‘A remarkable achievement’ LOUISE KENNEDY
‘A deeply moving memoir, raw with loss, yet luminous with love’ SARAH WATERS
‘What a kind, honest book. What a gift of love’ DAVID MITCHELL
‘Essential reading from an all-time great’ SARA COLLINS
Ghost Stories is Siri Hustvedt’s 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 Paul’s 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 Auster’s last ever piece of writing – the first thirty-five pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siri’s 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 Auster’s life together, an exploration of how grief unmoors time and how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday.
‘She’s a twenty-first-century Virginia Woolf’ LITERARY REVIEW
‘A deeply moving memoir, raw with loss, yet luminous with love’ SARAH WATERS
‘What a kind, honest book. What a gift of love’ DAVID MITCHELL
‘Essential reading from an all-time great’ SARA COLLINS
Ghost Stories is Siri Hustvedt’s 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 Paul’s 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 Auster’s last ever piece of writing – the first thirty-five pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siri’s 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 Auster’s life together, an exploration of how grief unmoors time and how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday.
‘She’s a twenty-first-century Virginia Woolf’ LITERARY REVIEW
Reviews
A truly wonderful book. Hustvedt's gift is to be able to write about the most searing of emotions with extraordinary insight, measure and beauty. The result is a deeply moving memoir, raw with loss, yet luminous with love.
Ghost Stories is a year of grief spun into wise, truthful gold. What a kind, honest book. What a gift of love.
All love stories must end as ghost stories. So we are reminded in Siri Hustvedt's tremendously moving portrait of a man, a marriage, and the joys and sorrows of a shared artistic life. Love and grief lie, inseparable, on every page. This is essential reading from an all-time great.
Tender, elegiac and erudite, Ghost Stories is a paean to love and to its ultimate expression - grief. A remarkable achievement
Both a work of intimate reflection and a moving tribute to the 43 years she and Auster shared . . . a profound and forthright meditation on love and loss, unique in our literature . . . Ghost Stories has laughter and tears; it's a wonderful celebration of his spirit . . . For now, in dark times, we have Ghost Stories. Some will see it as a love letter to Paul Auster. Actually, more interesting than that, it's an account of a widow falling in love again, but with a ghost.
This book is cohesive, melancholy, distinctive and genuinely moving . . . Hustvedt writes so intimately about their physical and intellectual companionship that she makes you feel, in a way not all memoirists can, the dimensions of the crater he left behind . . . Ghost Stories is almost exactly my kind of thing. It's a grainy and resonant book about loneliness, despair and confusion. It's close to a howl.
A howl of grief for the loss of a husband, father and grandfather
Rich with accounts of their life together
Ghost Stories is, in a sense, a collaboration: sandwiched between Hustvedt's funny, desperately sad account of her husband's sickness are passages written by Auster in the final months of his life in the form of letters to his baby grandson. Literary history is full of talented writer couples, but few seem to have achieved the balance, mutual respect and happy productivity of Hustvedt and Auster.
Beautiful . . . [Hustvedt] is a writer of astonishing range and depth . . . it seems necessary to give something of the background of these two writers, yet there is no need to know any of this to find solace and deep delight from the intelligence and humanity of Ghost Stories, its portrait of a marriage of true minds. Auster comes across here perfectly as he was: smart, funny, caustic, loving, idealistic - exasperated to the last by the politics of his native land. Hustvedt (who always looks so cool in her photographs, even when not dressed in a jumpsuit) reveals the nerves that co-exist with her grit and wisdom . . . the delight to be found in Hustvedt's book arises because so much of the landscape revealed is one of love. Love of life, love of the world, love of family . . . Ghost Stories deserves its place among the enduring accounts of sorrow and survival. It will console you for the losses you have suffered, and for the ones you know - we all know - are yet to come.