Siri Hustvedt: I still smell Paul's cigarettes in the moments I need to have him close

Barcelona"I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead." Thus begins Ghost Stories (Edicions 62 / Seix Barral, 2026; translated by Jordi Martín Lloret), the memoir that Siri Hustvedt (Minnesota, 1955) has needed to write after the "horrible years" that followed the diagnosis of lung cancer in the author of The New York Trilogy and Leviathan. The volume reconstructs the 43 years of relationship between Siri and Paul in chapters that advance and retreat in time to show the difficult moment the author was going through. Hustvedt's urgent yet reflective narrative combines with the last texts Auster wrote, a series of letters intended so that his grandson Miles –born months before the writer's death– can one day know what kind of family he has grown up in.

It is not the first time you have written a book in which you appear. The Shaking Woman (2009; in Catalan by Edicions 62) began at the moment when, during a tribute to her father, her body began to tremble uncontrollably, although she kept her mind clear and could continue speaking. In Ghost Stories she returns to herself, but connected to that of Paul Auster, with whom she maintained a long-term relationship.

— Shortly after Paul's funeral, which was on May 3, 2024, I began to have ideas and take notes to write a book about him. My only wish was for Paul to return: whole, in his bodily form, as he had been before the illness. His death made it impossible for this return to become a reality. I tried to resurrect him in writing, putting all my strength into it. The nine months I dedicated to it ended up being pleasant, even though grief is very important, in the context of the book.

Illness is also quite present. One of the chapters is the twelve letters he sent to friends during the almost year and a half of cancer treatment.

— These letters helped me to recover what course the illness had followed. They are an immediate document that shows how our state of mind changed according to the treatments, the possible operation that could not be, the complications derived from some medication that was taken...

It is not the only document we find there. We also find two love letters dated 1981.

— The year Paul and I started seeing each other, our relationship briefly broke down and I wrote him two letters to try and win him back. In addition to the letters, the book includes some notes he had written me that I had never gotten around to reading, but that he had kept. It was a way of recovering concrete fragments of a time that could no longer return.

After Paul's death, time became "distorted" to the point of being "unrecognizable" for him. He writes: "I remember what day it is but then I forget. I remember it's May but then I forget. The hours fly by but the minutes crawl."

— When Paul died, time shattered into a thousand pieces. It seemed to me that the best way to show this situation was by writing a fragmented text that did not advance chronologically. It represented more faithfully how I felt and, at the same time, allowed me to show the years of marriage as a whole. I wanted to make my literary voice dialogue with Paul's by including the letters he wrote for Miles, our grandson.

Did writing a book like Ghost Stories have a therapeutic purpose?

— he could even laugh, at times, especially when he tried to describe some traits of Paul's character and mine too. Ghost Stories I could even laugh, at times, especially when I tried to describe some traits of Paul's character and also my own.

Ensure that both one and the other tried to "see life as a comedy".

— Yes, that's right. The last words I said to my husband weren't as profound as many people would have expected, but they define what our relationship was like. As I was dying, I took his face and said to him, "My God, we've had fun, haven't we? We've had so much fun." Fun and the desire to have a good time have been the most important things for us. It may seem strange, but it's the truth.

For the two of you, that conversation that began in 1981 and that you believed was "eternal" had great value. In one of the chapters of the book, he recalls how, on one occasion, you were talking in Wittgenstein's bed until three in the morning.Wittgenstein until three in the morning.

— When we realized it, I told him it was incredible that we were still talking about Wittgenstein at that hour. He replied it was because we had had coffee after dinner. Paul's death has put an end to this eternal conversation we had. If I now maintain an imaginary dialogue with him – I can do it – I miss the wit of his replies and, at the same time, my ability to surprise him. I can remember moments and invent new ones, but I miss his intelligence, his body, his touch, and the conversation between us. I will never recover all of this.

On the day of the funeral, when he returned home with his family, he went up to his room to rest for a while. Then he noticed Paul's presence very close to him. Did it cost you, to write this passage of the book, considering that you are not a religious person?

— I have read about presences for years. In neuroscientific literature, it is a central topic. There are many types of presences. Autoscopy, for example, allows you to see a double of yourself as if it were real. After a traumatic experience, some people have seen themselves outside their own body, floating above themselves. To explain these kinds of phenomena, we must go beyond the medical perspective and also take philosophy into account: someone's death recalls the phantom limb syndrome that an amputation causes in some people and about which Merleau-Ponty wrote. The nervous system fills the void of an absence. On the day of Paul's funeral, when I felt his presence in the bedroom, I did not believe for a moment that I had gone mad.

How is it explained that this happened, or that you felt this was happening?

— Science marks a great difference between the self and others. Neoliberalism also focuses on the island that each of us represents ourselves to be. My stance is different: I think that I and others are more mixed than it may seem. Intersubjectivity occurs from the very moment we grow inside another person's body, within an organ, the placenta, which mediates between the mother and the fetus.

In addition to noticing Paul's presence on the day of the funeral, he explains that he began to smell the scent of Schimmelpenninck cigarettes that he had smoked for years, even though he had quit long before he got sick.

