In volume six of In Search of Lost Time, Proust, with trademark acuity, notices that when our loved ones die, they don’t die for us immediately, if ever, but rather transform into a kind of aura—something like a ghost—and it is through this aura that they remain alive for us and occupy us as they did when living. Proust compares their deaths to a journey abroad, albeit a journey from which they can never return. Their auras, though, don’t need to return—they never left in the first place.
Siri Hustvedt nods to Proust in Ghost Stories, her memoir of the death of her husband of 40 years, the writer Paul Auster, and of the asphyxiating grief that replaced him. For Hustvedt, grief is an epistemological rupture that makes nonsense of time, perception, and the arrangement of the self. Grief is also a force inextricable from memory, and since there’s no hope that an actual ghost will appear, what is forlorn longing for the lost but the worst kind of haunting?
Before he died, Auster told Hustvedt that he wished to return to her as a ghost. And although Hustvedt includes a shivering scene after Auster’s funeral, as she lies on their bed and unmistakably feels Auster standing beside her, she experiences his revenant presence most strongly as an onslaught of unaccountable disturbances in daily life. Her breathing and blood pressure are now all wrong; her nerves “buzz and hum.” Each day, “there is a dreamlike quality to my life now. I climb into a half-filled bathtub and realize I have forgotten to remove my socks.” She catalogs her symptoms with a clinician’s precision—disrupted sleep, errant bowels—yet the catalog resists medicalization. “I am now in the business of recollecting myself,” she writes—recollection as both remembering and reassembling. The future has collapsed into an incoherent present. How fatiguing to have to tutor yourself through mundanity. She must grasp the banister.
What ultimately emerges from Ghost Stories is a picture of grief as 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. She subjects her personal calamity to rigorous scrutiny without sacrificing its emotional or spiritual verity. More important, her grief is not performed but examined, not exhibited but interrogated. 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.
Hustvedt’s story opens with a blunt, unblinking statement: “I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead.” Time for her has become “deranged beyond recognition”: Unmoored and rudderless, adrift within an annihilating sadness, Hustvedt has to learn how to live again, while recalibrating her comprehension of what living means now. “When he stopped,” she asks, “did lived time stop in me?”
She must also work out not only how to survive the enormity of Auster’s death but how to think, how to see herself and the world, without him: “I felt more vivid to myself when I was with Paul.” Strafed by his suffering and death, exhausted by “the enactments of ordinary life” that continue nonetheless, she admits: “I have lost the sanctuary of my own thoughts.” For a thinker of such exquisite taste and grasping wisdom, a writer incapable of a limp sentence or lazy answer, the loss of her own thoughts is right next door to the hell she’s already living in. Her new notion of self then, one without Auster to accompany her, becomes suspect, uncertain, a scaffold that trembles beneath the tentative steps of deep sorrow:
I am mourning Paul, but most of the time, I am mourning Siri and Paul. I am mourning AND. I am mourning how the AND made me feel in the world.
The memoir begins soon after April 30, 2024, the day of Auster’s death, and proceeds through weeks of what Hustvedt will later call “cognitive splintering”—a phrase worthy of William James, whose “wild facts” she invokes. These are the experiences that resist assimilation into any tidy system, any neat theory that might make sense of what cannot. For Hustvedt, this gutting grief is precisely such a wild fact: incapable of being ignored, never mind denied or explained—“the truth is unbearable to me, and yet it must be borne.” But how does she negotiate that fact when her heart has been shorn and her mind stumbles, staggers through another day’s onerous tasks?
Hustvedt’s early chapters center on the immediate material aftermath of Auster’s death: the sorting of pills, the emptying of closets, the handling of objects that once mediated care. The bag of motley medications becomes a grotesque archive of suffering, a pharmacological memento mori. Each bottle is a failed promise, a record of the medical system’s lamentable limits, signs of the hope that did not work—“dirty, sneaking hope,” as Jean Anouilh once had it. Hustvedt’s attention to objects—Auster’s pens, his typewriter ribbons, his boxer shorts—will remind you of the fetishistic detail of Proust, but without Proust’s aesthetics of consolation. There is no madeleine here to restore the past. Instead, objects testify to emptiness, to irreversibility. The typewriter, once animated by Auster’s “percussive” rhythm, becomes “a speechless thing.” And then there’s his chair in their dining room, “the blue chair where he ate breakfast every morning and ate dinner every night, the chair underneath which are scratches in the floorboards because he sat heavily in that chair and sometimes moved it while he was sitting”—scratches that are now “traces of his body’s living weight.”
