Siri Hustvedt’s powerful memoir of losing her husband Paul Auster will make you cry
- Written by Julienne van Loon, Associate Professor in Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
“Divested of others, what exactly is a self?” This question occurs halfway through Siri Hustvedt’s extraordinary new grief memoir, Ghost Stories. By my reading, it propels the whole book.
Ghost Stories reflects on Hustvedt’s life with her husband Paul Auster, her partner of 43 years, in the aftermath of his death, aged 77, in April 2024. An internationally renowned writer and filmmaker, Auster’s notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Smoke (1995), and the Booker Prize shortlisted novel, 4 3 2 1 (2017).
Review: Ghost Stories: A Memoir – Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre)
Ghost Stories narrates the final years, months and weeks of their time together, as well as the period immediately following Auster’s death. The four-year period, 2021-2025, forms the memoir’s central setting. It starts when COVID is still a serious menace and Trump’s first term is nearing an end. For Hustvedt’s Brooklyn household, these years cover two premature deaths.
Auster’s first biological grandchild, Ruby, died aged ten months while in the care of her father, Paul’s son Daniel, in November 2021. The medical examiner determined the cause of her death as “heroin and fentanyl”, Hustvedt writes. Daniel died of an overdose five months later in April 2022, aged 44, after being arrested and charged with manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and endangering the welfare of a child.
Hustvedt and Auster, along with their adult daughter Sophie, grieve for these two, and for the awful circumstances that led to their deaths. Paul called these events “the horrible things”; Hustvedt finds putting them in words “nearly unspeakable”. Feeling the acute effects of this complex grief and stress, as well as the unkind glare of the media, Auster fell ill in September 2022.
Reflecting on the timing of this, Hustvedt notes that while studies connecting cancer to emotion and loss are “mixed”, there is agreement in the medical literature that stressors have an impact on the immune system.
Auster suffered daily fevers, exhaustion, shortness of breath. Initial diagnoses included long COVID and pneumonia, but by early the following year, he had been diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer. Numerous hospital visits and various treatments followed – biopsies, scans, chemo drugs, immunotherapy. Nothing worked.
Paul Auster died barely 12 months after his diagnosis. Ghost Stories concludes as Hustvedt and her family prepare for his first annual memorial service in April 2025.
Fierce intellect – and feeling
“Divested of others, what exactly is a self?” Don’t mistake this for a purely intellectual question. It is not, and certainly not in the hands of Hustvedt – though she brings her fierce intellect to it.
Hustvedt has written 17 books to date, spanning fiction, nonfiction and poetry. They include the internationally bestselling novel, What I Loved (2016), the impeccably researched memoir, The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves (2010) and five essay collections.
She has a PhD in English Literature, three honorary doctorates and other honours. A genuine polymath, her interests span neuro-psychoanalysis, biology and philosophy. But her thinking is – always – grounded in the experience of ordinary, everyday life. For Hustvedt, selfhood is inter-being. In other words, she understands that we are feeling, sensing beings who are always entangled with other feeling, sensing beings.
Ghost Stories opens on Hustvedt’s day to day in the period immediately following Auster’s death. She is adrift in his “beyond” and finds herself “deranged beyond recognition”. The first two sentences offer a simple acknowledgement: “I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead.”
Hustvedt’s initial experience of grief is acute: she finds it difficult to breathe, to eat, to sleep, even to navigate her way to the local shops and back along the street in Brooklyn’s Park Slope where she has lived for so many decades. Her memory is faulty; time itself feels strange. Here is the author stripped of her continuity.
A moving love story
Need I warn you? This book will make you cry. I started crying about 20 pages in and continued at regular intervals.
Hustvedt’s experience has parallels with my own life: parenting in a blended family, coping with addictive behaviours at close range, having a family member diagnosed with terminal cancer. So reading Ghost Stories stirred up significant personal memories.
But the book is also a moving love story, intertwined, inevitably, with cycles of birth and death. Surely, no reader is distant from these things.
Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt with fellow writers Colum McCann and Gay Talese.
Sarah Yenesel/AAP
A tapestry of ‘found manuscripts’
Auster’s letters form part of the memoir’s tapestry. Indeed, the book is woven through with “found manuscripts”.
There are 12 emails Hustvedt wrote to a small group of friends and family during Auster’s treatment, updating them on the progress of the patient, the cancer, and related medical plans and treatments. There are the lyrics of a song dedicated to Auster by his daughter, Sophie, and several messages and notes sent between family members, including between Hustvedt and her stepson Daniel.
Hustvedt also includes two deeply moving love letters she wrote to Auster very early in their relationship, when he left her for a short period to return to his failing marriage with acclaimed short story writer Lydia Davis, Daniel’s mother.
These “found manuscripts” are scattered throughout, adding to fragmented journal notes dashed off in the middle of things, as Hustvedt endures the demanding daily physical, administrative and emotional labour of caring for Auster during his illness. She reads all the research on its specifics and does the maths on survival rates – but decides not to share her findings with the patient.
Then there is the forward-moving narrative of her grief immediately following Auster’s death, which draws on her reading in bereavement studies. This intertwining of “found manuscripts” and forward-moving narration brings a lightly multi-voiced element to the storytelling, as well as an archival one.
In this way, the book is reminiscent of Hustvedt’s novel, The Blazing World (2014), longlisted for the Booker Prize, a narrative made up of fictional “found manuscripts” put together by a scholar years after the central protagonist’s death. In Ghost Stories, the effect of such intertwining is a story that feels authentic, immediate and real.
“Divested of others, what exactly is a self?” Of course, the self can never be divested of others, nor should we desire it to be. Hustvedt knows that deeply. A self divested of others is a dangerous, patriarchal fantasy. Fascist, even.
“I was your you. The back-and-forth, a teeter-totter of confession, argument, desire,” writes Hustvedt in one of her journal entries, addressing Auster, who is by then already dead. “I and you. You and I. And now silence. I am labouring ferociously to acknowledge it. Being without you.”
Elsewhere, she writes:
I will speak more plainly: 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.“
Auster reportedly told Hustvedt one of the differences between them was that she tended to become more articulate when angry, whereas he felt he tended to become less so. I found this anecdote interesting, because I think that as a writer, Hustvedt is remarkably articulate in this book – yet she is under such tremendous pressure.
In this way, Ghost Stories has something in common with Hustvedt’s earlier memoir, about a mysterious neurological condition she suffers after the death of her father. Both are born of a period of acute hardship: both are extraordinary books.
"Health is not a flight into sanity,” Hustvedt once told me, quoting a favourite line from English psychoanalyst and paediatrician, Donald Winnicott. “Health tolerates disintegration.”
Ghost Stories belongs to a subset of memoirs written by leading literary women mourning the loss of a long-term partner, like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Pulitzer-winning novelist and journalist Geraldine Brooks’ Memorial Days, recently shortlisted for the Stella Prize.
The market for this subset of memoirs is significant: we know, for example, that women are more likely to be widowed than men and that older women are among the most avid readers. And recent research by Australia Reads shows the life-writing genre is more popular with readers than any other nonfiction category.
I am not trying to suggest Hustvedt has been deliberate in thinking about the market for this memoir. On the contrary, she is writing for her own survival. As a result, she holds her readers close and delivers a powerful narrative as a witness to death and dying, in an acutely and thoughtfully observed book.
Ghost Stories can and should change the way you think about life with and alongside others who matter to you. It deserves many readers.
Authors: Julienne van Loon, Associate Professor in Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
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