Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt

Summary

Intelligence Squared Podcast Summary

Episode: Love, Loss and Mourning Paul Auster, with Siri Hustvedt

Host: Maithili Rao
Guest: Siri Hustvedt
Date: May 16, 2026

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Overview

In this tender and penetrating episode, host Maithili Rao and celebrated novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt explore Hustvedt’s new memoir, Ghost Stories—a meditation on love, loss, mourning, and her 43-year marriage to the late Paul Auster. The discussion intertwines memories of courtship, the creative intimacy of partnership, trials with fame and tragedy, and the process of grieving and literary remembrance. Throughout, Hustvedt reflects on how love and grief shape not only individual lives but also the ongoing work of writing and remembering.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origins of a Love Story

[03:03]

• Siri recounts meeting Paul Auster at a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y, February 23, 1981, describing him as "absolutely beautiful" and recalling their immediate and intense connection.
• “I spent the next hours hanging in Paul’s vicinity, trying very hard to get his interest...and I could see that I had talked interest into that face.”—Siri Hustvedt [04:24]
• Their romance began that night, quickly turning into a lifelong partnership.

2. Early Challenges and the Role of Letters

[04:56] – [06:53]

• The early relationship had a brief rupture; letters Siri wrote during their break are woven into Ghost Stories. Hustvedt discusses her "embarrassment and tenderness" rereading them after Auster’s death.
• “The essential message was that I loved him. And I had a feeling that he loved me back.”—Siri Hustvedt [06:13]
• These private documents became a "private mythology" of their marriage.

3. Creative Partnership and Mutual Admiration

[07:44] – [10:07]

• Both began as obscure writers, supporting and critiquing each other’s work from the start, which formed the bedrock of their relationship.
• “If Paul and I had not admired, mutually admired the other person’s work, the marriage would have foundered.”—Siri Hustvedt [08:06]
• Hustvedt highlights navigating external media narratives that tried to subordinate her work to Auster’s fame.

4. Gender, Misogyny, and Public Perception

[10:07] – [12:48]

• Siri addresses being publicly cast as "Paul’s wife" or even an “aspiring model”—labels that misrepresented her scholarly achievements.
• “[The] aspiring model has followed me around for many, many years. My aspirations were rather puny and focused on trying to eat a little better than I was eating at the time.”—Siri Hustvedt [12:32]
• She discusses defending her identity in the face of reductive media coverage.

5. Literary Culture Then and Now

[12:48] – [15:12]

• Siri reflects on the romanticism of being an outsider artist in 1980s New York, contrasting it with contemporary metrics obsessed with popularity and followers.
• “The antidote is inner life...the power of books happens one person at a time.”—Siri Hustvedt [13:45]
• Auster viewed reading as "the place where two consciousnesses touch."

6. The Form of Ghost Stories and Writing Through Grief

[18:19] – [19:09]

• Hustvedt describes “cognitive splintering”—grieving as a fragmented sense of time influencing the experimental, collage-like structure of her memoir.
• Includes her own letters, memories, and Paul’s unfinished “Letters to Our Grandson Miles” to evoke the dialogic nature of their relationship.

7. Inclusion of Paul Auster’s Final Writing

[22:14] – [24:33]

• Incorporating Paul’s letters to Miles (their grandson) contextualizes his voice and family lore, making the book a multi-generational family story.

8. Addressing Family Tragedy

[24:33] – [27:36]

• The couple endured the loss of Paul’s son, Daniel, after a highly publicized family tragedy.
• “It would be utterly fraudulent to leave that out of the story... I wanted to give the readers something of Daniel.” —Siri Hustvedt [25:24]
• Hustvedt reflects on media sensationalism and insists on rendering Daniel as a full human being, not merely a character in a lurid news item.

9. Navigating Fame, Privacy, and Literary Honesty

[27:36] – [29:29]

• Hustvedt describes Auster’s embarrassment with fame and the risks of writing while imagining public reception.
• “If you begin to consider...how the book will be received, the book won’t be worth much.”—Siri Hustvedt [28:33]
• Both she and Auster resisted the temptation to pander to public or commercial expectations.

