Novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt reflects on losing her husband of more than 40 years, Paul Auster, in her new memoir Ghost Stories. Auster, who died of cancer in 2024, was a literary superstar in the 1980s and 1990s, with fans mobbing him at events worldwide. Yet Hustvedt focuses not on his fame but on their intimate life together, from their meeting at a poetry reading to their marriage as a continuous 'dialogue' over literature.
The memoir is structured as a 'hunt for my lost partner', but Hustvedt explains she is also mourning the loss of 'AND' – the conjunction that bound them as a couple. She describes how time has become 'deranged beyond recognition', with familiar subway entrances seeming alien and the house full of tripwires like the smell of his cigars and his handwriting on postcards. The fragmented narrative, with short paragraphs, mirrors the concussive nature of grief.
Hustvedt recalls her earlier struggle against being seen as 'Paul's beautiful wife', a label applied by Harvey Weinstein at a party. She notes that despite Auster's reputation as a postmodernist, she was the one who engaged more systematically with thinkers like Lacan and Bakhtin. Her academic background in psychiatry surfaces in descriptions of houses as 'zones of gestural repetition' and citations of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Throughout the memoir, Hustvedt searches for solace in philosophers like Kierkegaard and CS Lewis, and mourns the shift from 'our' to 'my'. She remembers Auster's desire to die telling a joke, and finds absurdist humour in late-stage cancer. Ultimately, Ghost Stories is a poignant exploration of how the death of a long-term partner forces a fundamental change in identity and language.
