Ghost Stories A Memoir

by Hustvedt, Siri

• ISBN13: 9781668218945
• ISBN10: 1668218941
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781668218969
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2026-05-05
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• More Book Details

Summary

A searing memoir of love and grief centered around the loss of Siri Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster.

"Genuinely moving...Hustvedt’s book is like Didion’s [The Year of Magical Thinking] in tone...a grainy and resonant book about loneliness, despair, and confusion. It’s close to a howl." —The New York Times Book Review

Ghost Stories is an intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written after the death of Siri Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster. The book includes personal, never-before-seen writing by Auster—letters and notes to Siri and his last unfinished book addressed to his grandson, Letters to Miles. The memoir is both an elegy and a reckoning, a chronicle of personal loss that also bears witness to the sorrows of recent years—the tragic deaths of Hustvedt’s stepson and 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 reflects on the things and papers Auster left behind, the forty-three years they spent together, 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.

Author Biography

Siri Hustvedt, a novelist and scholar, has a PhD in English literature and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is the author of a book of poems, seven novels, four collections of essays, and two works of nonfiction. She has published papers in various academic and scientific journals and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, the European Charles Veillon Essay Prize, an American Academy of the Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction for The Blazing World, which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.