Siri Hustvedt on Grief as Unrequited Love

This week’s show is a meditation on grief and the ways it weaves itself into our writing. Guest Siri Hustvedt says so many profound things about the writing process, about writing after loss, and about how to make sense of a life in the absence of a person who’s been part of your everyday for more than four decades. Hustvedt was married to the acclaimed novelist Paul Auster for 43 years, and her new book, Ghost Stories, is a book about loss, and a book that works to keep Auster alive on the page through his own words. The book has been widely compared to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and for Memoir Nation provides a beautiful portal into the many permutations of loss.

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, four collections of essays, two works of nonfiction, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities and in 2019 princess asturias prize. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her most recent book is Ghost Stories: A Memoir.

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