Michael Cunningham (2:27)

Yes, I've always been drawn to those stories. I think they were the first stories I knew. When I was a little kid. My mother would read a story to me every night, or sometimes the same story over and over and over again at my insistence and until I got a little older and knew better, we would get to the end, you know, they lived happily ever after and my mother would stop reading and I would say, go on. And she would say, well, that's the end of the story. That can't be the end of the story. What if Snow White. Snow White doesn't even know this prince. He was just somebody wandering through the woods and he kissed a dead body in a glass casket. What does he think is gonna happen when he takes her to the castle? And my mother would just say, well, that's the end, and go downstairs and have a well deserved cigarette and a drink.

Meg Wolitzer (3:27)

Well, maybe that. That's the best description of a writer. They don't think that's the end.

Michael Cunningham (3:31)

Yeah, yeah, well. And I think you might say that this collection of my own versions of the fairy tales are kind of myself as an adult trying to answer myself as a very small child and say, well, this is what happens happily ever after.

Meg Wolitzer (3:55)

I love that. And was there a particular connection to the Jack and the Beanstalk story?

Michael Cunningham (4:01)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The stories I chose were a little bit random. I love them all roughly equally. But I suppose, you know, these things are not as conscious when you're writing as they can sound when you're talking about what you've written. I had some sense of which of the fairy tales had seemed to me as a child to end too abruptly. They're the ones I was most eager. You know, the 12 princes who've been turned into swans, except one of them still has a swan wing because his sister didn't have time to finish the Cloak of Nettle. What happens to that guy Jack and the Beanstalk? You know, Jack climbs up the beanstalk and the giant's wife lets him in. Whoa, whoa. Hot little dude. And he steals her husband's gold. And then after a while he comes back and she lets him in again. What's going on in that? Marriage.

Meg Wolitzer (5:09)

Right. No, it's really ripe for your kind of sensibility.

Michael Cunningham (5:15)

It certainly is.

Meg Wolitzer (5:16)

That actually brings me to some larger questions. What does a writer's sensibility mean? I'm always thinking about that. What is your sensibility? And what do you understand that question to mean?

Michael Cunningham (5:29)

You know, it's a really good question and I am not sure if I can answer it. I'm sure I have a sensibility, but I don't think of myself as having a sensibility. I simply, you know, write the way I write about what I want to write about. Yeah, you know, it's funny you ask. I starting a new novel and for the first time I felt like I already kind of know how to write this. Which I guess you could interpret as me sort of sniffing my way into my own sensibility. I could see the next two plus years. I could see where I would get stuck. I could see where I would go on. And I thought, I don't want to do that. I want to remain nervous and fearful. And so I put that away and started something that is making me appropriately nervous and fearful. So I guess you could say I finally bumped up against my own sensibility and decided I didn't want to work.

Meg Wolitzer (6:44)

That's really interesting, because what it suggests to me is that maybe too much of an awareness is not so good for a writer. Just do the thing that you intuitively understand and you'll make mistakes and then you'll fix them.

Michael Cunningham (6:59)

Yeah. Well, I don't know if this is true for you, but I have found, having done this for a while, that somebody may talk about a Michael Cunningham book about a certain sensibility, about certain persistent subjects and themes. And, I mean, I get it when people say that, but it's kind of news to me.

Meg Wolitzer (7:24)

Yeah.

Michael Cunningham (7:24)

You know, Right. It must be the same people.

Meg Wolitzer (7:27)

Oh, yeah, yeah. You find yourself being compared, you know, another writer's work being compared with yours. And what is that overlap in that Venn diagram? Like, what is it? Is it the subject matter? Is it sort of sentence wise? Like, what is it? I don't really know. I kind of don't want. No, I don't wanna think about it.

Michael Cunningham (7:44)

No, no, this is. I think it's better to not. No, this is a job for people who are not the writer.

Meg Wolitzer (7:49)

But there's also, of course, that whole idea that writers are always sort of on the shoulders of writers who, say, came before them rather than contemporaries. I mean, the Harold Bloom book, the Anxiety of Influence was an important book that came out in, I guess, I don't know, the 1970s. And I mean, for you, I'm thinking about it because you are using these fairy tales, but also in your previous work, like, you're using what to us and to most readers, a classic novel. Mrs. Dalloway.

