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Siri Hustvedt

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29

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2026-05-16

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2026-05-16

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1. “And then there's a back and forth, and it's all very exciting, but eventually the car runs out of gas. The organic model is something else because it grows and blooms and thrives, and then a storm comes along and severs a limb. If that tree survives the storm, the limb does not grow back in the same way, it grows back in another way. And I think that's why the organic tree model is preferable in love relations to the mechanical model because you have to adjust to changed circumstances. to a new climate to a missing limb. And I do feel that over time, Paul and I managed to do that. Not without some difficulty adjusting to the person who is always becoming that you live with. You know, we are dynamic creatures, not static creatures. And we go on changing until we die. When I was 23, already believed in the organic model.”

   2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “Yes, so I was 23 years old living in New York my first year in New York and I was reading a lot of 18th and 19th century philosophy at the time. So these two models have roots I was also having what I think of now as a mechanical love affair. So the difference is this. In the machine model, say a car, There's no perpetual motion machine. Eventually, the machinery breaks down. It can be replaced, but the way you do that is you replace a part. And it has to be the same part. In other words, the overall design of the machine doesn't change. So a mechanical love affair repeat over and over the same motions and out of those motions you do get I think arousal and excitement you know you think of the elusive lover that's a very good one you know one chases and the other”

   2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “For that suffering self, because you know you're not alone at all. This is so common. It's an ordinary business, but it happens to be an ordinary business. That includes extreme emotions.”

   2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “It's hilarious, and I have to tell you, after I recovered from my shock of looking at those stocking feet, I burst out laughing. During these two years of mourning Paul, and I actively mourn Paul every day, there have been any number of times when here alone in the house, I just burst out. I don't know. I think this is... This is a wonderful thing about human life that we are able to represent ourselves to ourselves as others. And once you gain the distance necessary for that representation, humor sneaks in. And also I do want to say about grief. That if you have the capacity to love and if you live long enough, you will grieve. This is not an extraordinary In life, it is part of many, many, many people's lives. That sense of shared experience. Brings both humor and compassion.”

   2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “Despair can become seductive when you're grieving. Just give it up. It's like, oh, you know, it's too much. But that, as you said earlier, that movement toward the abyss is hugely dangerous. And I found ways Holding to the scaffolding the routines, the forms of my life. You know, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, waking up at the same time, going to bed at the same time, continuing to read, continuing to work. All of that, even when I felt cognitively splintered even when it was interrupted by Bursting into tears, all of that helped me enormously. And I have continued to stick to those forms and not to be seduced by despair. That ruins people.”

   2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “And I tried to analyze what's going on. Was I, you know, we shall overcome? Was I crying for myself? Was it a kind of selfish breakdown because of that text? Or was I crying for the republic? And I'm still not sure. I think private grief and grief for one's own country can intermingle and increase the other, if you will. And we often, we do not separate so neatly as we would like to our emotion. I knew very well when I saw animal crackers that I bought for Paul at Memorial still in Kettering, the hospital where he was being treated that I was sobbing for my dead husband. But we shall overcome, I thought, this is where the private and the public mingle. And had Paul been alive, I would have had my ally. In political talk and thinking, and he was gone. So I think and I felt about private grief and public grief that despair is not an option.”

   2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “Yes, it's it was interesting I tell a little story about making dinner. I was making dinner for Sophie and Spencer and Little Miles who were coming over. And I had the radio on while I was cooking. And I opened the refrigerator and reached for fennel in the refrigerator to take it out and chop it. we shall overcome the great civil rights anthem came on the radio and I started to sob.”

   2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “Yes, I think That time in our marriage, I couldn't have said that early on, even after we were first married, we didn't know what we would become. We didn't know what, as I say in the book, the and would be the Paul in Syria and Paul, how that and would develop. But by the time Paul fell ill, I don't think there was any question between us that the other, whoever the other was, if I had fallen ill, I know Paul would have Done everything in his power. To help me through it. And because I knew that and he knew it on the other side, that little Norwegian expression, which is desculabar mangle, which means it should only lack a strange translation. But yes, it means, but of course there's no question. But there was no question because of what had been Created between us over all those years.”

