Siri Hustvedt’s Revelatory Examination of Grief

In her memoir Ghost Stories, grief is a form of knowledge—anguished and fragmentary, but knowledge nonetheless.

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........

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