Siri Hustvedt's New Book Is a Love Letter and Goodbye

Siri Hustvedt opens her new book Ghost Stories with a stark declaration: "I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead."

The book is a grief memoir in the tradition of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates's I Managed to Stay Alive — a writer processing loss through the act of writing. For Hustvedt, an accomplished author in her own right, writing is how she makes sense of the world.

Hustvedt and Auster, author of the New York Trilogy and Moon Palace, formed one of contemporary literature's most celebrated couples. Both brilliant, both devoted to their craft, they shared a Brooklyn home where each maintained a separate writing space, exchanging manuscripts and advice, attending conferences together. Their marriage was intellectual and physical — "profoundly in love until the end," as Hustvedt writes.

Unlike Joan Didion's husband, who died suddenly at dinner, Auster faced a long illness. He died from lung cancer, a disease he could not outrun. Hustvedt traces the daily brutality of that decline — medical visits, chemotherapy, health bulletins sent to friends — while remembering the life they built together, their meeting, their daughter Sophie, their family's endured tragedies.

She writes with delicacy about the family's deepest wounds, including the death of Auster's son from a previous relationship, a tragedy compounded by loss. Through it all, their marriage held.

As Auster prepared to die, their daughter gave birth to a grandson. Auster found the will to write Letters to Miles, letters he hoped his grandson would read as a teenager. Hustvedt includes them in the book.

Before his death, Auster said he wanted to be a revenant. Hustvedt has felt his presence since. But the real haunting, she suggests, is what remains on the page — the act of writing itself, the most beautiful way to keep the people we love alive.

Ghost Stories is published by Gallimard and runs 415 pages.