   2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “No, my sense is this, and it's always been my sense when I'm working on a book, is that if you begin to Consider or think about how the book will be received. Book won't be worth much. So I do at times worry once I've finished a book, I think, oh my God. What's going to happen here? And I have to come my nerves. But while I'm writing, That is not the case. I think. It can ruin writers. And I have never felt that How shall I put it? This is harsh, but pandering to what one imagines the Will be accepted in some popular way is going to do your writing any good. And Paul felt the same way.”

   2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “I wanted to give the reader something of Daniel and when I was unearthing all my papers and I found a comic that he had made quite young, a good one, he was a very gifted person and a very gifted photographer. I felt that Daniel could say something in his own voice and give the reader a sense of this human being because the media attention to this story turned everyone involved, I think, into, or some of us anyway, into monstrous beings. is really rarely the case so that was my method if you will of turning a lurid and gruesome story genuinely gruesome into something that also has real human dimensions”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “Yes, and I think I realized that. My urge, my profound need, if you will, to write about what was happening to me, but also to write about Paul, that my resurrection urge, if you will, to bring something of Paul back, it would be utterly fraudulent to leave that out of the story. At the same time, I didn't want that gruesome story, and it truly is. Paul called it the horrible things. I didn't want the horrible things to overwhelm What also existed with them Which was Love for each other and Paul's great love for his daughter and then his son-in-law and his love for Daniel, but he couldn't trust Daniel. He was an addict, but he had had difficulties from very early on. And I decided that without Know turning the book into that story.”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “Well, I think I wondered, I mean, soon after he died, I wondered what to do with these letters. I mean, they could certainly go among his papers. There weren't enough to really produce any kind of printed book. It could have been a little chat book, you know, the very last writing of Paul Oster. But I realized that if they were... Put into this larger book, which is in many ways also a family story with its, you know, terrible aspects and its beautiful ones. So Paul writing to an imaginary future Miles, a literate, more grown-up person who's able to take in the information about the family. Paul's great love, I think, for me, for his daughter Sophie, for his son-in-law, Spencer, all of that comes across intimately in those letters. He was able in the context of my larger book to communicate something about”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “The dialogical or the dialogic nature of our marriage would be reproduced in the book as well. So my voice, then Paul's voice, two different kinds of prose. And so I felt my way forward. I knew these ingredients had to be included, but I felt my way forward.”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “As a form, it's also not written in paragraphs but in blocks of prose. So between those blocks of prose, I wanted to give the reader air, if you will, air to make a transition. But it is an organic form. And then a very important ingredient is the book that Paul was working on before he died, letters to our grandson Miles that he hoped would be a book of 100 to 200 pages, but he couldn't finish it. He managed to write 35 pages. I put those also into the book. There was a moment early on when I thought I would have them as a block inside the text. And then I realized that didn't work, that I needed to contextualize some of the letters and that if they were interspersed Between sections of my prose that”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “Was fragmented for me. I had it completely other radically changed sense of time. And I thought, how is this going to be presented in the book? Well, of course, we all remember in the present, the act of memory always takes place in the present, but it's a form of recovery of the past. By putting these documents into the book, I was able to move from one time to another, and that represents a form of splintering that is part of our ordinary memory, but there is a timeline from May to the following March that also exists in the book, so the reader can keep tabs on when I'm writing. So there's the time of writing. There's the time of memory, there's recovering these documents that are immediate to the time that they were written. And I think for me, that worked”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “Yes, the form appeared. The title came And then I realized that I had a desire to go back into the written materials so that they would form a kind of collage. And it is related to what I talk about very early in the book, in the second paragraph, that time”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “Well, I think in some way the antidote is Paul and I shared our inner lives in some way and a sense of commitment to work that wasn't necessarily hugely popular and a feeling that Art does have power and that power, especially in books. Happens one person at a time. You know, Paul used to say that reading is the place where two consciousnesses touch. And I would say it's also where two consciousnesses and unconsciousnesses can touch an absolute privacy and intimacy. And that experience of reading is not gone. And I find when I meet readers, of course it's usually people who have read a book by me, that that intimacy continues. One to one. And yes, we're all influenced by cultural perception. We can't free ourselves from that. At the same time, I think...”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “Well, yes, then the aspiring model has followed me around for many, many years. My aspirations were rather puny and focused on trying to eat a little better than I was eating at the time.”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “I did. And actually, even in the book, there was a moment in graduate school, I was so poor. I was stopped on the street by a photographer who turned out to be completely legitimate. And he sent photographs he took of me to the Ford agency. And there were for about two minutes, I thought maybe I could make some money doing some modeling. It turned out that they wanted me to go to Paris and walk in the shows. But of course, that was impossible. I think I was still taking classes for my degree. And that was the beginning. and the end Of that Desire to make some money on the side, which I never did. No.”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “I tried to indicate that it's not as if I wasn't irritated and it's not as if when push came to shove, I didn't defend myself at those moments. Mostly I did. I think in the very early days I was so gobsmacked by what was happening. I was speechless. But, you know, listen, this goes on. I mean, I think in a review in the Times, I was described as an aspiring model. I was a graduate student at Columbia who did get her PhD in 1986. So there's something.”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “And I think the memory of that and living through each other's writing lives together makes quite a difference. There were many people who assumed that I met Paul after he was Paul Auster, a known writer, but that actually isn't true. And I do want to say that the Noel Coward scenario could have been ours if Paul hadn't been So supportive and generous about my work because as I said, I was younger, but also there was a lot of sexism and misogyny in the way media and the press approached my work”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

