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