10. Caregiving, “It Goes Without Saying,” and Mature Love

[29:29] – [31:25]

• As Auster fell ill, Hustvedt refers to a Norwegian expression, “Die Skulle bar,” (roughly, “it goes without saying”), signifying the mutual, unquestioned care developed over decades.
• The phrase captures the implicit trust and responsibility that marked their marriage’s later years.

11. Personal Grief Meets Political Grief

[31:25] – [35:34]

• Hustvedt links her personal mourning with a sense of collective political dread, especially in the fraught times faced by America.
• “Private grief and grief for one’s own country can intermingle and increase each other, if you will.”—Siri Hustvedt [32:36]
• She stresses how maintaining daily routines and refusing to “be seduced by despair” provided vital structure and resilience.

12. Humor and the Commonality of Grief

[35:34] – [37:33]

• Even in deep mourning, Hustvedt relates finding humor, describing a moment when she found herself “in the bathtub with [her] socks still on.”
• “We are able to represent ourselves to ourselves as others. Once you gain the distance necessary, humor sneaks in.”—Siri Hustvedt [36:12]
• She emphasizes that grief, while deeply personal, is a universal human experience.

13. Two Models of Love: Mechanical vs. Organic

[37:33] – [40:35]

• Hustvedt outlines two philosophical models:
  • Mechanical: Like a car—repetitive, replaceable, unchanging.
  • Organic: Like a tree—dynamic, adaptive, changed by storms and experience.
• “The organic tree model is preferable in love relationship to the mechanical model, because you have to adjust to changed circumstances, to a new climate, to a missing limb... We are dynamic creatures, not static creatures.”—Siri Hustvedt [38:40]
• Hustvedt and Auster’s relationship exemplified this adaptive, evolving organic love.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Partnership:
  “If Paul and I had not admired, mutually admired the other person’s work, the marriage would have foundered.” — Siri Hustvedt [08:06]

• On Public Perception:
  “There’s a desire... in the way media approached my work.”—Siri Hustvedt [11:05]

• On the Power of Books:
  “Reading is the place where two consciousnesses touch.”—Paul Auster, as quoted by Siri Hustvedt [13:45]

• On Grieving and Routine:
  “Despair is not an option... All of that, even when I felt cognitively splintered, even when it was interrupted by bursting into tears, all of that helped me enormously.”—Siri Hustvedt [34:26]

• On Humor in Grief:
  “After I recovered from my shock of looking at those stocking feet, I burst out laughing... that sense of shared experience brings both humor and compassion for that suffering self. Because you know you’re not alone at all.”—Siri Hustvedt [35:48 – 36:56]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:03 | Siri meets Paul Auster at the 92nd Street Y | | 05:27 | Rereading and including early love letters | | 07:44 | The centrality of mutual literary admiration in their partnership | | 10:07 | Navigating public misogyny and reductive labels | | 13:30 | Reflections on outsider literary culture then vs. influencer culture now | | 18:19 | Writing through grief and choosing the form of Ghost Stories | | 22:14 | Including Paul’s letters to their grandson, Miles | | 24:33 | Discussing family tragedy: the loss of Paul’s son Daniel | | 27:36 | How fame changes the nature and risks of public grief | | 29:29 | Caregiving, marital trust, and the meaning of “It goes without saying” | | 31:25 | Intersecting personal and political grief | | 35:34 | Humor and the universality of grief | | 37:33 | Siri explains the two models of love: mechanical vs. organic |

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Final Reflection

Siri Hustvedt’s conversation with Maithili Rao is a moving meditation on memory, partnership, public scrutiny, writing, and grief. Gifted with striking openness and a philosopher’s insight, Hustvedt offers listeners both a portrait of Paul Auster the man and a map for navigating the ambiguities of loss. She closes with a vision of love as something that grows and adapts—rooted in daily acts and ongoing mutual transformation.

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Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt is available now.

Transcript

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[Mia Sorrenti]

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. On today's episode, the novelist, essayist and poet Siri Hutzfed sits down with Maithili Rao to discuss her new book, Ghost Stories. It's a deeply personal reflection and memoir on mourning, memory and her life with the late writer Paul Auster. Let's join our host, Maitha Lee Rao, now with more.

[Maithili Rao]

Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Maitha Lee Rao. Today I'm honored to be speaking to Siri about her new book, Ghost Stories. Welcome to Intelligence Squared.