22. “I don't think there's anywhere to go, but I admired it very much. And I, well, was eight years younger than Paul and had published a couple of poems in literary magazines, not much. But I did have about 100 pages of a manuscript of poems. And he read them and I knew that he respected and admired the work. So that was the foundation. And you have to remember that even though Paul did indeed become famous as a writer when he was about 40, he was 34 when I met him, and we lived through 18 rejections of his first novel, City of Glass, and his reputation, if you will, didn't take off until he was 40. So we were both obscure writers when we met.”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “Yes, and I have thought of this that if Paul and I had not Admired, mutually admired the other person's work. The marriage would have foundered. So I felt extremely nervous when he handed me his poems, the poems he had published by then, and the first half of the invention of solitude because I thought if I don't like this work, I don't think”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “And it turns out that it's good I wrote them because the essential message was that I loved him and I had a feeling that he loved me back. So once that was declared, I think it was. Vital to the ongoing relationship that we had.”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “You know, because these letters became part of the private mythology of our marriage together. Every once in a while, Paul would say, Would you like to see those letters, Siri? And I inevitably said absolutely not. I was very worried about encountering my young self and her silliness. But after he died, I realized that I did want to see the letters. And it was part of what I think of as the documentary aspect or quality of the book that I do reproduce letters, notes that I remembered, of course, having written, but I did not remember them verbatim. So my response to those letters was a mixture of embarrassment and tenderness. In other words, I did feel a kind of tenderness for that old self.”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “My perseverance paid off and I did. I took him home that night. And that was the beginning of our what turned out to be a very long love affair.”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

27. “And then I spent the next hours hanging in Paul's vicinity, trying very hard to get his interest. We did talk that evening for hours and hours and hours. Rather late. That night I looked across the table. We were at a bar in Tribeca and I could see that I had talked interest into that face.”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

28. “I was a graduate student at Columbia. It was february twenty third, nineteen eighty one, and I went to a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y. With a fellow graduate student, a friend of mine, and we were going to hear Anne Lauterbach, a poet I admire, read her poems, which we did. And when my friend and I left the poetry reading after it was over, I caught sight of this absolutely beautiful man and Standing inside the entrance to the Y Wearing a leather jacket Hunched over very inward looking smoking either a little cigar or a cigarette. I cannot remember which. And I said to my friend, You don't know who that is, do you? And he said, Yes, that's Paul Oster, the poet. And I said, introduce us right now. And he did.”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

29. “Welcome to Intelligent Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorenti. On today's episode, the novelist essayist and poet Siri Hutzfen sits down with Maithilly Rao to discuss her new book, Ghost Stories. It's a deeply personal reflection and memoir on morning, memory and her life with the late writer, Paul Oster. Let's join our host Maithali Rao now with more.”

    2026-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT