I'm in a bit of a hole here, because I've neither seen the soon-to-follow movie nor read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, so there was a lot for me to read about and catch up on afterwards.
If, like me going in, you don't know the conceit of this Pulitzer Prize winner, Cunningham tells the story of Woolf as she both sets about to write Dalloway (originally titled The Hours) and comes to her fateful decision to end her own life, and intertwines it with two other characters' stories: Sally, who, in a state of uncertain desperation about her own life, finds comfort in reading Mrs. Dalloway 25 years after the book's publication; and Clarissa, who in 1990 is living out a sort of modernized retelling of the story of Mrs. Dalloway itself.
It's like a remake, a reboot, and a cover song all rolled into one.
What I found most intriguing about the telling was that, while the story jumped between three periods ranging 65-ish years, Cunningham doesn't seem all that concerned with world-building. What I mean is that he doesn't go to extreme lengths to establish the settings of each time or make a point to notify us of the uniqueness of the environment or technology beyond what comes up naturally. I think the idea is that in order to really emphasize the shared experience of these three women, it's not important to highlight the differences in their worlds but to focus on the sameness of their lives.
And, yeah, it's wild that Meryl Streep came up in conversation between characters in the book only to soon star in the movie.
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