Before I get to the book, allow me just a few comments on this blog.
This post is number 1,200 since I began posting weekly 22 years ago. More often than I'd like to admit, I'm repeating myself, saying things (maybe slightly differently) that I already said five, ten, twenty years ago.
When I catch myself doing this, it makes me think about posting less frequently, maybe on a less rigid schedule. Back in the days when blogs were more fashionable, it was conventional wisdom that posting with a reliable frequency was a must. But there are now lots of ways to announce a new post, and regularity may not be as important. What do you think?
Several people have suggested another idea: creating a book out of (a few of!) these 1,200 posts. Instead of unintentionally repeating myself, I could deliberately weave together those apparently important recurring themes into chapters.
I'm not under any pressure (that I know of) to decide these things, so on to today's comments on the first of my favorite books of summer 2026.
I've been reading Siri Hustvedt's novels for about thirty years. It took me a lot longer to get acquainted with Paul Auster. At some point I vaguely realized that Hustvedt and Auster were a married couple, but now, reading Ghost Stories: A Memoir, I'm finally getting a sense of what that marriage of two dedicated and celebrated writers contributed to each of them, and to us readers.
Both writers realized as teenagers that they wanted literature and writing to be at the center of their lives. The 43 years of their marriage covered the whole of Auster's life as a published writer. Hustvedt was also writing fiction and nonfiction that whole time, during which they were each other's intimate collaborators, in constant conversation.
Mostly, Paul and I talked to each other, in the house, on walks, and when we traveled together to one place or another. When we were apart, we talked on the telephone every night if we could. Our marriage was a dialogue, the precise wording of which is mostly lost to memory. I’m glad I saved his little notes to me, from the very first one—Dear S. I have recorded some of them in this book, my book of mourning him. Writing is action. Sentence by sentence, block of prose by block of prose, I have tried to bring something of the man back on the page, something of who he was for me.
Toward the end of this moving, sorrowful, sometimes playful, and endlessly affectionate book, after Siri Hustvedt describes and documents her husband's last months and days and moments, considers what immortality may or may not be, quotes Auster's letters to his then-grandbaby, reveals the tumultuous start of their relationship, and describes sensations of his presence happening even as she sits there writing...
... she says this:
And I say it again. Paul Auster, my husband of forty-three years, is dead, and I can’t get him back, not as I want him, not as a breathing, heart-beating, warm-as-a-furnace body in our bed, not as a fully visible man smiling that slight smile at me, the one touched by irony, the smile that was as good as an exaggerated wink across a room because I knew him. The Blue Team boy, that outstanding fellow who became a famous writer, is dead. But I’m alive, and I’m a creature of us, of AND, of Bartleby and the Princess on the Pea; of slapstick; demented luggage; the Plenum of Problems Theory; the organic model of erotic love; sea creatures and small whales. We wrote out the dreams we dreamed while we sat at our desks writing, and we read those dreams aloud to each other in the green chairs.
If not all of those references are immediately clear (for example, the "demented luggage" and "of AND"), they're all explained in turn in the preceding pages. May they help tempt you to read this beautiful memorial to an endlessly fertile love.
Paul Auster died on April 30, 2024.
On April 27, Paul said he wanted to come back as a ghost.
I am telling ghost stories.
Review of Ghost Stories: A Memoir in The Guardian.
PS: A book I've already reviewed, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, by historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, has now been released. My recommendation stands.
Here's a link to publisher's description of the book; and to Kristine Johnson's helpful review and road map.
Mimi Marstaller on refreshed Quaker practices with deep roots: "Here's what happened last Sunday," part one, at Portland (Maine) Friends Meeting. Part two: Zoom worship.
Sarah Thomas Baldwin on "How to belong at church." I've sometimes wondered about that myself....
We can exchange being known or belonging for fitting in. There’s a lot of “fitting in” in Christian circles. But fitting in means “I have to become more like you” in order to earn a place at the table.
Belonging means I can be me and still have a seat beside you.
Elderchaplain Greg Morgan: "We All Deserve Dignity."
J. Michael Luttig's warning to U.S. midterm voters and all defenders of democracy, via Heather Cox Richardson.
Climate Desk: The USA's Environmental "Protection" Agency has "announced a final plan Monday that guts the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards."
EPA spokespersons did not respond to a request for comment about what science they are using to support the claim that greenhouse gas emissions don’t contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.
Sue Foley, "Southern Men." (Recorded in Canada....)
