Sheila Heti in conversation with Siri Hustvedt

I spoke to Siri Hustvedt in her home in Park Slope, in late April, one week before the two-year anniversary of the death of her husband, the writer Paul Auster. He had been seventy-seven when he died of cancer. She was now seventy-one, and living alone.

Hustvedt had just published her sixteenth book, Ghost Stories, an account of the first year of her mourning, which she began writing a month after Auster’s death. It’s an affecting book, almost a collage, filled not only with her reflections, but old diaries and letters, and Auster’s own letters to their infant grandson, written in the months before he died. Ghost Stories touches on his wild fame in the 1990s, when people would be screaming for him outside his events; a crowd even once jumped on his car, as if he were a movie star. The result is a vivid portrait of their love, their relationship, the man he was, the woman she is, and the often annihilating, utterly bewildering state one finds oneself in after losing one’s partner of forty-three years.

She and I had met once before, briefly, in 2012, when we sat together on a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival with Karl Ove Knausgaard (as yet unknown in America). When I met her in April, it had been raining all day, and it continued to rain as we spoke for three hours, which was not nearly enough time to cover the breadth of her work—seven novels; a poetry collection; The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves, a book-length investigation into the strange shaking phenomenon that periodically overtook her body; and many well-regarded, more scientific papers on the mind-body problem, epistemology, and psychoanalysis, among other subjects. 

Hustvedt has a very expressive way of talking, sometimes headlong and digressive, at other times almost grave, patient, emphatic, and thoughtful. She laughs often, wrinkling her nose in a way that’s irresistibly sweet. Her conversation is full of ideas—about love and grief and family, her long marriage to Auster, as well as the difficulties they faced. (Not long before his illness, there was a great tragedy in the family: Auster’s son Daniel was charged with the second-degree manslaughter of his ten-month-old daughter. He died just a few weeks later of an overdose.) An avid thoughtfulness is always present in Hustvedt’s speech, whether she is talking about her own life or ideas from the history of philosophy, seventeenth-century biology, or contemporary neuroscience, all of which she discusses as easily and naturally as other people discuss their neighbors. We talked for several hours without pause until the photographer and his assistant came. (Naturally, the interview has been condensed and edited.) Siri offered to show them around the house, so they could choose the best place to shoot. She prepared us for what we were going to see: the library on the second floor, her own study on the third floor, and finally her late husband’s office in the basement. She led us up to the second floor, then up to the third, answering questions about the various things on display. Without quite mentioning it, however, she never took us to the basement. Either she forgot, or she changed her mind and decided not to. My guess, and hope, was that it was the latter.

PART 1

Siri: It’s a way of laying down stones. I mean, I realized right from the start that the whole temporal dimension of the book was really important. There is a timeline that sort of hovers behind the narrative, almost. The book starts in May and ends the following March, and there are these documents that come from all sorts of different periods in our life together. Putting his letters in was very important because it creates a kind of posthumous dialogue between our two voices.

I think this is maybe one of the issues with that kind of pressure, which I felt a lot when I was young. You know, where am I in this drama? You’re sort of nowhere and you can’t breathe. And Paul gave you so much room to breathe. And, of course, that’s very seductive. You just feel you have to keep yourself from lunging. I think he didn’t have to work very hard, probably because he exuded some indifference. It’s very arousing.

It could have gone in many ways. And I think this was part of Paul’s ars poetica, that the mechanics of reality involved accident—it wasn’t fate for him. 

Yes. How many times did he say over those years, “What if I hadn’t met you? What if I hadn’t met you?”

As the years went on, I understood more. He felt—and this is a little grandiose—but I do believe that Paul felt that because he met me and because I loved him, he bloomed, and he was able to do the work that he so desperately wanted to do. 

