Siri Hustvedt felt her husband's ghost. She wrote a book about it

Siri Hustvedt reflects on the death of her husband, Paul Auster, in her new memoir, Ghost Stories Wed 24 Jun 2026 at 9:00am On the day of her husband's funeral, American author Siri Hustvedt had a strange and moving experience. Her husband, Paul Auster — a poet, filmmaker and author whose best-known novels include The New York Trilogy, The Brooklyn Follies and 4 3 2 1 — died of complications from lung cancer in April 2024, at age 77. After a graveside service, the rabbi and a handful of family members came back to Hustvedt's house in Brooklyn, where her sisters organised lunch for everyone. Afterwards, Hustvedt quietly left the gathering. "I remember … thinking the widow can do whatever the hell she wants, and so I went up and lay down on our bed in the bedroom," she tells ABC Radio National's The Book Show. "And as I was lying there, I felt Paul on the stairs. I felt him walk into the room. I felt him look at me and I was filled with joy. It was an extraordinary experience." Hustvedt — the author of novels including What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American — has a longstanding interest in the brain. Her 2009 book The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves was part memoir, part investigation into the episodes of violent trembling she experienced after her father's death. When it came to explaining her encounter with her husband's ghost, Hustvedt once again turned to science. She discovered her experience was a relatively common phenomenon among the bereaved. "The neurological literature is actually full of grief presences," she says. "Between 30 and 60 per cent of bereaved people experience some form of a grief hallucination of the person who died. "Some people have complete hallucinations of the whole physical being. I did not see or hear anything. Paul didn't touch me. What I had was simply this sense that he was there, and it's not so uncommon. But I am really grateful for the experience." Hustvedt believes these ghostly encounters are the nervous system's response to the "radical absence" of a loved one after their death. But speculating on the neurology behind Auster's presence didn't lessen the episode's power. Before he died, Auster told Hustvedt he wanted to return as a ghost. "He knew he was going to die, and I think it was his way of saying, 'I don't want to die … I want to come back, Siri, and see what you're writing," Hustvedt says. "It was a bid for life." This wish "lodged itself very deeply" in Hustvedt's mind and inspired the title of her latest book, Ghost Stories, a memoir reflecting on her life with Auster and his death. Love at first sight Hustvedt and Auster met at the 92nd Street Y, a community centre in New York's Upper East Side. It was 1981 and the pair were at a poetry reading for the acclaimed New York poet Ann Lauterbach. "I didn't know Paul at all, but I saw this very beautiful man … standing near the door, the exit to the Y, in a leather jacket, smoking maybe a cigarette or a little cigar, I'm not sure which," Hustvedt recalls. "And I said to my friend, 'You don't know who that guy is?' And he said, 'Oh, yes, that's Paul Auster, the poet'. And I said to him, 'Introduce me right now'." He did, and the pair spent the evening talking together. "I have to say … he didn't seem terribly interested in me. And at that time of my life — I had just turned 26 — I was used to men being extremely interested in me," Hustvedt says. "[Paul] seduced me in part with his indifference. He was not aggressive; he was not flirting. He was serious and sincere." Hustvedt was instantly smitten. "The joke between us was always that I fell in love within 30 seconds, and it took him several hours," she says. "I worked very hard during those hours to impress this beautiful man who was also a poet. "And by the end of the evening, I think I had impressed him." Impress him she did: Hustvedt and Auster married the following year, and had a daughter, Sophie, now a singer, in 1987. A shared writing life The first written exchange between the two was a note Auster wrote Hustvedt the day after their first meeting. "He had written Dear S and then a dash," Hustvedt recalls. "He had no idea how to spell my name. At that time, my name was obscure. It was not the iPhone [age]." Auster had tried calling Hustvedt, but she hadn't picked up, so his note asked her to call him. "He signed it, 'love and kisses'," Hustvedt says. "We had spent the night together but still I thought, 'love and kisses? My goodness!' … I was absolutely delighted with that note." It marked the beginning of a rich literary exchange between the two that spanned their 43 years together. Auster's letters — many of which appear in Ghost Stories, including a series he wrote in his final months to his baby grandson, Miles — reflect his evolution as a writer. "Paul did have a kind of early and a late style, and if you look at the arc of his prose over time, he was always a good writer, but the sentences got longer as he got older," Hustvedt says. "He had a kind of rolling rhythm that he used in his late books that you don't find in the New York trilogy, for example, and I think this is probably even inside some of the notes, and certainly in those late letters that he wrote to our grandson." Over the years, the two authors regularly read each other's work, sometimes offering a frank assessment of a draft. "We could actually be very critical," Hustvedt says. "I had spent five years working on my third novel, What I Loved, and I gave him the whole draft. He read it silently to himself, and we met and he said, 'Siri, it just isn't there yet'. "I wrote a whole new draft in eight months, and he loved that draft." In another instance, Hustvedt told Auster she didn't like either of the two endings he'd written for his novel Oracle Night. "He wrote a third and I thought it was perfect," she says. While Hustvedt says these conversations were difficult, they were always welcome. "When criticism rests on a bed of love and respect, it's not so hard to take." The nature of grief Immediately after Auster's death, Hustvedt's connection to time altered in an unexpected way. She describes in Ghost Stories how time became "deranged beyond recognition": she'd forget the month and day of the week; hours would skip ahead while minutes dragged by. She understands why. Our sense of time is tied to the particular rhythms of our daily life, she says. "In my case, it was a shared life for 43 years with the same person, and when that person dies, the rhythms and timing of everyday life become something wholly different. "When that ordinary functioning is disrupted radically, time is disrupted with it. And by 'time' I mean not the time of physics, but lived time, experienced time." To learn more about the nature of grief, the intellectually curious Hustvedt turned, inevitably, to books — or, more specifically, to what she calls bereavement literature. "My response to trouble is inevitably to read — that's what I do. Whenever some terrible thing comes along in my life, I start reading," she says. "Reading brings a certain distance to one's own experience and also forms of comfort because grief is an ordinary business." She recognises that however earth-shattering it can feel to lose someone you love, it's a commonplace experience. "Most people, if they have the capacity to love and they live long enough, will grieve, so, I'm not alone," she says. "And at the same time, the startling realities of grief deserved exploration." A literary resurrection After Auster's diagnosis in 2022, Hustvedt kept a journal documenting his treatment and his subsequent decline. When she tried to return to writing after his death, she found she couldn't pick up the half-finished novel she'd been working on in snatches during the 18 months she'd spent caring for him. "After he died, I realised that there was absolutely no way that I could go back to those people," she says. "I knew that I had to write, and I knew that the only thing I could write about was what we had been through. "I also think that I had a huge wish to try to resurrect something of this man on the page, and that was the dominant urge of my writing." The writer has felt Auster's presence in other ways since the day of his funeral. "I started to smell cigar smoke, and this too apparently is not so unusual," she says. "At first, I thought I was really smelling someone smoking a cigar outside my study's window. And of course there was nobody out there … It came often in those first months, often, all the time. And now it's much, much less. But I still have had it a few times — not so long ago, I had a whiff. "[These could be] strange forms of madness, and it might be related to my peculiar nervous system. But it happens." Ghost Stories is the first book of Hustvedt's that Auster hasn't read. She's confident he would have loved it. "It's not a hagiography," she says. "It's not Saint Paul. You get to know some of his little foibles and warts on his character. But I think he would have loved this book. I think he would have been really proud of me." Ghost Stories: A Memoir is published by Sceptre.