SIRI HUSTVEDT on Love, Grief & Her Late Husband PAUL AUSTER - Highlights

“Grief is a particular kind of unrequited love. It wasn't unrequited in the past. Usually, we think of unrequited love as you never got to do it, you never had it for yourself. But, in fact, there can be requited love, which is then unrequited love in the paroxysms of grief.”

Today, we are honored to welcome a writer whose work has long explored the intimate landscapes of the mind, memory and the heart. Siri Hustvedt’s writing moves between the personal and the philosophical, the literary and the deeply human. Her work bridges collections of essays, non-fiction, poetry, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Recipient of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature and the Gabarron Prize for Thought, her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Her new memoir, Ghost Stories, is a reflection on forty-three years shared with her late husband, the writer and filmmaker Paul Auster. In its pages, we encounter not only love and loss, but the quiet persistence of presence, memory, and language itself.

(0:00) “We were hugely important to the drama of becoming in our own lives”

(2:04) Grief as Unrequited Love

Siri explores the emotional reality of living without Paul Auster, noting that grief occurs because love does not stop when a person dies.

(3:19) The Shared Space of a 43-year Marriage

(4:36) Reading from Ghost Stories

Siri reads the opening passage of her memoir, detailing how the loss of her husband deranged her sense of time and bodily rhythms.

(7:02) How Loss Changes Our Sense of Time

(11:24)  How Powerful Emotions and a Person's Life Can Play a Role in Illness

(13:04) Believing in a Reality that Transcends the Individual

(20:06) Physical Love in Marriage

On the importance of physical intimacy in long-term marriages, a reality often left out of grief memoirs.

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