It wasn’t quite Beatlemania, but, at the height of Paul Auster’s fame in the 1980s and 90s, screaming fans clambered on to the hood of a car after a reading in Buenos Aires. Admirers mobbed him at bookshop events in Paris, the city where he had once eked out a living translating French literature. He was offered big money to make ads promoting American beef to Japan. He was hailed as a rock god, a literary superstar, a postmodernist with leading-man looks.
Little of this is of much consequence or consolation to novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt 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 – “a beautiful man in a black leather jacket” – 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.
Nights 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. “I think you are the best and it is very sad to lose the best,” she writes to him. At their wedding the following year, a poet friend offers a toast: “To the bride and groom – two people so good-looking I’d like to slice their faces with a razor.” Now, in her late 60s and newly widowed, memories keep flooding back. Of him telling her, “I love to watch you walk across the room naked.” Him asking, “‘Beckett or Burroughs?’ ‘Beckett,’ I said instantly. Paul grabbed me, kissed me hard, and we started making love on the stairs.”
Hustvedt describes their marriage as a “dialogue”. They read and edited each other’s work. Sentences in his books featured verbatim quotes from her novels and vice versa. Ghost Stories, she believes, is a “hunt for my lost partner”, but, more than that, it’s a hunt for a lost conjunction – “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.”
Now time is broken. “Deranged beyond recognition,” observes Hustvedt. When she steps outdoors she can no longer find a familiar subway entrance. She pats herself down, keeps checking she hasn’t lost her keys. The house is full of tripwires – the smell of her husband’s cigars, postcards sporting his handwriting, his name on a chequebook. Ghost Stories – fragmented, full of short, even single-sentence paragraphs – preserves the concussive nature of grief, catalogues haptic memories (Auster’s furnace-hot legs were a balm for her perennially cold feet), searches for solace and insights (from the likes of Kierkegaard and CS Lewis), mourns the endless winter ahead (“Now I live in a continuous draft”).
Auster’s death forces a shift in pronouns – Hustvedt has to catch herself saying “our”; from now on it will have to be “my”. 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 “defensive, prickly attitude about being treated as my husband’s appendage”. Harvey Weinstein, producer of the Auster-scripted, Wayne Wang-directed film Blue in the Face (1995), introduces her at a party as “Paul’s beautiful wife”. It was, she reflects, “as if I were a nameless, inanimate thing that belonged to my husband”.
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 – to this day she lectures in psychiatry at a New York medical college – come through in her descriptions of houses (“zones of gestural repetition”) and citations of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who “uses the word intercorporeality for our entwined bodily relations with others”).
Hustvedt says Auster wanted to die telling a joke. She’s alive to the absurdist humour in late-stage cancer – the fact that her ailing husband is being kept alive by an immunotherapy drug partly built from the ovarian cells of Chinese hamsters. She’s able to laugh at herself getting irate with him for having a different method of organising books in their shared library – “‘Where’s Gertrude Stein, for God’s sake?’ I would yell at him”. 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.
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’s 10-month-old granddaughter Ruby – from acute intoxication by the effects of heroin and fentanyl; then Ruby’s father Daniel (Auster’s son from his first marriage to writer Lydia Davis) from an overdose. Daniel’s troubled life – numerous stints in therapy and counselling, stealing $13,000 from Hustvedt’s 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 – emerges in sad shreds.
“Like many diaries,” declares Hustvedt, Ghost Stories is “full of holes – a geography of telling and not telling”. As well as “Grief Reports” documenting Auster’s hospitalisation and funeral, it includes a dozen email bulletins “from Cancerland” she sent to their closest friends; “Heroic Couplets” she gave him the Christmas before he died (“The form may seem absurd, ridiculous, / Too stiff for any modernist with pride”); letters he wrote to Miles, their daughter Sophie’s newly born son.
Yet for all the loss and loneliness it itemises, what offsets the pervasive melancholy of Ghost Stories – gives it life – is its incandescent anger. Auster’s ebbing mirrors that of America; Hustvedt says he refused to call Donald Trump by his name, referring to him only as “45”. Reading the paper at the breakfast table, the writer – someone who had once been interviewed by the president of Finland, and to whom the University of Copenhagen dedicated a research library – sighed and grumped. His kind of intellectualism ran counter to the know-nothing nationalism advocated by vice-president JD Vance’s injunction “to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country”.
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: “‘When fascism comes to America, they’ll call it Americanism.’ It has, and they do.”