Michael Cunningham (8:20)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And in the case of the Hours, I didn't want, you know, good luck with it if I did. I didn't want to try to imitate Woolf's voice.

Meg Wolitzer (8:32)

Yeah.

Michael Cunningham (8:33)

But I wanted to reflect it. I have never before and never since used so many parentheticals, semicolons and et cetera.

Meg Wolitzer (8:45)

So.

Michael Cunningham (8:46)

Well, back to Sensibility or a certain way you have of telling a story. There's some flexibility within it. Virginia Woolf just ravished me with punctuation. And then I sort of came back from that with a more urgent need for semicolons and parentheses. But, you know, you know, what I.

Meg Wolitzer (9:04)

Mean, yes, but they're falling away. I just saw an article the other day about the semicolon. I knew they were talking about the semicolon. It was something about like the one, the punctuation mark that people aren't using or shouldn't use or something. And I got very tense when I saw what it was going to be.

Michael Cunningham (9:18)

I will go to battle for the semicolon. And in the punctuation wars, I will be very much with semicolon brigade.

Meg Wolitzer (9:27)

Can we linger on that for a moment? This is like super nerdy now. But I love a good semicolon too. I mean, for me it's almost. There's a way in which they can be like arrest in a piece of music. Like they're going to reflect upon what just came and restated, but not really restated, but also give you that pause, give you that moment for the reader at least, if not the writer, to think and feel.

Michael Cunningham (9:51)

Yeah, yes, absolutely. It's a sort of three quarter stop as opposed to a comma. It implies a different relationship between two phrases from what a comma implies. And anyone who may be listening and is opposed to the semicolon, what you're gonna do without it, what's gonna take its place, what's gonna give us that particular pause.

Meg Wolitzer (10:19)

That's right. And I'm thinking now about the actors who read your story. Jim Parsons so wonderfully read your story. But all the actors who read the stories on our show and who read stories aloud anywhere, I wonder about how they managed to get that semi colonic feeling across. Right. Like when they come upon punctuation or how they know how to do a line. For me, sitting alone in my room as a writer reading to myself, you know, it's the same voice that I try to get out of. Susan could not wait. I mean, I can't bear it. But they don't have it. They take their time.

Michael Cunningham (10:56)

Yeah.

Meg Wolitzer (10:57)

What makes a good reader, what makes.

Michael Cunningham (11:00)

A good reader is really, I think fundamentally anyone who is, how to put this there for the ride. Anyone who wants to actually take leave of their own lives and enter a life that is not theirs. And beyond that, you're free as a reader to love or not love whatever you love or don't love, but without that willingness to sort of let go. And I think to a good reader brings to a book a certain generosity the way a good critic does. You are hoping that it will be good and if it's not, you're sorry about that. That doesn't mean you're Mistaken about it, at least for your own purposes, but you know what I mean.

Meg Wolitzer (12:00)

Oh, yes. Well, when I asked the question first, I was thinking about readers reading aloud. But then I realized when you started answering that they're really kind of one and the same because the interpretive response of the actors who read isn't that different really from the way a reader reading a book takes it in.

Michael Cunningham (12:20)

I misunderstood the question, but yes, yes, a good reader reading aloud.

Meg Wolitzer (12:26)

It's the same answer, really.

Michael Cunningham (12:27)

I think it's really the same answer. And part of what is so fabulous about Selective Shorts is the stories are being read by people who know how to read aloud. Too many writers, bless us all, are not very compelling readers. We are people who spend our days alone in a room, trying our best not to disappear up our own assholes. We are not in show business.

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Michael Cunningham (13:44)

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Meg Wolitzer (14:11)

Company affiliates excludes Massachusetts. How did you get to be such a good reader? Because I know you to be such a very good reader.

