Siri Hustvedt has revealed that she is working on a memoir about her late husband, Paul Auster, author of the acclaimed New York Trilogy.
The news was first reported in Zeit Online, where Hustvedt said in an interview that “a few days after Paul’s death” she started writing a memoir about him. “It’s called Ghost Stories. I have 120 pages now,” she told the German news website, adding that writing about Auster was her “first impulse” after he died.
Auster died aged 77 on 30 April due to complications from lung cancer. “I began writing the memoir about him and me, about ‘us’, after he was buried in Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn on May 3rd,” Hustvedt told the Guardian. “It isn’t that I ‘wanted’ to write this book, but rather that I had an urgent need to write it.”
“The compulsion to write after the death of a beloved person is hardly unique to me,” the 69-year-old author added (her most recent book, Mothers, Fathers and Others, is an essay collection written after her own mother’s death).
“There is something about death that triggers in writers this impulse to write,” Hustvedt told Zeit Online. “Writing on a blank page is different from talking to someone in person. There is something about that page, that empty space, that creates an intimacy that doesn’t exist in a live dialogue with a human being.”
Born in Minnesota, Hustvedt has a PhD from Columbia University. Having published her first novel, The Blindfold, in 1992, she went on to write several novels including What I Loved, The Summer Without Men and The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker prize (as it then was) in 2014. Hustvedt and Auster met in 1981, and married the following year. They have a daughter, and lived together in Brooklyn, New York, until Auster’s death.
When asked by Zeit Online how she was doing, Hustvedt said she was “OK”.
“You know, I’m grieving for my husband,” she added. “But as I always say to friends now: I’m not depressed. But I’m scared. Since he died, I’ve been reading about grief all the time.”
While Hustvedt hopes that she will have finished writing Ghost Stories by early next year, she told the Guardian: “That is my hope, not my promise. I have no idea when it will be published.”
