THE UNWRITTEN BOOK

A series of meditations on grief, art, desire, memory, and the spirit world, centered around an unfinished novel written by the author’s father.

An award-winning fiction writer best known for her explorations of the macabre and the unreal, Hunt plumbs the depths of human experience in this assemblage of reflections on life’s sweet mystery. “Most of our lives are spent shrinking,” she writes, “eroding into bits and decaying. What if we celebrated that decay and championed the infinitesimal?” Although her gaze ranges widely—from her love of One Direction and W.G. Sebald to her grandmother’s stamp collection and the time she “bathed” in more than 200,000 volts of electricity—Hunt returns again and again to the unfinished manuscript she discovered in her father’s desk drawer after his death. The “unwritten book” itself—three chapters of which are interspersed throughout the text—can lag a bit, as Hunt herself acknowledges in her annotations. “Apologies if this is boring you,” she writes. “I promise you things are about to get juicy for our narrator.” Some other sections of the larger book feel cobbled together—e.g., ruminations on policing and safety, reflections on the pandemic, the author’s attempts to fill the silences of her family history. But Hunt more than compensates for these minor quibbles with her engaging style, vulnerability, and earnest engagement with death and grief, ghosts and art, fear and the unknown—and perhaps the book’s shagginess is merely a reflection of life itself. As Hunt writes in a description of her mother’s hoarding, she “has a drawerful of nail polishes beside a toy turtle beside a pink pillow beside an expired jar of my dad’s cancer drugs beside a golden statuette of the Virgin. I make it make sense. I plot these points and create a chalk line around the ghost, all that’s missing.”

A vulnerable, wide-ranging, and at times deeply affecting patchwork of ruminations on the unknown.