Mourning becomes Siri Hustvedt
At 6.58 p.m. on 30 April 2024, Siri Hustvedt’s husband of 43 years, the novelist Paul Auster, died of cancer in the library of their Brooklyn home. He was surrounded by family, including his adored daughter Sophie, who three months earlier had given birth to his first grandson, Miles. Hustvedt and Auster met at a poetry reading in 1981 and married later that year. It was she who proposed to him. Auster, aged 34, was not yet famous and Hustvedt, aged 26, was still a graduate student. By the 1990s, when she too became a novelist, they were New York literary royalty. In the 1970s, Auster had been married to the translator and short story writer Lydia Davis, with whom he had a son called Daniel. If Sophie was a summer’s day, Daniel was darkness.