He told me once. This was very early in the first days of our being together. It was maybe April, it was a warm, warm day, and we were sitting on steps somewhere in the Village. I remember the sunshine. And he didn’t say anything about it to me then, but he told me later that I was talking and he was listening, and suddenly he had this feeling that I was incredibly wise and intelligent, and he was possessed by a feeling of amazement, and that was very important to him. Of course, I don’t remember that. I remember sitting on the steps with him, I do, and I remember the sunshine. But I don’t remember what I was talking about—not one word. But something happened inside of him that he referred to over the years. That’s the kind of thing that can happen between people, right? Of course, I was crazy in love with him from the first second I saw him.

Well, he was very beautiful, and then he was a poet. But you know, if I hadn’t liked the poems, I don’t think it would have gone anywhere. Yes, I remember reading the poems and thinking, God, he’s extraordinary. And there was this manuscript of poems that I had, and I could see that he was impressed. And if we hadn’t had that—

Yeah. I think we needed that admiration.

I don’t think you can. 

That is a very good question, isn’t it? You know, I was very well loved by my mother. And I was well loved by my father, to a degree. 

What you’re saying is that there are different ways of loving, and that certain forms of complexity can get mixed in, right? And, yes, loving is a good thing, but it’s good to be answered, to be loved back. I think probably sustaining love when there’s no love back is very difficult. That doesn’t really work, right?

Siri: It could be Mama. She was that kind of shining presence. I think people need love. They need attachments to grow. And when attachment goes wrong, it can be really perilous for the person.

Siri: Well, as a young person I was in this relationship that was giving me a lot of pain. Just to give a small taste of it: When I pounced, he ran, and when he pounced, I fled, and the whole mechanism would keep going over and over and over again. And I thought, “Well, Siri, there’s no perpetual motion machine. It’s going to run down.” And the organic model that seemed very attractive to me at the time was that a big storm comes along and it blows off a tree’s limb, and the limb does not grow back in the same way, but there’s a new bloom. Often sexual fantasy runs off a kind of machine model—people need the same ingredients to get the erotic charge. But a long love affair, I think, has to be more in the organic model.

I think I realized it when I really needed him to move, and he did. He could be really stubborn, really kind of immovable. That was really part of who he was, and it helped him in his working life. But, you know, sometimes inside the marriage, I wanted him to talk about what was going on with him, and he could be very shut down. 

Something interesting I found—not just with Paul, but with other human beings—is that sometimes you have to let things be, and pressing and prying can be harmful. I mean, it’s very important for me not to bury my own thoughts and feelings, but also it’s important not to be a barrage of insistence that somebody be different.

Part of the excitement of being with someone for all that time is that you don’t know everything, and you’re quite aware of that. I’m sure he took things with him to the grave that I will never know, and that’s okay.

I don’t know, but when we read our work to each other, there was always an element of surprise. So that is an indication that there are these places, these regions, this geography of another self that isn’t, you know, an open book. It’s part of the mysteries of the other, and that is also—

Yes.

Yes. I think there are many ways to love, and really I had no intention, in the book, of holding up our relationship as some kind of moral guide for how people should live. I am most definitely an epistemological pluralist. That is how I live inside myself. I do not think that there is a single paradigm for anything, and everything is so complex and so enormous that the idea that anyone owns the truth is absolutely ridiculous. There are many ways to be together, and “forty-three years” is a sort of meaningless thing.

Yes, but I didn’t want to create some portrait of this fantasy marriage where there were no conflicts. It was not a fairy tale. The relationship with Daniel was rough, and that was very much part of the marriage, because Daniel was three when I met Paul. I had to withdraw myself from [their relationship], to kind of save myself. This was not early on. You know, a grown man is not your child anymore, and you’re not in control of that person’s life . . . That’s a simple way of saying that there’s a lot we don’t know, but to overlook emotional intensity—especially grief, rage, and sorrow—that’s a bit foolhardy.

PART 2

Siri: Well, it’s undemocratic.

Yes. I asked Knausgaard at one point why there was only a single woman mentioned in the entire six volumes of My Struggle—it was Julia Kristeva—and he looked at me, and he said, “No competition.”

