It wasn’t quite Beatlemania, but at the height of Paul Auster’s fame in the 1980s and ’90s, screaming fans climbed onto the hood of his car after a reading in Buenos Aires. Admirers mobbed him at bookstore events in Paris, the city where he had once scraped by translating French literature. He was offered large sums to appear in ads promoting American beef to Japan. He was hailed as a rock star, a literary superstar, a postmodernist with leading-man looks.
Little of this holds much weight or comfort for novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt, who was married to Auster for over 40 years before he died of cancer in 2024. As she recounts in Ghost Stories, her memoir of their life together, she was a tall blonde PhD student in a jumpsuit when she met him—”a beautiful man in a black leather jacket”—at a poetry reading. He was separated from the mother of his child, living alone in a gloomy Brooklyn apartment, and had yet to publish anything significant. Literature bound them: he was just 15 when he decided his future was in writing; she had come to the same realization even younger.
Nights in the city. A cab downtown, a smoke-filled bar, talking and talking and talking. They wake up together. Soon after, when he tells her he is returning to his wife and son, she knows her own mind. “I think you are the best and it is very sad to lose the best,” she writes to him. At their wedding the following year, a poet friend toasts: “To the bride and groom—two people so good-looking I’d like to slice their faces with a razor.” Now, in her late 60s and newly widowed, memories keep flooding back. Of him telling her, “I love to watch you walk across the room naked.” Him asking, “‘Beckett or Burroughs?’ ‘Beckett,’ I said instantly. Paul grabbed me, kissed me hard, and we started making love on the stairs.”
Hustvedt describes their marriage as a “dialogue.” They read and edited each other’s work. Sentences in his books featured verbatim quotes from her novels, and vice versa. Ghost Stories, she believes, is a “hunt for my lost partner,” but more than that, it’s a hunt for a lost conjunction—”Yes, I am mourning Paul, but most of the time, I am mourning Siri and Paul. I am mourning AND. I am mourning how the AND made me feel in the world. That AND where he and I overlapped.”
Hustvedt says Auster wanted to die telling a joke.
Now time is broken. “Deranged beyond recognition,” observes Hustvedt. When she steps outdoors, she can no longer find a familiar subway entrance. She pats herself down, keeps checking she hasn’t lost her keys. The house is full of tripwires—the smell of her husband’s cigars, postcards in his handwriting, his name on a checkbook. Ghost Stories—fragmented, full of short, even single-sentence paragraphs—preserves the concussive nature of grief, catalogs haptic memories (Auster’s furnace-hot legs were a balm for her perennially cold feet), searches for solace and insights (from the likes of Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis), and mourns the endless winter ahead (“Now I live in a continuous draft”).
Auster’s death forces a shift in pronouns—Hustvedt has to catch herself saying “our”; from now on it will have to be “my.” She thinks back to earlier in their marriage, before her novels What I Loved (2003) and The Summer Without Men (2011) became international bestsellers, when she had a “defensive, prickly attitude about being treated as my husband’s appendage.” Harvey Weinstein, producer of the Auster-scripted, Wayne Wang-directed film Blue in the Face (1995), introduces her at a party as “Paul’s beautiful wife.” It was, she reflects, “as if I were a nameless, inanimate thing that belonged to my husband.”
Auster was often assumed to be a high-end postmodernist and critical theory exegete, but it was…Siri Hustvedt, who also explored these themes in her essay collection Mothers, Fathers, and Others (2021), has long engaged with thinkers like Lacan and Bakhtin. Her academic background—she still lectures in psychiatry at a New York medical college—shines through in her writing, whether she’s describing houses as “zones of gestural repetition” or citing phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “intercorporeality,” which refers to our intertwined bodily relationships with others.
