The tender memoir of the forty-three years Siri Hustvedt spent with her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster - from their first encounter in 1980s New York through the highs and lows of love, family and griefDeserves its place among the enduring accounts of sorrow and survival
OBSERVER
A profound and forthright meditation on love and loss, unique in our literature
INDEPENDENT
Rich with accounts of their life together
SUNDAY TIMES
Distinctive and genuinely moving
NEW YORK TIMESA remarkable achievement
LOUISE KENNEDYA deeply moving memoir, raw with loss, yet luminous with love
SARAH WATERSWhat a kind, honest book. What a gift of love
DAVID MITCHELLEssential reading from an all-time great
SARA COLLINSGhost Stories is Siri Hustvedts most personal work yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster.
It is a patchwork-quilt book that stitches together memories from over forty years of love and life together: journal entries Siri wrote between November 2023 and 3 May 2024, the day of Pauls funeral; emails Siri sent to friends during his cancer treatment; notes Paul sent her over the course of their relationship; and three love letters Siri wrote to him in 1981, when he left her for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life with his first wife and son.
The book also contains Paul Austers last ever piece of writing - the first thirty-five pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siris and his grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, born on 1 January 2024.
Unflinching, tender and wise, this is the full-bodied story of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Austers life together, an exploration of how grief unmoors time and how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday.
A note from Siri
I began writing Ghost Stories shortly after my husband, Paul Auster, died on April 30th 2024. My meditations on Pauls cancer, his death, my grief, the potent feeling I had of his presence on the day he was buried, and my memories from the years we spent together are interwoven with several texts that were written before he died: twelve letters I wrote to friends during his cancer treatment; journal entries I wrote between early November, 2023 and May 3, 2024; and three love letters I wrote to Paul in 1981, when he left me for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life. Although I knew Paul had saved those letters, I hadnt read them since they were written and had only a foggy recollection of their content.In the last month of his life, Paul began writing what he hoped would be a small book of letters to our grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, who was born on January 1st, 2024. Paul was too weak to finish it as planned, but the thirty-five pages he did manage to write are interwoven in this book.I want to stress that Pauls text is not an appendix to mine but an integral part of the book as a whole. Because the memoir turns on attachment, betweenness, and dialogue, all crucial to the love affair that lasted forty-three years, the insertion of one authors text into anothers, is, in this case, essential to the memoirs overall meaning.