Ghost Stories - by Siri Hustvedt (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A searing memoir of love and grief centered around the loss of Siri Hustvedt's husband, Paul Auster"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A searing memoir of love and grief centered around the loss of Siri Hustvedt's husband, Paul Auster.

"Genuinely moving...Hustvedt's book is like Didion's [The Year of Magical Thinking] in tone...a grainy and resonant book about loneliness, despair, and confusion. It's close to a howl." --The New York Times Book Review

Ghost Stories is an intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written after the death of Siri Hustvedt's husband, Paul Auster. The book includes personal, never-before-seen writing by Auster--letters and notes to Siri and his last unfinished book addressed to his grandson, Letters to Miles. The memoir is both an elegy and a reckoning, a chronicle of personal loss that also bears witness to the sorrows of recent years--the tragic deaths of Hustvedt's stepson and granddaughter.

Hustvedt explores how grief unmoors time, how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday, and how the body experiences the absence of love as a presence. She reflects on the things and papers Auster left behind, the forty-three years they spent together, the rituals of mourning, and the nature of language, memory, and the self.

Part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, Ghost Stories is unflinching, tender, and wise. It is a story of a woman haunting her own life, and the ghosts that inhabit us even as we carry on.

Review Quotes

"Revelatory...In Ghost Stories, grief is a form of knowledge--anguished and fragmentary, but knowledge nonetheless...Hustvedt's masterful artistic achievement lies in her ability to render this knowledge without reducing it to bumper-sticker mantra or, worse, to theory. She writes as both subject and analyst, participant and observer, and the tug between these roles generates the book's intellectual energy...Ghost Stories belongs less to the tradition of therapeutic memoir than to that of philosophical meditation you can locate in Augustine, in Rousseau, in Cellini."--The New Republic

"Genuinely moving...Hustvedt's book is like Didion's [The Year of Magical Thinking] in tone...a grainy and resonant book about loneliness, despair and confusion. It's close to a howl."--The NYT Book Review

"Partly a book about grief and its psychological and physiological side effects, it's also a revealing and intimate glimpse into a literary marriage--the buoyant moments of their early courtship, their deep involvement in each other's work, their inside jokes."--The New York Times

"Besides recounting his final illness, Hustvedt creates a palpable portrait of [Paul] Auster as lover and husband, father and grandfather...Their bond was physical, emotional, and deeply intellectual. He told Hustvedt he wanted to return as a ghost; she honors that desire in this intimate memoir."--Kirkus

"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."--The Observer

About the Author

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, five collections of essays, two works of nonfiction, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her novel The Blazing World was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. She is the recipient of many other awards, including the Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities, the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize, and the Sigourney Award for expanding psychoanalytic thought. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.