Hustvedt recalls that her husband, Paul Auster, wanted to die telling a joke. She finds a dark humor even in late-stage cancer, noting the absurdity that his life was prolonged by an immunotherapy drug partly derived from the ovarian cells of Chinese hamsters. She can laugh at herself, too, like when she’d get frustrated with his different system for organizing their shared library—“‘Where’s Gertrude Stein, for God’s sake?’ I would yell at him.” After his death, in a moment of distraction, she once climbed into a half-filled bathtub without remembering to remove her socks. Auster himself had remarked, “After all the horrible things we’ve been through, if I die of cancer, it will make a bad story.”
Hustvedt needs that laughter, surrounded as she is by darkness. Family friend Salman Rushdie, who visits them, recently lost his right eye in a violent attack in upstate New York. Hustvedt herself slips on the pavement and ends up in the ER with a broken wrist. Her longtime analyst dies. Then come two more devastating losses: Auster’s 10-month-old granddaughter, Ruby, from acute intoxication by heroin and fentanyl, followed by Ruby’s father, Daniel—Auster’s son from his first marriage to writer Lydia Davis—from an overdose. Daniel’s troubled life unfolds in sad fragments: numerous attempts at therapy and counseling, stealing $13,000 from Hustvedt’s bank account as a teenager, forging academic transcripts, and pretending to enroll in university to spend his father’s tuition money on drugs.
As Hustvedt says, her book Ghost Stories is, “Like many diaries, full of holes—a geography of telling and not telling.” Alongside “Grief Reports” documenting Auster’s hospitalization and funeral, it includes email updates she sent to close friends “from Cancerland,” the “Heroic Couplets” she gave him the Christmas before he died (“The form may seem absurd, ridiculous, / Too stiff for any modernist with pride”), and letters he wrote to Miles, their daughter Sophie’s newborn son.
Yet for all the loss and loneliness it records, what counterbalances the pervasive melancholy of Ghost Stories—and gives it vitality—is its incandescent anger. Auster’s decline mirrors that of America; Hustvedt notes he refused to say Donald Trump’s name, referring to him only as “45.” Reading the newspaper at breakfast, the writer—once interviewed by the president of Finland and honored with a dedicated research library at the University of Copenhagen—would sigh and grumble. His kind of intellectualism stood in stark contrast to the know-nothing nationalism epitomized by Vice President JD Vance’s call “to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
Hustvedt, whose Norwegian mother lived through five years of Nazi occupation during World War II, observes that moves to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would cost millions of lives. At her husband’s memorial, she quoted her father: “‘When fascism comes to America, they’ll call it Americanism.’ It has, and they do.”
Ghost Stories: A Memoir by Siri Hustvedt is published by Sceptre (£22.00). To support The Guardian, purchase a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about the review and topic of Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt in the context of life after Paul Auster
General Beginner Questions
Q What is Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt
A Its a new essay collection by the acclaimed author published in 2024 The essays explore themes of memory perception ghosts and the unseen forces that shape our lives
Q Why do reviews keep mentioning life after Paul Auster
A Paul Auster Hustvedts husband of over 40 years and a celebrated novelist passed away in April 2024 Many reviews are reading this new book which deals with absence and the past through the lens of this profound personal loss even though the essays were written before his death
Q Is this a memoir about her grief over Paul Auster
A Not directly The book is not a memoir of grief but a collection of intellectual essays However its themes of haunting memory and what lingers after a person is gone feel deeply resonant and poignant given the timing of its release after Austers passing
Q Do I need to have read Paul Austers work to understand this book
A No its not necessary The book stands on its own However knowing about their long famous literary partnership might deepen your appreciation for the emotional subtext many readers and reviewers are finding in it
Deeper Analytical Questions
Q Whats the main connection reviewers are making between the book and Austers death
A Reviewers note that the books central preoccupationhow the past and the people in it haunt the presentfeels eerily prophetic Its seen as a powerful if unintentional meditation on living with the ghost of a beloved partner
Q How is Hustvedts Ghost Stories different from her fiction
A While her fiction often explores similar psychological and philosophical terrain this is a nonfiction essay collection Its more direct in its intellectual inquiry blending personal anecdote with insights from neuroscience psychoanalysis and art history
Q Are the ghosts in the book meant to be real spirits
A Mostly no Hustvedt
