“There’s the sweet girl from Minnesota, the good girl… then of course there’s the great beauty Siri, the tall woman who dazzles people just by walking into a room… and then there’s ‘Deep Siri,’ the one who writes… She’s an overwhelming force, and also she’s my wife. I’ve lived with her for 43 years now, and I must say, I’m just still madly in love with her.”
The speaker was one of America’s most acclaimed Jewish writers, Paul Auster. Not long before his death, he spoke to the camera about the woman with whom he had shared more than half his life – the highly regarded novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt.
Hustvedt was born in the mid-1950s in Northfield, Minnesota, a quiet town far from the centers of cultural life. Her mother, Esther, was Norwegian, and her father, Lloyd, was a professor of literature and languages at St. Olaf College. In their modest, loving home, where affection went hand in hand with clear rules, the four sisters formed an almost literary little community: Siri, the eldest, followed by Liv, Asti, and Ingrid.
Words were everywhere. The house was filled with books, and the girls spoke two languages fluently: English and Norwegian. From time to time, they would accompany their father to the college. He would lecture or grade papers while they sprawled on the office floor at his feet, drawing.
She felt that he loved having her there, Hustvedt later recalled. At first, she thought she had discovered her calling right there on the college floor: she loved to draw, and she was good at it.
Then, when she was 13, the family embarked on a research trip to Iceland. Lloyd wanted to study the Icelandic sagas, and the entire family squeezed into a small Volkswagen. From time to time, their father would point out locations mentioned in the sagas they had read – places that seemed to come alive before the girls’ astonished eyes amid the slightly otherworldly landscapes passing outside the window.
Siri had trouble falling asleep in the endless summer daylight of Iceland, so she read David Copperfield and other classics. And suddenly she knew, with remarkable clarity, what she was going to do with her life: she would become a writer.
After the exhilarating and eye-opening journey, the family returned to Minnesota, where Hustvedt graduated with highest honors in history from the college where her father taught, St. Olaf.
In 1978, she took the step that would completely change her life: she moved to New York to study English literature at Columbia University.
“Years ago,” she would write many years later, “I left the wide flat fields of rural Minnesota for the island of Manhattan to find the hero of my first novel…” She did not find the person she had imagined, but that was life, she felt. Things changed. She changed. What she did not know then was that she had brought her hero with her to the city…
She was a cash-strapped graduate student, juggling academic papers with waitressing, writing poems that she kept to herself while also modeling in department stores. More than once, the strain left her completely exhausted; she was too proud to ask for help.
By the time she finally met him, she already knew the city well – the city that would become the protagonist of one of Paul Auster’s most famous works. It was 1981. Auster was an almost unknown poet and translator, separated from his wife and the father of three-year-old Daniel. At a poetry reading, the tall, blonde doctoral student was introduced to the cool, reserved man in a simple black leather jacket.
It took her thirty seconds to fall for him, she would joke years later, explaining the electric attraction that flared between them and grew into a larger-than-life love. Paul needed a few hours.
Their relationship seemed to have stepped straight out of the great novels they both loved. As though time were breathing down their necks, they urgently scribbled notes to each other (mostly Paul), exchanged drawings (Siri’s were mostly erotic), and wrote long letters back and forth. They separated for less than two weeks, during which Auster tried to repair his first marriage. To Hustvedt, those days seemed like an eternity, as she was consumed by the fear that she was about to lose “the best.”
They reunited and moved in together that same year.
She brought almost nothing with her to their shared apartment – she was still broke – except for many boxes of books. They were delighted to discover (for both of them, there could be no better proof of their compatibility) that combining their libraries produced a great many duplicate copies. They gave the duplicates away, choosing each time the more beautiful or more up-to-date edition. That was the moment, Hustvedt later recalled, when she realized: that was it. They would never be able to part.
They were married on June 16, 1982. If the date sounds familiar, it may be because it is “Bloomsday” – the day on which the events of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel Auster greatly admired, take place.
It was a very modest affair. Both were still unknown, and the major works that would make them famous and bring financial security were still somewhere in an uncertain future. Hustvedt wore a dress that cost $69.99, and the few friends who were invited had to pay for their own dinner. On several occasions, both partners said they would never have traded that day for a more lavish celebration.
