Siri Hustvedt’s Heartbreaking Memoir Is a Study of Love and Loss

Following the death of her husband, Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt chronicled her first year without him into a heartbreaking book, Ghost Stories, published by Sceptre and out now

Authors Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster were together for 43 years. It’s a fact Hustvedt found herself saying repeatedly in the early, disorienting days of grief following Auster’s death from lung cancer in 2024. Ghost Stories is Hustvedt’s heartbreaking chronicle of the first year without her husband. Rich with literary and scholarly references to mourning, as well as letters from the couple’s early courtship, it is also the memoir of an intertwined artistic life, and an attempt, through writing, to bring back the beloved after they die. Also included is a series of letters Auster wrote to their daughter Sophie’s infant son Miles, who was born shortly before Auster’s death, and which dovetail beautifully with Hustvedt’s narration.

The author is speaking from the home she and Auster shared, in front of the painting of a woman in a red dress that served as the cover image of Hustvedt’s best-selling 2003 novel What I Loved. As Hustvedt writes in Ghost Stories, the couple’s life together was bound to the rhythms and textures of this home. During his illness, Auster expressed a desire to come back as a ghost and on the day he was buried, Hustvedt experienced a powerful presence she knew with absolute certainty was her husband. Ghost Stories is animated with memories of Auster, while describing the devastating process of adapting to profound loss.

Here, Hustvedt discusses writing while grieving, intercorporeality, and Sabine Lidl’s documentary, titled Siri Hustvedt – Dance Around the Self, in which the late Auster also features.

Laura Allsop: When did you start writing the book?

Siri Hustvedt: I think it was about two weeks after Paul died that I started writing. It was definitely May, and it was definitely after we buried him on May 3rd. It was just a compulsion. I had a tremendous urge to write, and I think a need to sort of resurrect what I could of what I had lived through, what I was living through, but also, who this person was for me and that relation that lasted over four decades. So I just launched in and I do think that the book provided a form of coherence for me that the rest of me didn’t have. Just the idea that I could go to sleep at night and know that I was going to get up, and yes, eat breakfast or whatever, but then work – this was a kind of lifeline at the time.

LA: I wonder if we could talk about the book’s structure because it covers the year after Paul’s death, but there’s also these leaps into the past and into the future too, with his letters to Miles.

SH: I realised early on that time was a thematic. There is that in-the-background timeline of the actual writing of the book; then you have some of what I think of as the documentary material, which includes the 12 letters to friends, some notes from my journal, and then Paul’s letters. That was to establish what I think of as a sort of posthumous dialogue. By putting them in, I wanted the reader to hear this other voice as a counterpoint to my own text and also to represent the dialogue that I think was this marriage for 43 years. So there’s all these documents that send you back and forth in time at various moments, which also, in a way, represents the reality of memory. Memory is always happening in the present, but it’s of course recovering aspects of the past.

LA: You write of immersing yourself in studies of grief afterwards, just as you immersed yourself in medical texts when Paul was ill, and it’s something I recognise from so much of your writing – the depth of your scholarship. 

SH: It does help create some distance from the burn of one’s own feeling. There’s considerable overlap in what we think of as the bereavement literature – it’s taking from psychology and psychiatry and psychoanalysis and neurology and all these fields that I’ve been very deeply inside for a long time. So, it wasn’t a shock to my system. At the same time I discovered what I hadn’t known before. There’s that beautiful Konrad Lorenz [description of] the Greylag goose that goes looking for its dead partner. That it should [have] this trisyllabic cry. In English, that’s “Where are you?” I found myself saying that over and over – “Where are you?”

LA: Towards the end of the book you talk about intercorporeality, this idea of people mingling, which is also in What I Loved.  

SH: I keep using these various words and I realised that it runs long through my work – the between, the “and”; the mingling, the overlap. The idea of autonomy is a contingent reality, not some absolute idea and I think cultivating the “between” or the “and” – the connectivity that is part of all life on earth, not just human beings – is really important. When that other vanishes in death, I think it comes as a bodily shock, even if you’re prepared. There’s a hole in the world, and you just can’t understand it. I think that’s why, in grief, people do produce presences, they manufacture what’s missing. It is a kind of waking dream phenomenon.

“I had a tremendous urge to write, and I think a need to sort of resurrect what I could of what I had lived through, what I was living through, but also, who this person was for me and that relation that lasted over four decades” – Siri Hustvedt

LA: Which of course you experienced after Paul died …

SH: I’ve read quite a bit about presences before, this was not something that I was unprepared for. But this ghost, this hallucinatory experience that was invisible – none of my senses were engaged – it was accompanied by a feeling of the most intense joy, I would say a kind of ecstasy. I am so happy I had it. But that was my one moment, the day we buried him. We know in placebo effects that words, symbols, rituals can create these physiological realities in the brain. I wondered if Paul saying “I want to be a ghost” became part of the nervous system’s production of this presence for me. 

LA: I wanted to ask about intercorporeality and intertextuality, the mingling of both of your books and narratives.  

SH: You know that funny thing that Paul said? “If we lived together for another 100 years, we’d be the same person.” I think many couples have that experience of sharing catalysts for the same thought. You’d sit at a dinner party and someone would tell a story, and then exactly the same story would appear in our heads at exactly the same moment. And sometimes we just looked at each other, like, “Which one of us is going to tell this?” That’s a kind of overlap, that your thought processes begin to have parallels that they probably didn’t have before you met.

LA: How are you finding this press run, talking about this? 

SH: I think writing was maybe the foremost leap in this – it’s saying what you hadn’t said. That’s when you walk the tightrope over to the other place. I did think, what am I going to say, for heaven’s sakes? I did think that after I had finished the book. I was sitting downstairs, and I had this thought [about the] title of Lévi-Strauss’s book, The Raw and the Cooked. I thought – well, there’s the raw stuff, but there’s also the cooked stuff; the meditating over what’s happened, and then the very emotional raw material, so that it was a movement back and forth. One of the benefits of the book was that I was able to laugh. Not all the time, obviously, but I was able to laugh when I was writing, too. That’s good in grief, that you have these moments of levity and you’re able to see things from a great enough distance that the comedy comes through. And that’s the magic of representation – that it’s not your boiling body. It’s on the outside and so you’re able to take a kind of reflective position that is good, healthy.

LA: I wanted to ask about Sabine Lidl’s documentary, which was recently screened in Berlin.  

SH: It’s a good film. It’s not thanks to me, it’s thanks to Sabine, who managed to make a visually arresting film about a writer. She came to Spain when I got an honorary doctorate and she was up in the Arctic when I had a little part in Wim Wenders’ movie [about architect Peter Zumthor]. Wim is an old friend, and he got me out there early September after Paul died. I think Wim thought, “Maybe this adventure would be good for Siri!” And it was. You know, I draw and I said to Sabine early on, I made 12 drawings for Memories of the Future and four for The Summer Without Men, and nobody said a word about them. They’re in the books. And they animated some of those drawings and I was so pleased. And Paul is in it. The first time I saw it was a little hard to see and the film goes on after his death, too. It’s beautifully edited. It’s about me, but it could have been really boring – and it’s not [laughs].   

Ghost Stories: A Memoir by Siri Hustvedt is published by Sceptre and out now.