Ghost Stories

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.