Michael Cunningham (14:22)

Oh, yeah, you too? Well, that's. I'm gonna ask you the same question. I'm just a ham, you know, I actually. The sort of sequesterment required for writing. I mean, obviously it's okay with me or I wouldn't have spent so much of my life doing it, but it's difficult for me. I could never live in a little house in the woods. I would go crazy. Yeah, I want to go out into the big, nasty, noisy world when I'm done writing and I want to talk to people. And I really have always loved being able to read a story to people. And I think, you know, first and foremost, you have to just love it. And then, you know, that's half the battle. What about you?

Meg Wolitzer (15:09)

I remember I gave a reading. The first reading I ever gave, I was like 20 or something. And John Irving, who had been my teacher, I was his fellow at Breadloaf teaching fellow. And my novel hadn't. First novel hadn't come out yet. And I read from it, and I think I read it in a very tentative voice. And he came up to me afterward and he said, I loved what you read, but I think you should work on how you read it. And I guess what I've said to students is sort of like, read it like you mean it.

Michael Cunningham (15:39)

You know, let you mean it. Exactly, Exactly. I was, as part of a sort of charity event, asked to read along with some other people from, let's just say, a novel that I neither liked nor respected, but it was for a good cause. And part of the problem was the writing was very sentimental and hysterical. And I just thought, okay, don't read this in a monotone, of course, but try reading it as if the feeling is almost too much.

Meg Wolitzer (16:16)

Yeah.

Michael Cunningham (16:16)

You know what I mean?

Meg Wolitzer (16:17)

Oh, absolutely.

Michael Cunningham (16:18)

And I could kind of sell it by seeming to be doing all I could not to break down while reading it, when, in fact, I just thought it was horseshit.

Meg Wolitzer (16:29)

That's. That is a good tip.

Michael Cunningham (16:31)

You know, I am an old showgirl. I'm. I'm full of tips.

Meg Wolitzer (16:35)

I'm with you. I mean, I'm like a frustrated theater camp kid.

Michael Cunningham (16:39)

Yeah. Yeah.

Meg Wolitzer (16:40)

A friend just sent me something the other day. There's an adult theater camp next summer in California where you go there for a weekend and you do theater games, and then you put on a show, like, you know, obviously on book, with a script. Like, I would like to go.

Michael Cunningham (16:56)

Can we both go?

Meg Wolitzer (16:57)

Do you want to go?

Michael Cunningham (16:58)

I do.

Meg Wolitzer (16:59)

I would absolutely love it if you went. That would be amazing to me. That's like, my dream is doing something like that. I would really, really love it. So I think performance is so different from what we do the rest of the time. Performance, like we're sitting there alone. You entertain yourself with. Well, I actually want to talk to you in a second, briefly, about a way that you and I mutually entertain ourselves, which is playing Scrabble. But to get out there is the opposite of what we do. Right. To get out there and speak as if you mean it on a stage.

Michael Cunningham (17:32)

Yes. And also no. In that I feel like writing fiction is, in a certain sense, performative. Because you are trying to capture and hold a reader's attention. You are saying, by implication, if you publish a book, stop what you're doing and read this.

Meg Wolitzer (17:58)

That's right.

Michael Cunningham (17:59)

Don't have lunch. Don't have sex. Don't go to your French lesson. Read this instead. I think that what's difficult for some of us writers is not so much the fact that it isn't a connection between you and, let's say, an audience or reader. It's the complete absence of connection in time and space. It's the aspect of sort of putting a note in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. So, you know, would we rather be Aretha or Prince delivering a song at Madison Square Garden? Hell, yes. And we do what we can. I think it could be argued that we are doing our version of that because unfortunately, the only barrier to my career as a singer is a complete absence of talent.

Meg Wolitzer (18:54)

Well, that's why you must have been really excited when the Hours became an opera, because I was. You didn't have to sing, but was it a little bit like you were.

Michael Cunningham (19:06)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was not involved at all. The two extremely talented people who wrote the opera wanted to be free of any meddling on my part, which I was more than willing to do or not do. But I think it would have been different if I had been at rehearsals and seen it peaking shape. So really, when I went to the opening and heard it for the first time, my overriding emotion was really, really, it's packed the Met. You know, when I was writing it, you may have extravagant hopes. Maybe it will sell some copies. Maybe it will win some sort of prize. I can promise you, I never, ever thought, maybe it will sell out at the Metropolitan Opera.

