Ghost Stories

From the author of What I Loved, The Summer Without Men, and many others, a memoir of love and grief centered around the loss of her husband, Paul Auster.

Ghost Stories is Siri Hustvedt’s most personal book yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, Paul Auster. It includes personal and never-before-seen writing from Paul himself, in the form of letters he wrote to Siri, as well as his last unfinished work, Letters to Miles. The book is both an elegy and a reckoning—a chronicle of personal loss that also bears witness to the cascading sorrows of recent years, including the tragic deaths of Hustvedt’s stepson and infant granddaughter.

Hustvedt explores how grief unmoors time, how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday, and how the body experiences the absence of love as a presence. She meditates on the things and papers Auster left behind and reflects on the forty-three years they spent together, and on the rituals of mourning and the nature of language, memory, and the self.

Part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, Ghost Stories is unflinching, tender, and wise. It is a story of a woman haunting her own life, and the ghosts that inhabit us even as we carry on.