One note before we start this episode. The conversation includes a discussion of suicide.

If you're thinking about suicide or if you know someone who is or if you need someone to talk to right now,

you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK, or you can text home to 741-741,

which is the crisis text line. If you're outside the US, check out the list of international hotlines at suicide.org.

Okay, here's the show.

You're listening to Book Exploder, where authors break down a passage from their work to show us how they write.

I'm Rishi Keishirui.

And I'm Susan Orleen.

For this episode, Susan spoke to author Michael Cunningham.

He breaks down how he wrote a passage in his book The Hours from 1998.

And Susan, you and Michael are actually friends, right? Is that fair to say?

Yeah, well, I'm proud to say that we're friends because I think he is really extraordinary.

And the Hours is probably in my top 10 favorite books.

I feel like it was one of those books that I read almost in one sitting.

And the Hours tells the story of three different women in three different time periods.

Right. It tells the story of Virginia Woolf in 1923,

as she begins to write Mrs. Dalloway.

Then there's the story of Laura Brown in 1949, and she's reading Mrs. Dalloway.

And then there's Clarissa Vaughn, who's kind of living a contemporary version of the story of Mrs. Dalloway.

And the Hours won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Penn Falkner Award.

And then it was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Marl Street.

And the passage that Michael breaks down in this episode is from the prologue.

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