[Siri Husfut]

Thank you so much for having me, Siri.

[Maithili Rao]

I first just want to offer my condolences for your loss. I first read your husband's writing more than 20 years ago when I first moved to New York, and I will always associate his work with New York and the wonderful formative years I spent there. Ghost Stories is a remarkable book. It's about grief, but it also feels like a very tender gift to the reader. You you bring the reader into your home, into your marriage. You introduce them to Paul the person, Paul the father, Paul the partner, someone you shared 43 years with someone who deeply adored you and always championed your work. Paul, you write, wanted me and my work to be seen unobscured by his shadow. And I think what's special about this book is that it shares not just how you saw him, but how he saw you, who you were in your life together, how and how that whole was greater than the sum of its parts. So, just to start from the beginning, can you describe how you met him? Just because it is a lovely, wonderful story that also gets us right back to where Cyri and Paul begin.

[Siri Husfut]

I was a graduate student at Columbia. It was February 23, 1981. I went to a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Street Y with a fellow graduate student, a friend of mine, and we were going to hear Anne Louterbach, a poet I admire, read her poems, which we did. And when my friend and I left the poetry reading after it was over, I caught sight of this absolutely beautiful man standing inside the entrance to the Y, wearing a leather jacket, hunched over, very inward looking, smoking either a little cigar or a cigarette, I cannot remember which. And I said to my friend, you don't know who that is, do you? And he said, yes, that's Paul Auster, the poet. And I said, introduce us right now. And he did. And then I spent the next hours hanging in Paul's vicinity, trying very hard to get his interest. We did talk that evening for hours and hours and hours. And rather late that night, I looked across the table. We were at a bar in Tribeca, and I could see that I had talked interest into that face.

[Maithili Rao]

By sheer force of will.

[Siri Husfut]

Just my perseverance paid off, and I did. I took him home that night. And that was the beginning of our. What turned out to be a very long love affair.

[Maithili Rao]

It turned out to be a very long love affair. But in the beginning, there was a break. And soon after you got together, Paul broke things off that wound up being temporary. And there are many letters that make their way into this book, and among them are some letters you wrote during the breakup. They reflect the fact that you've been experimenting with automatic writing. They show you smitten, confident, hopeful, trying to win Paul back. How did you feel rereading these letters, and why did you decide to include them?

[Siri Husfut]

Well, you know, because these letters became part of the private mythology of our marriage together. Every once in a while, Paul would say, would you like to see those letters, Siri? And I inevitably said, absolutely not. Very worried about encountering my young self and her silliness. But after he died, I realized that I Did want to see the letters. And it was part of the. What I think of as the documentary aspect or quality of the book that I do reproduce letters. Notes that I remembered, of course, having written, but I did not remember them verbatim. So my response to those letters was a mixture of embarrassment and tenderness. In other words, I did feel a kind of tenderness for that old self. And it turns out that it's good I wrote them because the essential message was that I loved him. And I had a feeling that he loved me back. So once that was declared, I think it was vital to the ongoing relationship that we had.

[Maithili Rao]

I recently went to see a local production of Noel Coward's very first play, which is called the Rat Trap. It's about two writers who get together very young with big ambitions for their careers. They get married. The institution of marriage and the world, with its oppressive ideas about gender, kind of close in on them. The man's career takes off, the woman stalls. It destroys them. That's not at all what happened with you and Paul. And the partnership you depict in this book is something very rare and beautiful. You write that you wanted the best for each other's books and that this book is the first book of yours that Paul didn't read before it was published. Can you describe a little bit what wanting the best for each other's books looked like in action? I almost got the sense that it started with those letters you exchanged with each other and the way words were a big part of how you connected.

[Siri Husfut]

Yes. And I have thought of this, that if Paul and I had not admired. Mutually admired the other person's work, the marriage would have foundered. So I felt extremely nervous when he handed me his poems, the poems he had published by then, and the first half of the Invention of Solomon. Because I thought, if I don't like this work, I don't think. I don't think there's anywhere to go. But I admired it very much. And I. Well, was eight years younger than Paul and had published a couple of poems and literary magazines. Not much, but I did have about 100 pages of a manuscript of poems. And he read them. And I knew that he respected and admired the work. So that was the foundation. And you have to remember that even though Paul did indeed become famous as a writer when he was about 40. He was 34 when I met him, and we lived through 18 rejections of his first novel, City of Glass. And his reputation, if you will, didn't take off until he was 40. So we were both obscure writers. When we met, and I think the memory of that and living through each other's writing lives together makes quite a difference. There were many people who assumed that I met Paul after he was Paul Auster, a known writer. But that actually isn't true. And I do want to say that the Noel Coward scenario could have been ours if Paul hadn't been so supportive and generous about my work, because, as I said, I was younger. But also, there was a lot of sexism and misogyny in the way media and the press approached my work.

