Siri Hustvedt<\/a> who, before he died of cancer in 2024, had been married to Auster for more than 40 years. As she tells it in Ghost Stories, her memoir of their life together, she was a tall blond PhD student in a jumpsuit when she met him \u2013 \u201ca beautiful man in a black leather jacket\u201d \u2013 at a poetry reading. He was separated from the mother of his child, living alone in a gloomy Brooklyn apartment, yet to publish anything of substance. Literature bound them: he was just 15 when he decided his future was in writing; she had come to the same insight at an even younger age.<\/p>\nNights in the city. A cab downtown, a smoke-thick bar, talking and talking and talking. They wake up together. By the time, not long after, he tells her he is returning to his wife and son, she knows her own mind. \u201cI think you are the best and it is very sad to lose the best,\u201d she writes to him. At their wedding the following year, a poet friend offers a toast: \u201cTo the bride and groom \u2013 two people so good-looking I\u2019d like to slice their faces with a razor.\u201d Now, in her late 60s and newly widowed, memories keep flooding back. Of him telling her, \u201cI love to watch you walk across the room naked.\u201d Him asking, \u201c\u2018Beckett or Burroughs?\u2019 \u2018Beckett,\u2019 I said instantly. Paul grabbed me, kissed me hard, and we started making love on the stairs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hustvedt describes their marriage as a \u201cdialogue\u201d. They read and edited each other\u2019s work. Sentences in his books featured verbatim quotes from her novels and vice versa. Ghost Stories, she believes, is a \u201chunt for my lost partner\u201d, but, more than that, it\u2019s a hunt for a lost conjunction \u2013 \u201cYes, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
double quotation markHustvedt says Auster wanted to die telling a joke<\/p>\n
Now time is broken. \u201cDeranged beyond recognition,\u201d observes Hustvedt. When she steps outdoors she can no longer find a familiar subway entrance. She pats herself down, keeps checking she hasn\u2019t lost her keys. The house is full of tripwires \u2013 the smell of her husband\u2019s cigars, postcards sporting his handwriting, his name on a chequebook. Ghost Stories \u2013 fragmented, full of short, even single-sentence paragraphs \u2013 preserves the concussive nature of grief, catalogues haptic memories (Auster\u2019s furnace-hot legs were a balm for her perennially cold feet), searches for solace and insights\u00a0(from the likes of Kierkegaard and CS Lewis), mourns\u00a0the endless winter ahead (\u201cNow I live in a continuous\u00a0draft\u201d).<\/p>\n
Auster\u2019s death forces a shift in pronouns \u2013 Hustvedt has to catch herself saying \u201cour\u201d; from now on it will have to be \u201cmy\u201d. 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 \u201cdefensive, prickly attitude about being treated as my husband\u2019s appendage\u201d. Harvey Weinstein, producer of the Auster-scripted, Wayne Wang-directed film Blue in the Face (1995), introduces her at a party as \u201cPaul\u2019s beautiful wife\u201d. It\u00a0was, she reflects, \u201cas if I were a nameless, inanimate thing that belonged to my husband\u201d.<\/p>\n
Auster was often assumed to be a high-end postmodernist and critical theory exegete, but it was Hustvedt who, as she also discussed in her essay collection Mothers, Fathers, and Others (2021), more systematically engaged with thinkers such as Lacan and Bakhtin. Traces of her academic identity \u2013 to this day she lectures in psychiatry at a New York medical college \u2013 come through in her descriptions of houses (\u201czones of gestural repetition\u201d) and citations of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who \u201cuses the word intercorporeality for our entwined bodily relations with others\u201d).<\/p>\n
Hustvedt says Auster wanted to die telling a joke. She\u2019s alive to the absurdist humour in late-stage cancer \u2013 the fact that her ailing husband is being kept alive by an immunotherapy drug partly built from the ovarian cells of Chinese hamsters. She\u2019s able to laugh at herself getting irate with him for having a different method of organising books in their shared library \u2013 \u201c\u2018Where\u2019s Gertrude Stein, for God\u2019s sake?\u2019 I would yell at him\u201d. At one point, distrait after his death, she climbs into a half-filled bathtub only to discover she has forgotten to take off her socks.<\/p>\n
Hustvedt needs to laugh. All around: blackness. Family friend Salman Rushdie, who visits them, recently lost his right eye in a murderous attack on him in upstate New York. Hustvedt slips on the pavement and ends up in ER with a smashed wrist. Her longtime analyst dies. Two more deaths: Auster\u2019s 10-month-old granddaughter Ruby \u2013 from acute intoxication by the effects of heroin and fentanyl; then Ruby\u2019s father Daniel (Auster\u2019s son from his first marriage to writer Lydia Davis) from an overdose. Daniel\u2019s troubled life \u2013 numerous stints in therapy and counselling, stealing $13,000 from Hustvedt\u2019s bank account as a teenager, forging academic transcripts and pretending to have enrolled at university in order to use all the tuition money gifted by his father on drugs \u2013 emerges in sad shreds.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike many diaries,\u201d declares Hustvedt, Ghost Stories is \u201cfull of holes \u2013 a geography of telling and not telling\u201d. As well as \u201cGrief Reports\u201d documenting Auster\u2019s hospitalisation and funeral, it includes a dozen email bulletins \u201cfrom Cancerland\u201d she sent to their closest friends; \u201cHeroic Couplets\u201d she gave him the Christmas before he died (\u201cThe form may seem absurd, ridiculous, \/ Too stiff for any modernist with pride\u201d); letters he wrote to Miles, their daughter Sophie\u2019s newly born son.<\/p>\n
Yet for all the loss and loneliness it itemises, what offsets the pervasive melancholy of Ghost Stories \u2013 gives it life \u2013 is its incandescent anger. Auster\u2019s ebbing mirrors that of America; Hustvedt says he refused to call Donald Trump by his name, referring to him only as \u201c45\u201d. Reading the paper at the breakfast table, the writer \u2013 someone who had once been interviewed by the president of Finland, and to whom the University of Copenhagen dedicated a research library \u2013 sighed and grumped. His kind of intellectualism ran counter to the know-nothing nationalism advocated by vice-president JD Vance\u2019s injunction \u201cto honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country\u201d.<\/p>\n
Hustvedt, whose Norwegian mother spent five years under Nazi occupation during the second world war, notes that shutting down the US Agency for International Development (USAID) will kill millions of people. At a memorial for her husband, she quoted her father: \u201c\u2018When fascism comes to America, they\u2019ll call it Americanism.\u2019 It has, and they do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ghost Stories: A Memoir by Siri Hustvedt is published by Sceptre (\u00a322.00). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It wasn\u2019t quite Beatlemania, but, at the height of Paul Auster\u2019s fame in the 1980s and 90s, screaming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":542967,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-542966","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=542966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/542967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}