Yes. And I was so flabbergasted. And of course you sort of wonder exactly what this means, and I think I didn’t really have a retort.

Well, I think often this is unconscious.

Oh, that’s a really good question. Well, I’m not going to say the names, no, no, but I can think of one. But they divorced, right? But there was a kind of rivalry, and he was a writer as well. The evidence I had was that they were not truly for the other, and I do think it was probably on both sides. But I think in this case the woman was the less recognized.

This is a good question. Who was it for? I think, maybe more than other books, this was maybe for an imaginary self, the other self.

Yeah, because the book created a kind of coherence in me. This is true of reading, but writing too—it creates a distance between the embodied self and the representation. When I was writing this book, my embodied self had less coherence than the thing I was making. 

I think there were other motives too. I recognized that with Paul, he did have a kind of persona in the world that was both beloved and hated. I witnessed it myself—this kind of crazed hero worship. He wasn’t famous until he was forty, and, you know, a famous writer is not fancy. But in literary circles, it was a little wild. I think people just fell in love—because he was beautiful in his forties. Sometimes I’d sit in the audience, it’s true, and I’d look at him and I’d go, “Whoa, you get to go home with that guy.” He had a kind of magic. After Paul died, John Coetzee wrote a little tribute to him, and John has been a good family friend for a long time, but he noted the screaming girls. He kind of envied that. And this is Mr. Nobel, you know. And I had to smile.

Yes, I think that’s right. And the joy of it is—I had him. God knows if I had lost him when I was forty it would have been different. I went to a festival in Iceland and there was a woman there, much younger than I am. She was probably in her early fifties, but she lost her husband when she was thirty-eight, which happens to be exactly my daughter’s age. I think she remarried. But you know, when you’re my age, it’s different. 

I don’t think the loss is any less acute. I don’t think what one feels is less strong. But I’m very well aware that I have much less in front of me than behind me, and that does create a perspectival difference.

I think so. 

...is over? No, I don’t feel that. And actually, I think writing this book helped me not feel that.

Because it’s an attempt to make something out of nothing.

Death. His absence. The fact that he just isn’t here. You know, so much vanished with him. The two biggest things, I think, are the talk and the touch. And that’s not better—that’s worse. In some fortunate way, I was never a person who expected life to be some big, happy thing. 

I mean the whole ball of wax, from the pat on the back to the kiss on the cheek to the holding hands in the taxi, to full-blown, erotic, multiple orgasms. And that vanishes. One of the things I found when I was reading grief memoirs was that very few people talk about the erotic life. It’s almost completely missing.

I don’t know. Supposedly we live in a culture that can address these questions. This is not Victorian England.

I don’t really either.

It wasn’t to regale people with the details of our erotic life together, but it was very important to me that I said that that went on, and that it was really important to both of us, and the loss of that part of our life together is a deprivation, and I feel it. I remember after my father died, I gave my mother a gift of a massage, because all those touches—you don’t have intimate touch anymore. C. S. Lewis, in A Grief Observed, says the most beautiful thing. You feel that he’s almost looking down at his body, and he says, “This body was H’s lover,” and he said, “Now what is it? An empty house.” 

And so beautiful. The other thing I realized from reading grief memoirs is that mostly they’re anatomies of the griever. The dead person is often missing. But what is the name of your novel?

Okay, are they really at sea?

They’re traveling by ship?

It’s almost like camp, how the girls’ camp and the boys’ camp are sometimes within shouting distance.

Maybe, maybe. Of course, that especially pertains to my inclusion of those young, sort of buoyant letters I sent him at the beginning of our relationship, and also this slightly sad aspect, which I realized after I’d finished the book—that those letters were summoning him back. And that’s exactly what the book is hoping to do. You know, “I want you back.” With death, the call is there, but there’s no getting him back. And that’s death. Whatever one thinks about the universe—even if one believes in paradise or whatever—it ain’t here. I’m not getting that guy back.