[Maithili Rao]

It's something that you write about in ways that I found so interesting, because you tease out the specific incidences where there's an interview and maybe a line about you or you are being introduced somewhere and described as Paul's wife. And it's interesting the way that it's a narrative that would assert itself from outside, because that wasn't how you experienced your career or your life at all. And this narrative is about making sure the woman keeps her place in the order of things, as you put it. How did you manage that and not let it corrode or invade either your work or your marriage?

[Siri Husfut]

Well, I tried to indicate that. It's not as if I wasn't irritated, and it's not as if, when push came to shove, I didn't defend myself at those moments. Mostly I did. I think in the very early days, I was so gobsmacked by what was happening, I was speechless. But, you know, listen, this goes on. I mean, I think in a review in the Times, I was described as an aspiring model. I was a graduate student at Columbia who did get her PhD, you know, in 1986. So there's something. There's a desire.

[Maithili Rao]

Did you ever dabble in modeling, or was that just a complete she's tall?

[Siri Husfut]

I did. And actually, even in the book, there was a moment in graduate school. I was so poor, I was stopped on the street by a photographer who turned out to be completely legitimate. And he sent photographs he took of me to the Ford Agency. And for about two minutes, I thought maybe I could make some money, you know, doing some modeling. It turned out that they wanted me to go to Paris and, you know, walk in the shows. But of course, that was impossible. I think I was. I was still taking classes for my degree. And that was the beginning and the end of that desire to make some money on the sag, which I never did. No.

[Maithili Rao]

But that's what wound up in. In the initial.

[Siri Husfut]

Well, yes. Then the aspiring model has followed me around for many, many years, my aspirations were rather puny and focused on trying to eat a little better than I was eating at the time.

[Maithili Rao]

I want to spend a little more time kind of setting the scene of this world you inhabited in the 80s together. And you write that at the time, as you just mentioned, something that drew you together was this idea of the artist as an outsider and the romance in some ways of that obscurity. I'm going to read a little bit from the book. You said an idea of a literary avant garde still flickered as a weak flame among writers in New York City. Back then, commercial success wasn't necessarily a badge of honor. In an age of influencers and cliques, the idea has little traction. So now we're in this world where success is measured in followers. What is the antidote to that?

[Siri Husfut]

Well, I think in some way the antidote is inner life. Paul and I shared our inner lives in some way and a sense of commitment to work that wasn't necessarily hugely popular and a feeling that art does have power. And that power, especially in books, happens one person at a time. You know, Paul used to say that reading is the place where two consciousnesses touch. And I would say it's also where two consciousnesses and unconsciousnesses touch can touch in absolute privacy and intimacy. And that experience of reading is not gone. And I find when I meet readers, of course it's usually people who have read a book by me that that intimacy continues one to one. And yes, we're all influenced by cultural perception we can't free ourselves from. At the same time, I think growing, if you will, making your inner world grow can help defend against some of that pressure.

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[Maithili Rao]

without Oscar Mayer and Heinz. In the early part of the book, you try to draw a picture of your experience of grief, losing your husband and this person who, as you've described, was your sparring partner, your reading partner, your writing partner in some ways, in that you shared drafts with each other, you call it a cognitive splintering, and you wonder how to articulate the abyss without also falling into the abyss. The form of this book is unusual. How did you approach the way to tell this story and the way to write about what you're experiencing?

