The twinned emotions of love and grief suffuse Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories (Simon & Schuster, Mar.), an elegy for her husband, fellow novelist Paul Auster, who died of lung cancer in 2024. The book mixes memoir, Auster’s letters to their young grandson Miles, and philosophical questions about death.

When did you know that you had to write this book?

It wasn’t until he died. I didn’t know before then, because I still have a half-finished novel that I’m thinking of returning to. But I realized that part of the grief was a desire to resurrect this person to the degree that was possible. The book is about illness, death, and the grief that follows, but it’s also about our 43 years together. It became a kind of collage because I unearthed these letters I had written to Paul years ago. And then Paul speaks in the book, too, because it includes letters he had wanted to be part of a small book, Letters to Miles, that he was never able to finish. I realized there was an interesting posthumous possibility
for a form of dialogue—you have my prose and then you also have Paul’s prose.

How did the process of writing and going through those old papers help you with your grief?

For me, the act of writing a book is always finding its form. I think of books as organisms that shape themselves, from both conscious and unconscious forces in the writer. There’s real pleasure in that, and when you’re grieving a person that you love very much, there’s a kind of tonic in that form of discovery and memory. There are parts of the book that are unbearable for me, because there were terrible things that happened to us. But there was something I needed that I found in the act of writing. Memories come back to you and you find yourself in a state of at least momentary pleasure, remembering either small or big things that occurred between us.

You’ve written novels, poetry, criticism, even science papers. Did that multifarious experience influence your approach to the book?

What happens if you move among disciplines, which is something I’ve now done for some decades, is that you learn that perspectives on the same problem change. There’s a moment when I’m talking about experiencing Paul’s presence on the day of his burial, and then I work through, how are we supposed to think about something like this? There are people who are still part of the spiritualist community and many religious people who simply accept the presence of the dead in the lives of those who survive them. Then there are also neurological explanations. In my mind, none of these are full explanations, and so it’s possible to look at all this from various perspectives and find something valuable. The book has his voice, my voice, the voices of our former selves at various moments throughout our history, and this philosophical idea that between human beings, you do create a third. That relation is not one or the other, but something that takes place between them, and it’s not static, it’s dynamic.
I wanted to celebrate that as well.

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