Day

Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952) is an American author living in Brooklyn, New York with his husband, Ken Corbett. He is the author of several short stories, non-fiction essays, two screenplays, and eight novels, starting with Golden States in 1984. In 1998, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel The Hours, which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2002.

Cunningham’s novels are largely works of contemporary fiction, as they primarily take place in present-day settings and discuss current events and social issues. However, they also frequently explore different time periods, either in the form of memories or shifting narration, in order to reflect the way that society has changed—or failed to change—in relation to these issues. For example, The Hours uses Virginia Woolf as a focal point, showing her life in 1923, Mrs. Brown in 1949, and Clarissa Vaughn—referred to as “Mrs. Dalloway” after Woolf’s novel—in 1999. Through these women, Cunningham explores issues of sexuality, societal expectations, and womanhood over nearly eight decades. Similarly, his novel Specimen Days (2005) contains three stories, one set during the Industrial Revolution, the next in the early-21st century, and the last set 150 years in the future. These three stories explore themes of human connection, technology, and scientific advancement through its central characters. In Day, Cunningham uses a period of three years, exploring how the characters change as people and evolve in their relationships to others in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Chess is forced to isolate herself and raise her son alone, reaffirming her commitment to being a single parent and giving her the confidence to decline Garth’s attempts to start a relationship with her. Similarly, Isabel sees both her job and her marriage to Dan failing, and at the conclusion of the novel she commits to finding a new job, moving to a better home, and looking for a new relationship instead of restarting her marriage with Dan.

Because Cunningham’s novels focus largely on the thoughts and feelings of his characters, they are often considered works of psychological fiction. Psychological fiction employs narrative techniques like stream of consciousness, flashbacks, and an omniscient third-person or shifting first-person perspective to deeply explore the thoughts, motivations, fears, desires, and more of its characters. For example, in his novel The Snow Queen (2014), Cunningham examines the lives of brothers Tyler and Barret Meeks; Tyler’s wife, Beth, who is terminally ill; and Beth’s friend, Liz. While Tyler turns to drugs to cope and Barret turns to religion, Cunningham explores themes of longing, spirituality and grief through a shifting third-person point of view that allows the reader to see every character’s thoughts. Similarly, in Day, Cunningham also uses an omniscient third-person point of view that shifts—often multiple times during the same conversation—to examine the psychology of the characters. Rather than focusing on plot, contemporary psychological fiction has a slower-paced story that instead focuses on the psychological impact the events have on the characters. For example, both times Cunningham jumps ahead a year in Day, he does not give plot details through the narrative in the traditional sense. Instead, he slowly reveals the events that occurred over the past year through the characters’ thoughts and conversations. As such, significant events like the death of Robbie or Violet’s illness are absent from the plot itself; instead, the details are provided in the reactions, fears, grief, and regrets of the characters—emphasizing the psychological impact of the events on people, rather than the events themselves.

Another important element of Cunningham’s work is his focus on LGBTQ+ topics. Although Cunningham identifies as a gay man, he has said in several interviews that he doesn’t want to be seen as “only” a gay writer. As he explained to Out Magazine in 2010, “I’m perfectly happy to be a gay writer, because, well, that’s what I am. What I never wanted was to be pushed into a niche. I didn’t want the gay aspects of my books to be perceived as their single, primary characteristics” (“Catching Up with Michael Cunningham”). These desires are reflected in Cunningham’s work, as several of his central characters identify as LGBTQ+, but it is only one aspect of their characterization. For example, in The Hours, the three main characters—Clarissa, Mrs. Brown, and Virginia Woolf—are queer in some capacity; however, that is not all that links their characters or drives the plot. Instead, Cunningham connects them through their struggles with relationships, careers, friendships, mental health, and more. In Day, Robbie is a gay man, and Chess expresses her lack of romantic or sexual interest in men. However, this aspect of their characters is accepted by everyone in the novel, with little focus on their struggles with their queer identities. This choice by Cunningham in many of his novels allows for sexuality to be a topic within his novel, but for the focus to be on the fact that queer characters grapple with relationships, grief, dreams, their career paths, and more—as all people do—instead of primarily focusing on their sexual identities.