A journalist suggested to Siri Hustvedt that her husband, Paul Auster, was probably the one writing her books. She, who never perceived this type of misogyny in her marriage, has come to understand that it is a "systemic" phenomenon and not a personal one. During her visit to the Magaluf Expanded Literature Festival (FLEM), she shared details that confirm that their relationship—also in the creative field—was deeply symbiotic.
In fact, she said that, at the beginning of their life together, she spoke to Auster about two models—"the mechanical and the organic"—to sustain a couple. She used the metaphor of a car where you change a part and it continues to work, and that of a tree that, after a storm, grows a new branch where it has lost one. When Hustvedt was researching the book she wrote about her 43 years together, she found an interview he had given to The Guardian, where she revived the same simile of the tree. She had made it her own, but she was moved by rereading those words that emerged from intimacy. Especially, doing so when he was no longer with her.
Writing Ghost Stories Hustvedt's work—still without a publication date—has helped her exorcise her pain and make peace with the loss. Throughout their life together, they read aloud everything they wrote, and now she is without her first reader. The bond was so deep that she says she still feels as if he were giving her directions. Auster claimed he was lost while writing his latest novel, but she just told him to keep going because the material was excellent. There was never any professional jealousy between them.
Hustvedt's ethereal figure contrasts with the forcefulness of her ideas. She doesn't hesitate to draw parallels between Trump and Hitler, nor to single out institutions, such as universities and large technology companies, for giving in to an administration firmly controlled by the president and his acolytes. She says she feels afraid and describes a scenario of "cold civil war" in the United States, where she calls for "collective resistance." Europe seems like a safe haven, although the rise of the far right is undeniable, with governments increasingly normalizing reactionary and neo-fascist policies. Trump isn't that far off.
