LEARNING TO FLY

THE DEAD do not scare me,” writes Samantha Hunt in The Unwritten Book: An Investigation, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April. “Indeed, many of the people I love most in this world are dead.” The genre-bending essays in Hunt’s first nonfiction volume are haunted, in the broadest sense, by not only the lives but also the objects left behind by these loved ones, including the author’s father, who died in 2001.

Shortly after his death, Hunt discovered pages from an abandoned and unfinished novel that her father had left in a drawer. In The Unwritten Book, Hunt’s own essays wrap around three chapters of this unpublished book in which a man who works as a magazine editor meets a mysterious stranger who invites him to a meeting of the Society of Icarus, a secret club of people who are trying to achieve human flight. These chapters, which Hunt annotates, communicate eerily with the author’s own ruminations on subjects such as death, hauntings, books, family, addiction, mental illness, the natural world, and the boy band One Direction. Finding the manuscript, she told me, was like “a communication with him…like a path back to the dead.”

Hunt, who lives in upstate New York, was born in Pound Ridge, a town in Westchester County near where her father, an editor at , worked. Her mother is a visual artist; some of her drawings illustrate the book, along with drawings by Hunt’s three daughters and her uncle, who died as a child. Born in 1971, Hunt is the youngest of six children, one of the four girls her parents had together (she has two older brothers from her father’s first marriage). During most of her childhood, her father struggled with alcoholism. In “Spirits,” one of the essays in the new book, Hunt writes that “[t]he children of alcoholics really are detectives, alert to the slightest changes in scent, demeanor, and language. A survival tactic that has become a secret superpower I now use to notice birds, flowers, and tiny fluctuations