— I still smell Paul's cigarettes from time to time. There was a period when I smelled it six to eight times a day. Now it's less frequent, perhaps because grief consists of adapting to the absence of the one who is gone. My body is getting used to the idea of solitude. It's not better than what I felt in the first weeks. It's worse, in fact.

He told me that he still smells Paul's cigarette smoke from time to time.

— Yes. It is so. Last week, in Madrid, I heard her briefly. Sometimes I have the sensation that I still smell Paul's cigarettes in moments when I need to have him close, and when I smell it, it gives me peace and comfort. I don't think Paul's specter is near me smoking cigarettes, but I do think we can experience hallucinatory desires. It would be a combination between Freud's theories and the scientific perspective.

Would it be a demonstration of the power of our mind to create realities?

— I don't believe in the division between body and mind. The brain's capacity to think comes from within a body. Thoughts are neurons, but they cannot be reduced to just neurons. Why not? Because we live in a world full of other people who influence us. The reductionism of dividing body and mind doesn't work for me. It is evident that symbolic and representational activity can have great effects, even if not only in our minds, but also in our entire organism. I insist, it is part of our body, it doesn't come from outside.

Besides their shared passion for literature, Paul and you really enjoyed going to the cinema. She explains that shortly after they started dating, they went to see A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and she was surprised to see him cry.

— It wasn't that a tear rolled down her cheek: she cried like a Magdalene. As the years went by, I got used to her emotionality, which was mainly expressed through movies.

It struck me that years later you said to him: "You cry with fiction. I cry with life".

— He found it very difficult to cry about anything that happened to him or anyone else. Throughout the cancer treatment, I only saw tears in my husband's eyes on one occasion: it was when the doctor told him they couldn't operate on him. I also had tears in my eyes, of course. But neither of us burst into tears. It was a very delicate moment. I thought: "My God, maybe we won't make it." Paul was very brave when facing his death.

Why did movies excite him so much?

— When I cried watching a movie, it was because I related it to some experience of his that spoke to him. He needed the distance between what he saw and what he had lived to be moved. Books were a similar mechanism for him to express what he carried inside. He would never have said that writing was therapeutic for him, but I think it was. He wrote out of pure necessity.

Their life together could have ended very soon. In May 1981 he left her without you expecting it.

— The interruption of our relationship became a foundational mythology that Paul and I often shared with each other. It was like our fairy tale. I had written him three letters, we had broken up for less than a week... It turns out it was a mythology we remembered in a distorted way, as I explain in the book: instead of three letters there were two, and the breakup was a little longer. Even so, the meaning of that experience is the same. He disappeared without giving me any explanation. I discovered that, even if I wanted to continue our relationship, his leaving wouldn't hurt me deeply. If he didn't come back, I would move on.

But he wrote her the letters.

— The fact of knowing that I would survive if he didn't return gave me the strength to write those letters. He was leaving because he wanted to be close to his son Daniel, who at that time had not yet turned 4 years old. He wasn't leaving because he rejected me, but because of the child.

Daniel, son of Paul Auster and also writer Lydia Davis, makes an appearance in the book. Like Paul, he is one of the family ghosts. From a very young age he was a child who wanted to "hide", wasn't he?

— While going through our family archive after Paul's death, I found a comic he made when he was about 12 years old that is a kind of parable of how he must have felt.

The comic book character ends up all alone on a deserted island. Instead of feeling desperate because there is no one around, he feels so good that he spends 37 years there and ends up naming the island "Love Island".

— Daniel was a talented and intelligent child. Explaining this comic he had made as a child and some of his other drawings, I tried to show something of him that had nothing to do with the appalling news published by tabloids around the world. Unfortunately, the comic does not in any way improve what eventually happened.

In 2021, Daniel's daughter, Ruby, died at 10 months as a result of an overdose of fentanyl and heroin. Daniel was accused of involuntary manslaughter and, shortly after being released from prison on bail, at the end of April 2022, he died of an overdose. He was only 44 years old.

— What Paul and I had to live through was absolutely grotesque, and that does not absolve Daniel of blame. His negligence had terrible consequences. As I explain in the book, it affected Paul greatly, and we both believed that those months contributed to the growth of his cancer. Paul referred to that whole story as "the horrible things." Although the newspapers talked about it, exacerbating the monstrous elements of it all, which were also real, behind it there was a human being.

Since the book tries to reconstruct the long love story with Paul, I wanted to end by asking you about a theory you invented about the two types of love: mechanical and organic.

— The mechanic is mechanical and works by repetition. The organic reminds me of a tree. If a storm tears off a branch and the tree survives, a new branch can grow that will be different from the one it had lost.

Paul appropriated this story of organic love and used it in some interviews. She was surprised that he slightly modified his version.

— Paul wasn't talking about a storm that accidentally broke off a branch, but about someone actively pruning that branch to make the tree grow better. I wonder if he believed he had implemented some kind of pruning to make our relationship survive. The difference between one version of the story and the other is important, but both the storm and the pruning work to keep the tree growing. Taking care of a tree is like taking care of a romantic relationship. Over time it changes and has different needs. Paul valued this idea greatly. One of Daniel's problems was that he didn't know how to take care of relationships with others. He was too afraid of everyone, and for that reason he needed to hide.