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Ghost Stories : A Memoir
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Overview
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.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781668218945
- ISBN-10: 1668218941
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster
- Publish Date: May 2026
- Dimensions: 9.32 x 6.27 x 0.84 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.02 pounds
- Page Count: 320
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“I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead. He died on April 30, 2024, at 6:58 p.m. here in the Brooklyn house where I am now writing these words.” These are the plain first lines of Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories. She observes herself in the months after Auster’s death, moving from present to past, lighting on one topic, then another, meditating on their 43 years together, his lung cancer and the treatments that might have worked but didn’t. “What I didn’t imagine is that after Paul’s death, time would be deranged beyond recognition. I remember and then forget what day it is.”
Hustvedt calls this book “a diary of sorts, and, like many diaries . . . it is full of holes—a geography of telling and not telling.” It is also epistolary: It includes her emails to friends and family detailing Auster’s treatments, his progress and setbacks; the love letters she wrote when they were new to one another; and, most compelling, the letters that Auster wrote after his diagnosis to his newborn grandson Miles.
Hustvedt (What I Loved, The Summer Without Men), like her husband, is a prolific and acclaimed writer, and this memoir dips into the couple’s writing routines, the way they read pages aloud to one another in the afternoons, and shared thoughts, sentences and even characters in their fiction. There are trips abroad to receive awards and literary friendships with other acclaimed writers. And there is their life in their Brooklyn house with their beloved daughter. Hustvedt is forthright but brief about the other terrible loss not long before Auster’s diagnosis: Daniel, Auster’s son from his first marriage, was implicated in the death of his baby daughter from a fentanyl overdose, and soon after, Daniel too died of an overdose.
Ghost Stories feels intimate, impressionistic and a little unfinished, with its scraps of observations and memories. It is a record of a long marriage and of the great unmooring of grief. It may be of most interest to Hustvedt and Auster fans, with its references to their books and glimpses into their writing lives. But as with two other affecting memoirs from acutely observant writers—Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow—Hustvedt’s words will be familiar and comforting to others who are similarly unmoored.
“I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead. He died on April 30, 2024, at 6:58 p.m. here in the Brooklyn house where I am now writing these words.” These are the plain first lines of Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories. She observes herself in the months after Auster’s death, moving from present to past, lighting on one topic, then another, meditating on their 43 years together, his lung cancer and the treatments that might have worked but didn’t. “What I didn’t imagine is that after Paul’s death, time would be deranged beyond recognition. I remember and then forget what day it is.”
Hustvedt calls this book “a diary of sorts, and, like many diaries . . . it is full of holes—a geography of telling and not telling.” It is also epistolary: It includes her emails to friends and family detailing Auster’s treatments, his progress and setbacks; the love letters she wrote when they were new to one another; and, most compelling, the letters that Auster wrote after his diagnosis to his newborn grandson Miles.
Hustvedt (What I Loved, The Summer Without Men), like her husband, is a prolific and acclaimed writer, and this memoir dips into the couple’s writing routines, the way they read pages aloud to one another in the afternoons, and shared thoughts, sentences and even characters in their fiction. There are trips abroad to receive awards and literary friendships with other acclaimed writers. And there is their life in their Brooklyn house with their beloved daughter. Hustvedt is forthright but brief about the other terrible loss not long before Auster’s diagnosis: Daniel, Auster’s son from his first marriage, was implicated in the death of his baby daughter from a fentanyl overdose, and soon after, Daniel too died of an overdose.
Ghost Stories feels intimate, impressionistic and a little unfinished, with its scraps of observations and memories. It is a record of a long marriage and of the great unmooring of grief. It may be of most interest to Hustvedt and Auster fans, with its references to their books and glimpses into their writing lives. But as with two other affecting memoirs from acutely observant writers—Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow—Hustvedt’s words will be familiar and comforting to others who are similarly unmoored.