The one metaphor Hustvedt locks on repeatedly, and the one that is the most intelligible to her, is that of amputation. Auster is both here and gone, a phantom limb.Here the memoir’s midsection turns more pointedly inward to the domestic space, to the Brooklyn house that becomes both setting and subject. The house is no mere backdrop; it is an “architecture of memory.” The household routines continue—opening the dishwasher, setting the table, taking in the mail—but their meaning has drained away. One of the memoir’s most painful moments occurs when Hustvedt notices a missing plate after a family dinner and cannot immediately account for it. Habit, as Henri Bergson taught us, is the sediment of duration; when it is swept away, time itself becomes not just unruly but uncanny. “Forty-three years,” Hustvedt repeats—the duration of their marriage—as if incanting a spell. The repetition is both assertion and question: What does such a duration mean? The answer, if there is one, lies not in the number but in the narrative that surrounds it, in the accumulation of gestures, habits, and shared perceptions that constituted a life together—that constituted love.
The memoir proceeds chronologically through May and June of 2024, interweaving present-tense narration, Auster’s unfinished letters to his grandson, Hustvedt’s own diary entries and emails to friends, and recollections of their life together. These scenes are not digressions but necessary interludes, evidence that the past persists within the present, what Freud might call Nachträglichkeit—deferred action. Throughout, the prose oscillates between much-needed detachment and deeply lyrical engagement. This oscillation mimics grief’s dual nature: it is both a physiological disruption and an existential undoing. “Grief is not constant,” she observes. “I can seal myself up for days … and then gale winds come.”
The one metaphor Hustvedt locks on repeatedly, and the one that is the most intelligible to her, is that of amputation. Auster is both here and gone, a phantom limb. “I feel Paul as a gaping hole in my torso, from neck to guts, as if parts of me have been cut out, but I also feel he should be out there beyond my body. I want to pull him into me, but there’s nothing to embrace.” This doubleness—absence and presence—is the chief paradox of the memoir, of all lived grief. It denies our attempts at resolution because it is constitutive of grief itself. He’s not coming back, but he’s not going away either.
The book’s final sections confront the problem of time more explicitly. Hustvedt reflects on numbers—43 years of marriage, 77 years of Auster’s life—as attempts to quantify what cannot be measured: “As I repeat the number seventy-seven to myself, I hear a jingle of enchantment in the two sevens; seven as prime and indivisible, as lucky; seven as in seven seas, seven voyages, and the seven wonders of the world, a number swollen with magic and the sacred in many cultures.” Numbers, she suggests, offer the illusion of mastery over the unholdable, serving our need for quantification, a belief that reality, or truth, can be reduced to data. It can’t.
Numbers, she suggests, offer the illusion of mastery over the unholdable, serving our need for quantification, a belief that reality, or truth, can be reduced to data. It can’t.In his book The Future of Truth, filmmaker Werner Herzog, whom Auster admired, distinguishes between a derisible “accountant’s truth” and “the ecstatic truth” of art and lived experience. Hustvedt knows the difference. Still, in desperation she clings to numbers as talismans even as she recognizes their impotence. This ambivalence is emblematic of the memoir’s central program: a refusal of both naïve consolation—don’t insult her with clichéd talk of silver linings, please—and of soul-shattering despair. Hustvedt neither denies the finality of death nor relinquishes the persistence of love. Instead, she inhabits the tension between them.
At Auster’s end, Hustvedt brings us through the almost second-by-second undoing of his life—“I wanted to be as close as possible to his body as he died.… Haunted eyes. I kissed him over and over”—and these scenes are, almost literally, unbearable to experience: You have to stop, put down the book, and, with Hustvedt, gather whatever strands of fortitude remain for you to continue.
In Les Misérables, Hugo observes that “beyond a certain pitch of suffering, men are overcome by a kind of ghostly indifference.” Hustvedt has gone beyond that pitch, and Ghost Stories is partly about the effort to find her way back from it. There is no manufactured uplift at the end of her telling. She knows the abyss left by Auster’s death will never fill. But after six months of his absence she has begun to reassemble herself: in small parts, in disparate places. “I can’t predict what will happen,” she admits. “My grief won’t end, but it will keep changing.” Hustvedt’s relationship with Auster will keep changing too, for as long as her love and memory last. D.H. Lawrence, in a 1923 letter, was characteristically to the point: “The dead don’t die. They look on and help”—and that’s as ghostly as we’re going to get.
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