Ghost Stories: A Memoir

by Siri Hustvedt

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.

Genres: Biography Memoir, Memoir

320 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication May 5, 2026

About the author

Hustvedt was born in Northfield, Minnesota. Her father Lloyd Hustvedt was a professor of Scandinavian literature, and her mother Ester Vegan emigrated from Norway at the age of thirty. She holds a B.A. in history from St. Olaf College and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University; her thesis on Charles Dickens was entitled Figures of Dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend.

Hustvedt has mainly made her name as a novelist, but she has also produced a book of poetry, and has had short stories and essays on various subjects published in (among others) The Art of the Essay, 1999, The Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991, The Paris Review, Yale Review, and Modern Painters.

Like her husband Paul Auster, Hustvedt employs a use of repetitive themes or symbols throughout her work. Most notably the use of certain types of voyeurism, often linking objects of the dead to characters who are relative strangers to the deceased characters (most notable in various facits in her novels The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl) and the exploration of identity. She has also written essays on art history and theory (see "Essay collections") and painting and painters often appear in her fiction, most notably, perhaps, in her novel, What I Loved.

She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, writer Paul Auster, and their daughter, singer and actress Sophie Auster.

Reviews

[Marika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author Siri Hustvedt has written one of the most achingly beautiful memoirs that details the grief of her husband's death. Hustvedt married fellow author Paul Auster in 1982 until his death from cancer in 2024. She writes how "grief unmoors us from time" and how we as humans tend to anchor ourselves to those we love, and asks what happens to that anchor when set free. Not just a memoir, this book is also a mediation on the cost of love.

* I read an advance copy and was not compensated.