Siri Hustvedt’s memoir ‘Ghost Stories’ chronicles the illness and death of her husband Paul Auster while exploring grief, memory, selfhood and the emotional architecture of long relationships.

“Divested of others, what exactly is a self?” This question occurs halfway through Siri Hustvedt’s extraordinary new grief memoir, Ghost Stories. By my reading, it propels the whole book.

Ghost Stories reflects in the aftermath of his death, aged 77, in April 2024 on Hustvedt’s life with her husband, Paul Auster, her partner of 43 years. An internationally renowned writer and filmmaker, Auster’s notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Smoke (1995), and the Booker Prize shortlisted novel, 4 3 2 1 (2017).

Ghost Stories narrates the final years, months and weeks of their time together, as well as the period immediately following Auster’s death. The four-year period, 2021-2025, forms the memoir’s central setting. It starts when COVID is still a serious menace and Trump’s first term is nearing an end. For Hustvedt’s Brooklyn household, these years cover two premature deaths.

Auster’s first biological grandchild, Ruby, died aged ten months while in the care of her father, Paul’s son Daniel, in November 2021. The medical examiner determined the cause of her death as ‘heroin and fentanyl’, Hustvedt writes. Daniel died of an overdose five months later in April 2022, aged 44, after being arrested and charged with manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and endangering the welfare of a child.

Hustvedt and Auster, along with their adult daughter Sophie, grieve for these two, and for the awful circumstances that led to their deaths. Paul called these events ’the horrible things’; Hustvedt finds putting them in words ’nearly unspeakable’. Feeling the acute effects of this complex grief and stress, as well as the unkind glare of the media, Auster fell ill in September 2022.

Reflecting on the timing of this, Hustvedt notes that while studies connecting cancer to emotion and loss are ‘mixed’, there is agreement in the medical literature that stressors have an impact on the immune system.

Auster suffered daily fevers, exhaustion, shortness of breath. Initial diagnoses included long COVID and pneumonia, but by early the following year, he had been diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer. Numerous hospital visits and various treatments followed – biopsies, scans, chemo drugs, immunotherapy. Nothing worked.

Paul Auster died barely 12 months after his diagnosis. Ghost Stories concludes as Hustvedt and her family prepare for his first annual memorial service in April 2025.

“Divested of others, what exactly is a self?” Don’t........

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