Ghost Stories
A Memoir
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead," writes Hustvedt (Mothers, Fathers, and Others) in the opening sentences of this tender tribute to Baumgartner author Auster, who died of lung cancer in 2024. What follows is a catalog of Auster's final months, full of hospital stays, emails to concerned friends and family, and Hustvedt's late-night memories of the couple's 43 years together. "If your father dies... I will lose my everyday," Hustvedt recalls telling the couple's daughter, Sophie, shortly after Auster was diagnosed in 2023. She infuses memories of everyday activities like checking the mail, cooking dinner together, and reading each other's proofs with a palpable romantic magic. After Auster's death, Hustvedt wrenchingly captures the way time was "deranged beyond recognition" as she wandered their Brooklyn home in his clothes, ate his favorite meals, and sat staring at his untouched pens and typewriter while being plagued by the aroma of his cigars. The book's title comes from Auster's stated desire to return as a ghost; Hustvedt sweetly fulfills his wishes by recounting anecdotes from his life and sharing letters he wrote to her and their children. The result is an elegy that's at once heart-swelling and devastating.