Despite the summer date, it was a gloomy day, and the weather grew steadily worse as the ceremony approached. The moment Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt were pronounced husband and wife, the storm broke in full force, with a tremendous succession of deafening peals of thunder.
“I kissed Siri,” Auster would later recall, “and I thought to myself: The gods are watching. I don’t know what this means. It could be really good and it could be really bad. Bus this is a cosmic event. It’s not just a normal wedding.”
In 1982, Auster published his first work of prose, The Invention of Solitude. A year later, Hustvedt published her first book of poetry, Reading to You.
In 1986, Hustvedt finally received the doctorate she had long worked toward.
In 1987, Auster’s The New York Trilogy appeared – but that year also brought them a very different kind of gift: Sophie, their daughter.
So, what does life look like for two writers sharing a workspace around the clock? They understood perfectly well that each needed solitude in order to write, and during the day they worked on separate floors. Only in the late afternoon would they come together again for a meal or some time together, as though each had just returned from a separate workplace.
And yet, they were together. To this day, Hustvedt desperately misses the sound of Auster’s footsteps as he paced back and forth in “his” space, or the rhythmic tapping of his old typewriter, sounds that accompanied her own thoughts and writing for so many years.
They also read and edited each other’s work, exchanging ideas and observations that would sometimes find their way, in parallel, into both of their writing.
While the atmosphere inside their home was almost utopian in its harmony, things were somewhat less balanced outside it. Auster became an international literary star, particularly in Europe and Latin America. In Buenos Aires, admirers climbed onto the hood of the car in which he was traveling; in Paris, he was surrounded by crowds and could not reach his destination; and in Japan, publishers offered him contracts.
Meanwhile, Hustvedt was an award-winning novelist and essayist in her own right. She published novels and literary essays and wrote about art, psychoanalysis, gender, neurology, and memory. She taught writing to psychiatric patients, conducted research on Vermeer and visual art, and continues to lecture on narrative psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical School.
And yet, again and again, she was presented first and foremost as “Paul Auster’s wife.”
At one event, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein introduced Hustvedt as “Paul’s beautiful wife.” For her, it was an illuminating moment: her name had disappeared, her writing had disappeared, and she had been reduced to the beautiful, nameless property of a famous man.
Over time, this disparity occupied more and more of her thoughts. She began writing and speaking extensively about the way intellectual authority is associated with the male body. She put it sharply: culture embraces powerful men, but responds with suspicion – and sometimes hatred – to women who display comparable power. One of her novels, The Blazing World, tells the story of an artist who believes her work is rejected because she is a woman, and presents it under the names of men.
It is important to emphasize that Auster himself never tried to diminish her. Quite the opposite: he repeatedly declared, to anyone willing to listen and whenever he had the opportunity, that she was more brilliant than he was in many areas. The problem was the outside gaze – the critics, interviewers, publishers, and readers who struggled to see the couple as two separate writers of equal stature.
On April 30, 2024, Paul Auster died of cancer, leaving the woman he loved – as she herself described it – to continue existing in a world in which he did not.
How do you do that?
Everyone has their own way of coping with grief. But if you are Siri Hustvedt, you write. Just a few weeks after Auster’s death, Hustvedt began writing Ghost Stories, a book constructed as a collage of memories, diaries, correspondence from the period of Auster’s illness, old notes and love letters, and previously unpublished texts written by Auster himself. Among them is Auster’s final, unfinished work, Letters to Miles – a series of letters he wrote to his infant grandson, Miles, after he had already fallen ill.
In ordinary life, in the house that is now hers alone, she feels Paul’s presence almost every day. The smell of a cigar. A ghost peering over her shoulder as she writes. But make no mistake: she does not believe in the supernatural. She believes in memories, and in the human mind’s ability to offer comfort.
And she continues to write. After Auster’s memoir, perhaps there will be a new novel – one she is working on now. Is she alone? “No one, not even a novelist, works entirely alone,” she says.
Read more on the film and the National Library of Israel’s Docutext festival here.
