Background
Hustvedt was born in Northfield, Minnesota in 1955 and lived in Minnesota prior to moving to New York. Her father, Lloyd Hustvedt, a professor of Scandinavian literature, came from a Norwegian immigrant family. Her mother, Ester Vegan, whom her father met in Oslo after the war, emigrated to the US at 30. ‘I did not grow up in a family with much money’, Siri Hustvedt has stated later.
‘It was a very rural, immigrant community. We were snowbound during the winter, and most of the old people spoke Norwegian. My father spoke with a Norwegian accent until the day he died. We took the school bus every day. It was smalltown America. I always had fantasies of leaving: grandiose fantasies. The fact my mother came from far away played a role. This was not her world. She came to it. She had a divided sensibility. I’m much more American, but I’m close to her, and I feel closer to things European than most Americans.’
Siri Hustvedt holds a B.A. in history from St. Olaf College. In 1978, she left for Columbia, in New York, to begin her PhD.
‘A huge thing. It was terribly exciting but a little… I’d only been to New York once, I didn’t know a single human being there. I had a little room, with a thin little bed, and for the first three days I re-read Crime and Punishment.’
She got her Ph.D in English (1986) from Columbia University; her thesis on Charles Dickens was entitled Figures of dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend.
And she still lives in New York, in Brooklyn, with her husband, the writer Paul Auster, and their daughter, singer and actress Sophie Auster.
Writing
Hustvedt has mainly made her name as a novelist, but she has also produced a book of poetry, and has had short stories and essays on various subjects published in (among others) The Art of the Essay, 1999, The Best American Short Stories, 1990 and 1991, The Paris Review, Yale Review and Modern Painters.
Her books include: The Blindfold 1992, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl 1996, What I Loved 2003, The Sorrows of an American 2008.
When did she know that she wanted to write?
‘It happened at 13, in Reykjavik. My father was studying the sagas. There were English books in the public library: David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights. I read compulsively that summer.’
‘It was after I had been reading those English novels that I—I actually announced it in the local newspaper.’
I had great reading experiences as a very young person. At eleven, my mother gave me Emily Dickinson’s poems and [William] Blake and I loved those poems. I didn’t understand what the poets were saying, certainly not in every line. And there were some poems I didn’t understand at all. But I read the poems over and over and over to myself, and I had an experience of awe. I loved those poems. And then when I was thirteen, again my mother—who was a very big reader and a big reader of English novels—gave me David Copperfield, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. At the same time I read lesser works like Hawaii by James Michener and Gone with the Wind. But those books had a huge effect on me. I ended up writing my dissertation on Charles Dickens.
I wrote poetry all through high school, during my year in gymnasium in Bergen, through college, and into my years as a graduate student at Columbia University. I always hoped to be able to write a novel, but didn’t understand how to do it, and I loved poetry. A moment came in graduate school when I got stuck. I had already published a poem I liked in The Paris Review, but somehow everything I was writing after that was very stilted and bad. A professor of mine, David Shapiro, who is also a wonderful poet, recommended that I do automatic writing like the Surrealists just to loosen myself up. I followed his advice and wrote thirty pages of prose in a sitting. I liked what came out. The next three months were spent editing those pages, which became a prose poem called “Squares.” I never wrote anything in lines again. I seemed to have found a form for myself.
Meeting Paul Auster
She met Paul Auster at a poetry reading, and they married in 1981.
‘I thought he was the cutest thing I ever saw. He was introduced to me as a poet, and I thought: “Oh, my God, a beautiful poet.” It was very fast.’
Writing style
Like her husband, Paul Auster, Hustvedt employs a use of repetitive themes or symbols throughout her work. Most notably the use of certain types of voyeurism, often linking objects of the dead to characters who are relative strangers to the deceased characters (most notable in various facets in her novels The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl), and the exploration of identity.
She has also written essays on art history and theory and painting and painters often appear in her fiction, most notably, perhaps, in her novel, What I Loved. She often uses art more or less as a vehicle for exploration in her writings.
A novel takes a long time to gestate inside me, and between books, I’ve discovered the immense pleasure of writing essays. The form, which is infinitely elastic, has provided me with a way of searching for answers to ultimate questions, which usually go unanswered, but which give me a chance to flex my thoughts.
Her only writing ritual is that
‘I must do a little walking while I write. The act of walking seems to jog loose sentences that have defied me.’
Life in a two-writer family
Paul and I met twenty-one years ago and we were both completely unknowns. He was then writing The Invention of Solitude, the second part. He had finished the first part when we met. And I was continuing to write poems and beginning to work on my dissertation. So we’ve shared his whole prose career. He had written poems and essays before that. His whole prose career really corresponds with our marriage. And I suffered through the 17 rejections that City of Glass got from New York publishers —a book which, just to brag, is now in 40 languages…
My main editor is my husband. I only show him complete drafts. And a year or two can go between the drafts. It’s not on a daily basis.
He’s more generous than I am. He likes to hear my feedback. And he’s a more efficient writer. He can do several books in his head at once—writing one book and thinking about the next—which I can’t do. I can have little seeds, little thoughts, but I’m just not good at that. He has much more finished versions to share with me than I do with him. So he’s really my first editor. Very brutal. That’s the pact.
(This short biography is based on published interviews with Siri Hustvedt, from various sources.)
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