One February evening in 1981, four days after her twenty-sixth birthday, Siri Hustvedt went to a poetry reading in New York. In the shabby foyer of the venue, she saw a man in a leather jacket smoking a cigarette and felt an attraction like a blow to the back of her neck. The man was 34-year-old poet Paul Auster, married with a three-year-old son. Hustvedt begged an introduction from a mutual friend and the two writers talked into the dawn. 

On 3 May 2024, Hustvedt buried the man she had met by chance, then married and lived with for over forty years. It had been a long goodbye: sixteen months of Paul suffering with lung cancer and the ‘grotesque consequences’ of treatment. Together they endured what Hustvedt calls Cancerland as her partner shrank into a man who needed a wheelchair to cross a room and, finally, a skeletal, bedridden figure. Ghost Stories is a howl of grief for the loss of a husband, father and grandfather. The author writes while wearing one of Paul’s jackets, with his too-big sweatpants tied tightly around her narrower waist. ‘I keep circling back to his death,’ she says. ‘Over and over, I watch him die.’

Hustvedt’s memoir is deeply bleak, perhaps because of its very detailed recollection of all that she and Auster shared and enjoyed together: ‘No interlocuter had ever enlivened me as Paul did.’ ‘We read books, and we wrote our own books, and we talked, and we had our ideas … We