s entirely counter to what I would’ve expected. I would assume that you would want to improve the B sentences, but what you’re saying makes so much sense.
Right, and this was, again, specifically advice for me and with my penchant, even that young, to write overly elaborate, overly lyrical. Why just one simile when you could have three? And I’m still looking at those A sentences. …
So, when you have that conversation with your students and you ask them to identify what they’re good at as a writer, presumably they want to know your answer to that question.
Oh, I do answer. I don’t ask them to discuss painful topics that I’m somehow spared from. I think this is something like, I write a really good sentence, and I feel like I see very clearly. I offer them that. I usually do not tell them, at least not early on, the A sentence versus B sentence thing, because they’re students, and it’s hard to convince them that I’m not speaking to everyone … We may trot that one out later. I try to steer them away from using the word weakness. Like, what are your challenges or whatever, which is kind of bullshit, but I also don’t want them to say weakness. …
Going back to Day for a minute, I reread The Snow Queen, and it struck me that Tyler is very attuned to the political happenings of the time, the elections of 2004 and 2008. I think in Day it would’ve been easy, and maybe obvious, to include the politics of 2020 and what became the politics of COVID-19. But there was none of that. Was this an intentional choice?
For one thing, I think the pandemic was enough, because of course the pandemic followed close on the heels of the 2016 elections, and I guess this is where you kind of cut your conscience to suit your situation. I’ve generally felt that a lot of American fiction, even the stuff I really admire, it takes place in a slightly weirdly apolitical world, as if it didn’t really matter who was running the country, who was running the corporations. It’s hard to imagine a South American writer or an African writer writing about people as if they were unaffected by class and politics and consumerism or whatever.
But for Day, I felt like not only was the pandemic more than enough to take on, but on the one hand, I don’t want the novels I write and novels I read, to just ignore culture and politics. On the other hand, you want a novel to be both specific to its time and to make sense beyond its time, and I feel like, the politics when I was writing Day—which is true right now—I have no idea what it’s going to be like in a year or two years. And I thought, These people have trouble enough with what they’re doing.
What advice do you have for readers of Writer’s Digest?
Don’t panic.
To be more specific, in my experience, what undoes writers more than any other factor is they give up too soon. Going both to undergraduate and then the MFA program, I knew, in both places, really gifted writers who simply came to their senses and stopped and did something else. It’s sort of by attrition, like “I’m sick of being a bartender, I’m going to get a real job, and I’ll write it on the weekends. I’ll have children and I can write when they’re taking naps.” Believe me, I’m not saying don’t have children or don’t do an interesting job. But what I do know, there’s so many of us early on, it’s a question of knocking at the door and knocking at the door and knocking at the door and just, “Fuck, will you stop knocking? All right!”
I had a story in The New Yorker, a chapter from A Home at the End of the World, and it got a lot of attention, but that was after almost 10 years of sending stories to The New Yorker and other places. … So, don’t panic.
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