From the perspective of my own 50-year marriage, I know that every long union has its special flavor. It is rooted in enduring love but composed in varying parts of an adaptation to each other's quirks, a gentle acknowledgment that certain behaviors will always remain points of friction, a sizable collection of inside jokes, unique modes of communication, and an understanding that sometimes a companionable silence can speak volumes. Above all, it's an Everest-sized mountain of memories.

But few long marriages include a spouse capable of capturing all of those aspects with the skill of a writer as talented as Siri Hustvedt. The result is GHOST STORIES, a memoir written in the wake of the death of her husband, writer Paul Auster. Overflowing with anguish, humor, compassion and love, it's a marvelous testament to the 43-year relationship of these two gifted literary artists.

The spine of the book is Auster's brave 14-month battle with non-small cell lung cancer. Hustvedt chronicles that time with the skill of a medical expert in a chapter entitled “Paul's Illness in Twelve Email Letters to Friends Sent From Cancerland.” Her account, which began with hope (an emotion she distinguishes from optimism) that chemotherapy might shrink Auster's tumor to the point where surgery was possible (a hope eventually dashed), traces its few bright moments and growing setbacks, including stark descriptions of the side effects of powerful immunotherapy drugs that were as brutal as the ravages of his illness. It concludes with the weary concession that “Paul does not want more hospital experience. We are engaging hospice services soon.” 

"There’s a power that emerges from this candid, but warm and balanced, portrait of a marriage. Hustvedt and Auster weren't only life partners, they were accomplished writers who leaned heavily on each other in their professional careers."

This was a mere three weeks before he died on April 30, 2024, at the age of 77, in the sunlit library of the four-story Brooklyn house that he and Hustvedt shared for 30 years. It now became a “haunted house, inhabited by a ghost Paul and I made together, a 'we' that doesn't exist anymore, not in the present anyway.”

Though GHOST STORIES features an elliptical structure and a variety of literary styles --- journal entries, poetry, and essayistic sections in which Hustvedt, who is an avid reader on scientific subjects and a medical school lecturer in psychiatry, delves into bereavement studies and literature that reports on the appearance of spectral presences --- she never loses control of her account, even as she writes to her absent husband, “I'm writing to hold on to you.”

Among the book's most memorable segments are a series of Auster's charming letters to his grandson, Miles, who was born on New Year's Day in 2024. Auster, who contemplated writing a book, Letters to Miles, began the project in March. He hoped to produce between 100 and 200 pages of material, but within a month he became too ill to reach that goal. The letters contain bits of family history, introducing Miles to the stories of his parents --- Auster and Hustvedt's daughter, Sophie, a singer-songwriter and actress, and son-in-law, Spencer Ostrander, who collaborated with Auster on BLOODBATH NATION, a book about gun violence in America. It's a poignant attempt to communicate from beyond the grave to a grandson who never will know his grandfather.

But not all of Auster's family life was so warm, as Hustvedt recounts in the tragic story of Auster's son, Daniel, who was born of his first marriage to another prominent writer, Lydia Davis. Hours after he was released on bail after being charged in the death of his 10-month-old daughter, Ruby, from acute intoxication from heroin and fentanyl in November 2021 while in his care, Daniel was found unconscious in a Brooklyn subway station. He died several days later. As Hustvedt describes it, his death was a culmination of years of mental health issues and addiction, afflictions that Auster tried --- and ultimately failed --- to help him overcome.

Hustvedt narrates the story of her grief and the experience of widowhood revealingly and without self-pity. She describes what she calls “cognitive splintering,” which included intermittently smelling smoke from Auster's small cigars after his death and wearing his favorite clothes during her writing of this book. But she expands outward from there, surveying the length and breadth of their relationship from a chance first meeting after a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y in 1981, when Auster was still married to Lydia Davis (though separated), until the last day of his life. There’s a power that emerges from this candid, but warm and balanced, portrait of a marriage. Hustvedt and Auster weren't only life partners, they were accomplished writers who leaned heavily on each other in their professional careers. 

They were frank, if consistently friendly, critics of each other's work, even sharing characters from time to time and occasionally unconsciously lifting sentences from each other's writing. Hustvedt describes without rancor, at least none directed at Auster, how it felt to write in the shadow of his relatively greater fame over the course of their joint careers. They joked that they preferred to think of themselves as “sparring partners” rather than “shawls,” the derisive term they coined for spouses who were little more than decorative accoutrements for a more prominent partner.

Hustvedt’s memoir inevitably will be measured against Joan Didion’s THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, another account of a long literary marriage and the aftermath of the death of a spouse, though Didion's loss was sudden and Hustvedt's played out over time. While the two writers' styles are markedly different, both books are worthy bookends on the shelf of stories about spousal grief.

Paul Auster once said that he “wanted to come back as a ghost,” and he gave the second volume in The New York Trilogy the title GHOSTS, so Hustvedt's acknowledgement that she is “telling ghost stories” is fitting. She recalls the time he told her, “If we lived together for another hundred years, we would become the same person.” After reading GHOST STORIES, one wishes the couple could have achieved that improbable milestone. But even as their lives merged, we're fortunate that they maintained their distinctiveness to the very end of this fascinating relationship.