Ghost Stories
The tender memoir of the forty-three years Siri Hustvedt spent with her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster - from their first encounter in 1980s New York through the highs and lows of love, family and grief.
Ghost Stories is Siri Hustvedt's most personal work yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster.
It is a patchwork-quilt book that stitches together memories from over forty years of love and life together: journal entries Siri wrote between November 2023 and 3 May 2024, the day of Paul's funeral; emails Siri sent to friends during his cancer treatment; notes Paul sent her over the course of their relationship; and three love letters Siri wrote to him in 1981, when he left her for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life with his first wife and son.
The book also contains Paul Auster's last ever piece of writing - the first thirty-five pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siri's and his grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, born on 1 January 2024.
Unflinching, tender and wise, this is the full-bodied story of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster's life together, an exploration of how grief unmoors time and how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday.
Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedt is a Norwegian-American writer, born February 19, 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota, United States.
She holds a B.A. in history from St. Olaf College, and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University (her doctoral thesis on Charles Dickens was entitled "Figures of Dust. A Reading of 'Our Mutual Friend'").
Hustvedt has mainly made her name as a novelist, but she has also published a book of poetry, and has had short stories and essays on various subjects published in (among others) The Art of the Essay 1999, Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991, The Paris Review, The Yale Review and Modern Painters.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and shares a daughter with her husband, fellow writer Paul Auster.
