Ghost Stories

Siri Hustvedt, an American novelist and essayist, writes this memoir in the months following the death of her husband, the writer Paul Auster, on April 30, 2024. Structured as an assemblage of chapters, emails, journal entries, and Paul's letters to his infant grandson, the book traces Hustvedt's grief, her 43-year marriage, and the traumas that preceded Paul's death. It is also an inquiry into time, memory, and the persistence of the dead in the lives of the living.

Hustvedt opens in the immediate aftermath of Paul's death from non-small cell lung cancer, diagnosed in January 2023 after a CT scan revealed a mass in his right lung. She describes a state she calls "cognitive splintering," a temporal disorientation in which she forgot the day, the month, and the hour. She catalogs the physical symptoms of grief and her compulsive urge to purge the house of Paul's belongings while clinging to his leather jacket. Their house in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where they lived for 30 years, becomes what she calls an architecture of memory, its rhythms of shared life gone awry. At Sunday dinner, she set four plates out of habit before realizing there should be only three, her embodied expectation colliding with the reality of Paul's absence.

Twelve email updates Hustvedt sent to friends chronicle Paul's treatment. He underwent chemotherapy and immunotherapy, and the tumor shrank dramatically, but surgery was repeatedly postponed because the immunotherapy drug caused lung inflammation and then attacked his liver. The tumor returned. Paul endured radiation with weekly chemotherapy, after which he collapsed and was hospitalized for lung infections. He spent weeks in rehabilitation before returning home in December 2023. A January 2024 scan showed the radiation had worked, but an April scan revealed metastasis to both lungs and the pancreas. Paul briefly agreed to palliative chemotherapy, then refused. Hospice care began.

Key family members emerge throughout. Their daughter, Sophie Auster, a singer-songwriter, was pregnant during much of Paul's treatment. Sophie's husband, Spencer Ostrander, a photographer, became Paul's primary caretaker, driving him to radiation daily. Their son, Miles, was born on New Year's Day, 2024. Hustvedt's sisters Liv, Asti, and Ingy provided constant support.

Interspersed in the memoir are seven letters Paul wrote to Miles in March and April 2024, intended for the boy to read as a teenager. Paul told stories of Sophie's childhood and her first day at a new school on September 11, 2001, recounting that morning: watching the second plane hit on television and waiting hours to learn Sophie was safe. He wrote about Spencer's photography career and their collaboration on Bloodbath Nation, a book about gun violence. In his final letter, written after learning the cancer had spread, Paul tells Miles there will be no cure and expresses regret that his grandson will have no conscious memories of him.

Journal entries from November 2023 through May 2024 record Paul's decline and death. On April 27, Paul told Hustvedt he longed to come back as a ghost, to see how she was doing and watch Miles grow up. On April 30, surrounded by family and hospice nurse Kettlie, Paul died. They played Sophie's music and Tom Waits's "Hold On." Hustvedt held his face, watched his breathing slow and stop, and felt his head go cool beneath her fingers.

The memoir confronts what Hustvedt calls "the horrible things." Paul's 10-month-old granddaughter, Ruby Auster, died on November 1, 2021. When the medical examiner determined the cause was heroin and fentanyl, Paul's son Daniel, Hustvedt's stepson, was arrested for manslaughter. Released on bail, Daniel overdosed and died on April 26, 2022, at age 44. Hustvedt reflects on Daniel's long history of addiction stretching back to childhood and on Paul's refusal to close the door on his son until the very end. She reproduces Daniel's childhood comic about a man who crashes on a desert island and hides from rescue planes, connecting it to Daniel's pattern of evading help.

After the burial at Green-Wood Cemetery, where Sophie sang "Blue Skies," Hustvedt lay alone on their bed and felt Paul's presence with absolute certainty. She did not see, hear, or smell him, but felt him walk up the stairs, enter the room, and stand beside the bed. She describes this as a moment of grace.

The experience launches a sustained inquiry into sensing the dead. Hustvedt reads bereavement studies and the philosopher William James on the "feeling of objective presence," learning that between 30 and 60 percent of mourners report such experiences. She began smelling cigar smoke, Paul's Schimmelpenninck cigarillos, throughout the house daily with no external source. Drawing on the philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe and the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, she articulates that she mourns not just Paul but the "AND," the shared embodied relationship that the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls intercorporeality. Paul's final novel, Baumgartner, uses amputation and phantom limb as metaphors for this kind of mourning.

The memoir's longest sustained narrative tells the story of their courtship. In February 1981, Hustvedt attended a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y and saw Paul near the exit. They talked through the night. Paul showed her a wallet photo of his three-year-old son Daniel; his lack of seduction seduced her. After weeks together, Paul abruptly told her he was returning to his wife and son. Hustvedt wrote two letters declaring her love. He returned after about 10 days, telling her he wanted commitment. They spent the summer at her parents' house in Minnesota. At a railroad crossing, she proposed: She would not live with him unless he married her. They married on Bloomsday, June 16, 1982, in a ceremony punctuated by lightning at the moment they were pronounced husband and wife.

Hustvedt examines their marriage with candor. She describes two models of romantic love: the mechanical model, which runs on rigid repetitions and breaks down, and the organic model, which grows like a tree. Their editorial partnership spanned four decades of reading manuscripts aloud, offering frank criticism, and never rejecting the other's advice. She addresses the gender politics that shadowed their careers: Journalists repeatedly asked what it was like to be married to Paul Auster and attributed her intellectual influences to him. Paul publicly called Hustvedt "the intellectual in the family," but the pattern persisted.

As months passed, Hustvedt chronicles her transformation. She notices herself becoming Paul: turning off lights, checking keys obsessively, eating his favorite foods, and wearing his clothes. She cites bereavement research on the phenomenon of identifying with a dead spouse. In October 2024, her anxiety spiked; she realized that November 1 would mark both Miles's 10-month birthday and the third anniversary of Ruby's death, an unconscious calendar collision. The 2024 election and the inauguration of the 47th U.S. president compounded her grief. She quotes Paul's 2017 metaphor: American institutions that seem like granite buildings may be made of soap.

Paul's memorial at St. Mark's Church on January 25, 2025, proved a turning point. Hustvedt spoke without shaking and named the "horrible things" aloud, freeing friends from the pretense of secrecy. She describes a gradual "unwinding": Her rib pains subsided, her anxiety lowered, and she began thinking beyond three days ahead.

The memoir closes with Hustvedt anticipating spring and the grave at Green-Wood Cemetery, for which she must find a headstone. She addresses Paul directly, declaring that the papers, letters, and recordings composing this book are ghost stories that are also love stories. She reproduces Paul's Christmas Eve 2020 card, in which he wrote that after 40 years, his love and admiration for her had continued to grow. The final pages include heroic couplets she wrote for Paul at Christmas 2023 and read at his graveside, celebrating their decades of love and ending with Miles as "our new someone."