Hustvedt, Siri 1955–

PERSONAL: Surname is pronounced "Hus-tvet"; born February 19, 1955, in Northfield, MN; daughter of Lloyd (a professor) and Ester (Vegan) Hustvedt; married Paul Auster (a writer), June 16, 1982; children: Daniel (stepson), Sophie. Education: St. Olaf College, B.A., 1977; Columbia University, M.A., 1979, Ph.D., 1986. Politics: Democrat.

ADDRESSES: Home—Brooklyn, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Picador, 175 5th Ave., New York, NY 10010.

CAREER: Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Prix des Libraires du Quebec, 2003, for What I Loved.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Blindfold, Poseidon Press (New York, NY), 1992.

The Enchantment of Lily Dahl: A Novel, Random House (New York, NY), 1996.

What I Loved: A Novel, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2003.

ESSAY COLLECTIONS

Yonder: Essays, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 1998.

Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, Princeton Architectural Press (New York, NY), 2005.

A Plea for Eros: Essays, Picador (New York, NY), 2006.

OTHER

Reading to You (poems), Station Hill Press (Barrytown, NY), 1983.

(Translator, with David McDuff) Geir Kjetsaa, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer's Life, Viking (New York, NY), 1987.

(Translation editor) Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Michel Feher, Parts I-III, Zone (Cambridge, MA), 1989.

Contributor to anthologies, including The Paris Review Anthology, edited by George Plimpton, Norton (New York, NY), 1990; Best American Short Stories, 1990, edited by Richard Ford, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1990; and Best American Short Stories, 1991, edited by Alice Adams, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1991. Contributor to periodicals, including the Modern Painters, La Nouvelle Observateur, Die Zeit, Observer, Dagbladet, Paris Review, and Fiction.

ADAPTATIONS: The Enchantment of Lily Dahl: A Novel was adapted for audio cassette, read by the author, Airplay, 1996; The Blindfold was adapted into a film, La Chambre des Magiciennes, by Claude Miller; The Blindfold was adapted as a play by Gabriela Izcovich, 2006.

SIDELIGHTS: Siri Hustvedt is the author of several novels and books of essays, as well as a volume of poetry. She has known that she wanted to be a writer since she was a teenager, even declaring her intentions in a profile written in her small hometown newspaper in Minnesota when she was fourteen years old. Through her teens and early twenties, Hustvedt wrote poetry, publishing the first poem she submitted to the Paris Review at the age of twenty-three. After becoming blocked while trying to write a book of poetry, Hustvedt began writing prose and did not return to verse.

Hustvedt told Robert Birnbaum on the Web site Identity Theory: "My first two books are in a way initiation books about very young women." Both The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl: A Novel also focus on central characters who are not unlike the author herself in some way. The Blindfold is based on what the author experienced when she moved to New York City as a graduate student at Columbia University, but with a darker twist. The Enchantment of Lily Dahl looks at the emerging life of a teenage girl in a small town in the Midwest, through bizarre events. The novel was inspired by the author's own hometown.

For her next novel, she wanted to write about a male protagonist. In What I Loved: A Novel, Hustvedt focuses on the lives of two friends, narrator and art historian Leo Herzberg and artist Bill Wechsler, and their families. They traverse the New York art and academic worlds over the course of a quarter century. Many major and minor losses occur, coloring life for Leo and allowing Hustvedt to study grief. As the plot of the novel unfolds, the author also explores topics such as personal identity and social relations. Don McLeese of Book acknowledged: "What I Loved, like its predecessors, is overflowing with ideas, yet it has such an engrossing pull the reader feels immersed in nothing less than the richness of life itself."

One collection of Hustvedt's essays, A Plea for Eros: Essays, contains personal and literary pieces. The autobiographical essays focus on ideas explored in her novels, such as the definition of self, memory, and living in New York City. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted: "Her clear, elegant writing is particularly effective in the opening essay ["Yonder"], which movingly evokes a variety of formative experiences." Describing the collection as a whole, a Kirkus Reviews critic wrote: "As accomplished and intelligent as the author's ficiton—which is saying a lot."

Hustvedt once told CA: "I think The Blindfold was generated by a fear of secrets. Any encounter between people carries vast unspoken material, and it was this content I hoped to get close to, circle, push at in the novel. The place between the narrator, Iris, and the other characters in the book is what determines both events and identities. Iris is made through the eyes of others, as, I think, we all are. Her lot is particular: she is poor, young, and plagued by an unstable nervous system. Despite the fact that her behavior on occasion veers into the pathological, I don't regard her as a bizarre person. Alone and single, Iris looks for a fixed point of reference—a truth in which to ground herself—but can't find it. The world slips and slides beneath her. Her sexual identity shifts as well. She courts the attentions of men and hides from them, finally playing out her own erotic ambiguity by disguising herself as a boy, Klaus, the character in a German novella she has translated with the professor she loves. Klaus is a fiction that takes hold of her, and in a real way is her. But every character in the book is a storyteller: Mr. Morning, the recluse who saves the objects of a murdered girl and asks Iris to describe them; George, the photographer who roams the city stealing pictures; Stephen, Iris's fickle lover; the gossips at the university who spread rumors; Professor Rose who reveals fragments of his obsession with evil; even the devastated Mrs. O., with whom Iris shares a hospital room. All these people are moved by fictions of their own which infect Iris, influencing her thoughts and actions. I suppose the mystery of the novel is the omnipresent sense of not knowing: that both the self and others are ultimately enigmatic."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Book, March-April, 2003, Don McLeese, "Body Double," review of What I Loved: A Novel, p. 72.

Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2005, review of A Plea for Eros: Essays, p. 1063.

Publishers Weekly, March 24, 2003, Wendy Smith, "Siri Hustvedt; Art, Ibsen, Brooklyn," interview with Siri Hustvedt, p. 53; October 3, 2005, review of A Plea for Eros, p. 58.

ONLINE

Identity Theory, http://www.identitytheory.com/ (November 7, 2005), Robert Birnbaum, interview with Siri Hustvedt.