Meg Wolitzer (19:53)

No writers. When we're sitting there writing, it's so far removed. It's from everything, isn't it? It's like, do you like to wait? Do you, like, delay gratification? Be a writer. That's really what it is so much of the time.

Michael Cunningham (20:07)

Yeah.

Meg Wolitzer (20:08)

But when you get a good sentence or when you know you're right, that feels so wonderful.

Michael Cunningham (20:15)

And I think that is what keeps certainly what keeps me going. We. Well, I tend to talk about how very difficult it is because I really want people to know how difficult this was, how hard it was to just produce, to fill this page with something that feels at least semi real. But, yeah, there are also times, not rare, but not that rare, when you feel like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, I can sing in this way. And I am putting down language in a way that creates life and movement, and I am using to the very best of my ability, whatever gifts I may have. And that's what you live for, right?

Meg Wolitzer (21:06)

Absolutely. So, Michael, you and I both love the game Scrabble. And we play, to me, the language and the beauty of letters jumping around, like jumping Beans. And moving somewhere and making other words is so glorious. Is so much fun. Is it connected for you with what we do for a living?

Michael Cunningham (21:26)

Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, I feel like Scrabble and Have you ever played a game called Anagrams, which uses the tiles in Bananagrams?

Meg Wolitzer (21:39)

Oh, yeah. Where you put them out on the table and kind of mess them around and then.

Michael Cunningham (21:42)

Yeah, but there's a variation called Anagrams. It's a lot more fun.

Meg Wolitzer (21:47)

I'd love to play and.

Michael Cunningham (21:49)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that makes somebody a writer, I mean, you have to have some kind of gift for it. But probably just about as important is this sort of slightly mysterious, endless fascination with how letters form words and words form sentences. That was what really got me started. I was going to be a painter, and I was an okay painter, but I started writing and I didn't feel especially good at it. But I was really aware right from the start that for reasons I have no clue about this particular endeavor, whether it's writing a sentence you feel good about or getting a word with an X on a Q under the triple word score. You know, one is a sort of recreational version of the other, but I think they're very much part of the same picture.

Meg Wolitzer (22:57)

Me, too. Me too. Letters and words. It's like a paragraph is a concentrate of a whole chapter, and a chapter is a concentrate of a whole novel. And a novel, I guess, to go back to this, is maybe a concentrate of a sensibility or the way you are in the world.

Michael Cunningham (23:13)

Yeah, yeah. I want to. Okay. I want to stay with this Scrabble analogy for one more.

Meg Wolitzer (23:17)

One more moment, please.

Michael Cunningham (23:18)

Well, I think another thing that's so interesting and compelling about Scrabble, certainly, for a writer is, as far as I can tell, writing is the art form that is most entirely based on arranging and rearranging existing elements.

Meg Wolitzer (23:39)

Yes.

Michael Cunningham (23:39)

Not like painting. It's not like dance. You know, you can arrange them in an endless variety of ways, but you are still working with something finite. And it's all about how you put them together, and not at all about how you put paint onto a canvas or how you choreograph a dance to a Strauss piece.

Meg Wolitzer (24:03)

Absolutely. That's a great way to think of it, and I will continue to do so. Well, Michael, we've covered a lot of ground here. I'm so happy to talk to you today and have other people listen, and I look forward to talking to you when they're not and playing more games and learning anagrams and reading your next novel and everything that awaits.

Michael Cunningham (24:24)

I'll be back in September. Let's have an anagrams date asap.

Meg Wolitzer (24:29)

It's a date. I love it. Thank you so much, Michael Cunningham.

Michael Cunningham (24:33)

Pleasure. It's great talking to you.

Podcast Host (24:41)

That was Michael Cunningham. Our podcast today was edited and mixed by Jo Plourd.

Commercial Narrator (24:54)

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Meg Wolitzer (25:25)

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Michael Cunningham (25:32)

Neighbor, State Farm is there, and we'll.

Meg Wolitzer (25:34)

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