“And as I was lying there, I felt Paul on the stairs. I felt him walk into the room. I felt him look at me and I was filled with joy. It was an extraordinary experience.”<\/p>\n
Hustvedt \u2014 the author of novels including What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American \u2014 has a longstanding interest in the brain.\u202f<\/p>\n
Her 2009 book The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves was part memoir, part investigation into the episodes of violent trembling she experienced after her father’s death.<\/p>\n
When it came to explaining her encounter with her husband’s ghost, Hustvedt once again turned to science.<\/p>\n
Listen to the podcast<\/a><\/p>\n Your favourite fiction authors share the stories behind their latest books on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show.<\/p>\n She discovered her experience was a relatively common phenomenon among the bereaved.<\/p>\n “The neurological literature is actually full of grief presences,” she says.\u202f<\/p>\n “Between 30 and 60 per cent of bereaved people experience some form of a grief hallucination of the person who died.<\/p>\n “Some people have complete hallucinations of the whole physical being. I did not see or hear anything. Paul didn’t touch me. What I had was simply this sense that he was there, and it’s not so uncommon. But I am really grateful for the experience.”<\/p>\n Hustvedt believes these ghostly encounters are the nervous system’s response to the “radical absence” of a loved one after their death.\u202f<\/p>\n But speculating on the neurology behind Auster’s presence didn’t lessen the episode’s power.<\/p>\n “There does not seem to be a culture in the world that exists without ghosts,” Hustvedt says. (Supplied: Spencer Ostrander)<\/p>\n Before he died, Auster told Hustvedt he wanted to return as a ghost.<\/p>\n “He knew he was going to die, and I think it was his way of saying, ‘I don’t want to die \u2026 I want to come back, Siri, and see what you’re writing,” Hustvedt says.<\/p>\n “It was a bid for life.”<\/p>\n This wish “lodged itself very deeply” in Hustvedt’s mind and inspired the title of her latest book, Ghost Stories, a memoir reflecting on her life with Auster and his death.\u202f<\/p>\n Love at first sight<\/p>\n Hustvedt and Auster met at the 92nd Street Y, a community centre in New York’s Upper East Side.<\/p>\n It was 1981 and the pair were at a poetry reading for the acclaimed New York poet Ann Lauterbach.<\/p>\n Hustvedt and Auster were married on June 16 \u2014 Bloomsday, the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses is set. (Supplied: Hachette Australia)<\/p>\n “I didn’t know Paul at all, but I saw this very beautiful man \u2026 standing near the door, the exit to the Y, in a leather jacket, smoking maybe a cigarette or a little cigar, I’m not sure which,” Hustvedt recalls.\u202f<\/p>\n “And I said to my friend, ‘You don’t know who that guy is?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes, that’s Paul Auster, the poet’. And I said to him, ‘Introduce me right now’.”<\/p>\n He did, and the pair spent the evening talking together.\u202f<\/p>\n “I have to say \u2026 he didn’t seem terribly interested in me. And at that time of my life \u2014 I had just turned 26 \u2014 I was used to men being extremely interested in me,” Hustvedt says.<\/p>\n “[Paul] seduced me in part with his indifference. He was not aggressive; he was not flirting. He was serious and sincere.”<\/p>\n Hustvedt was instantly smitten.\u202f<\/p>\n “The joke between us was always that I fell in love within 30 seconds, and it took him several hours,” she says.\u202f<\/p>\n “I worked very hard during those hours to impress this beautiful man who was also a poet.<\/p>\n “And by the end of the evening, I think I had impressed him.”<\/p>\n Impress him she did: Hustvedt and Auster married the following year, and had a daughter, Sophie, now a singer, in 1987.<\/p>\n A shared writing life<\/p>\n The first written exchange between the two was a note Auster wrote Hustvedt the day after their first meeting.\u202f<\/p>\n “He had written Dear S and then a dash,” Hustvedt recalls.<\/p>\n “He had no idea how to spell my name. At that time, my name was obscure. It was not the iPhone [age].”<\/p>\n Auster had tried calling Hustvedt, but she hadn’t picked up, so his note asked her to call him.<\/p>\n “He signed it, ‘love and kisses’,” Hustvedt says.\u202f<\/p>\n “We had spent the night together but still I thought, ‘love and kisses? My goodness!’ \u2026 I was absolutely delighted with that note.”<\/p>\n It marked the beginning of a rich literary exchange between the two that spanned their 43 years together.<\/p>\n “This book is a diary of sorts, and, like many diaries \u2026 it is full of holes \u2014 a geography of telling and not telling,” Hustvedt writes in Ghost Stories. (Supplied: Hachette Australia)<\/p>\n Auster’s letters \u2014 many of which appear in Ghost Stories, including a series he wrote in his final months to his baby grandson, Miles \u2014 reflect his evolution as a writer.\u202f<\/p>\n “Paul did have a kind of early and a late style, and if you look at the arc of his prose over time, he was always a good writer, but the sentences got longer as he got older,” Hustvedt says.<\/p>\n “He had a kind of rolling rhythm that he used in his late books that you don’t find in the New York trilogy, for example, and I think this is probably even inside some of the notes, and certainly in those late letters that he wrote to our grandson.”<\/p>\n Over the years, the two authors regularly read each other’s work, sometimes offering a frank assessment of a draft.<\/p>\n “We could actually be very critical,” Hustvedt says. \u00a0<\/p>\n “I had spent five years working on my third novel, What I Loved, and I gave him the whole draft. He read it silently to himself, and we met and he said, ‘Siri, it just isn’t there yet’.<\/p>\n “I wrote a whole new draft in eight months, and he loved that draft.”<\/p>\n “[Auster] took a childlike joy in beloved people and beloved books,” Hustvedt writes in her book. (Getty Images: Timothy Fadek\/Corbis)<\/p>\n In another instance, Hustvedt told Auster she didn’t like either of the two endings he’d written for his novel Oracle Night. “He wrote a third and I thought it was perfect,” she says.\u202f<\/p>\n While Hustvedt says these conversations were difficult, they were always welcome.\u202f<\/p>\n “When criticism rests on a bed of love and respect, it’s not so hard to take.”The nature of grief<\/p>\n Immediately after Auster’s death, Hustvedt’s connection to time altered in an unexpected way.\u202f<\/p>\n She describes in Ghost Stories how time became “deranged beyond recognition”: she’d forget the month and day of the week; hours would skip ahead while minutes dragged by.<\/p>\n![\"author](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/8201c0dc9ea527c5c91ef5dd1c546173.jpeg\")
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