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Ghost Stories - Siri Hustvedt The tender memoir of the forty-three years Siri Hustvedt spent with her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster - from their first encounter in 1980s New York through the highs and lows of love, family and grief 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. A note from Siri 'I began writing Ghost Stories shortly after my husband, Paul Auster, died on April 30th 2024. My meditations on Paul's cancer, his death, my grief, the potent feeling I had of his presence on the day he was buried, and my memories from the years we spent together are interwoven with several texts that were written before he died: twelve letters I wrote to friends during his cancer treatment; journal entries I wrote between early November, 2023 and May 3, 2024; and three love letters I wrote to Paul in 1981, when he left me for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life. Although I knew Paul had saved those letters, I hadn't read them since they were written and had only a foggy recollection of their content. In the last month of his life, Paul began writing what he hoped would be a small book of letters to our grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, who was born on January 1st, 2024. Paul was too weak to finish it as planned, but the thirty-five pages he did manage to write are interwoven in this book. I want to stress that Paul's text is not an appendix to mine but an integral part of the book as a whole. Because the memoir turns on attachment, betweenness, and dialogue, all crucial to the love affair that lasted forty-three years, the insertion of one author's text into another's, is, in this case, essential to the memoir's overall meaning.' Review 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. -- Sarah Waters, author of FingersmithGhost Stories is a year of grief spun into wise, truthful gold. What a kind, honest book. What a gift of love. -- David Mitchell, author of Cloud AtlasAll 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. -- Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie LangtonTender, elegiac and erudite, Ghost Stories is a paean to love and to its ultimate expression - grief. A remarkable achievement -- Louise Kennedy, author of TrespassesBoth 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. -- Robert McCrum ― IndependentThis 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. -- Dwight Garner ― New York TimesA howl of grief for the loss of a husband, father and grandfather ― Literary ReviewRich with accounts of their life together ― Sunday Times CultureGhost 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. -- Susie Goldsbrough ― The TimesBeautiful . . . [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. -- Erica Wagner ― Observer About the Author Siri Hustvedt is the author of seven novels, five collections of essays, a poetry collection and a memoir. Her books have been listed for major prizes, including the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize and the PEN America Literary Award. She holds a PhD from Columbia University and has been awarded honorary PhDs from Johannes Gutenberg University, Stendhal University and the University of Oslo. She is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has written on art for the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph. Born in Minnesota, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.