[Siri Husfut]

Yes, the form Appeared, the title came. And then I realized that I had a desire to go back into the written materials so that they would form a kind of collage. And it is related to what I talk about very early in the book. In the first. In the second paragraph, that time was fragmented for me, I had a completely other radically changed sense of time. And I thought, how is this going to be presented in the book? Well, of course, we all remember in the present. The act of memory always takes place in the present. But it's a form of recovery of the past. So by putting these documents into the book, I was able to move from one time to another. And that represents a form of splintering that is part of our ordinary memory. But there is a timeline from May to the following March that also exists in the book so the reader can keep tabs on when I'm writing. So there's the time of writing, there's the time of memory. There's recovering these documents that are immediate to the time that they were written. And I think, for me, that worked as a form. It's also not written in paragraphs, but in blocks of prose. So between those blocks of prose, I wanted to give the reader air, if you will, air to make a transition. But it is an organic form. And then a very important ingredient is the book that Paul was working on before he died. Letters to our grandson Miles, that he hoped would be a book of 100 to 200 pages, but he couldn't finish it. He managed to write 35 pages. I put those also into the book. There was a moment early on when I thought I would have them as a block inside the text. And then I realized that didn't work, that I needed to contextualize some of the letters and that if they were interspersed, you know, between sections of my prose, that the dialogical or the dialogic nature of our marriage would be reproduced in the book as well. So my voice, then Paul's voice, two different kinds of prose. And so I felt my way forward. I knew these ingredients had to be included, but I felt my way forward.

[Maithili Rao]

Let me talk a little bit more about these letters. Because like you said, they create this conversation between your voice and his. They're also doing something a little different from what your sections of the book are doing, which yours are. Remembering Paul, remembering you and Paul together, writing about this loss. And the letters Paul has written to your grandson Miles are both looking to the future and also sharing some lore and sharing some essential facts about Miles, parents and grandparents. I would not have initially thought that they were a natural fit for this book. When did it occur to you that, yes, they belong in here?

[Siri Husfut]

Well, I think I wondered, I mean, soon after he died, I wondered what, what to do with these letters. I mean, they could certainly go among his papers. There weren't enough to really produce any kind of printed book. It could have been a little chapbook, you know, the very last writing of Paul Auster. But I realized that if they were put into this larger book, which is in many ways also a family story with its terrible aspects and its beautiful ones. So Paul writing to an imaginary future. Miles, a literate, more grown up person who's able to take in the information about the family and Paul's great love, I think, for me, for his daughter Sophie, for his son in law, Spencer, all of that comes across intimately in those letters. So he was able, in the context of my larger book, to communicate something about who he was without my telling the reader.

[Maithili Rao]

I haven't yet asked you about the other tragedy that took place in your lives before Paul was diagnosed with cancer. The diagnosis came after what you describe as a horrible time. Not even a difficult time, a really horrible time. And in 2022, your stepson Daniel Paulson, from his first marriage to the writer Lydia Davis, died of a drug overdose. He was out on bail after being charged in the death of his 10 month old daughter Ruby, who had died a few months earlier from heroin and fentanyl exposure. There are so many happy memories in this book, but also this enormous, dark tragedy. Yes, yes.

[Siri Husfut]

And I think I realized that my urge, my profound need, if you will, to write about what was happening to me, but also to write about Paul, that my resurrection urge, if you will, to bring something of Paul back. It would be utterly fraudulent to leave that out of the story. At the same time, I didn't want that gruesome story, and it truly is. Paul called it the horrible Things. I didn't want the horrible things to overwhelm what also existed with them, which was our great love for each other and Paul's great love for his daughter and then his son in law and his love for Daniel. But he couldn't trust Daniel. He was an addict. But he had had difficulties from very early on. And I decided that without, you know, turning the book into that story, I wanted to give the readers something of Daniel. And when I was unearthing all my papers and I found a comic that he had made, quite a good one. He was very gifted person and a very gifted photographer. I felt that Daniel could Say something in his own voice and give the reader a sense of this human being. Because the media attention to this story turned everyone involved, I think, into, or some of us anyway, into monstrous beings. And this is really rarely the case. So that was my method, if you will, of turning a lurid and gruesome story, genuinely gruesome, into something that also has real human dimensions.

[Maithili Rao]

The fame that Paul experienced in his life was something you both grew used to dealing with and kind of working around. And you describe Paul as being embarrassed by it, by the groupies, by the super fans, by the invitation to be in a Japanese beef commercial. But then, of course, when Daniel's story is in the paper, suddenly this fame has a whole other side, where there are tabloid photographers waiting outside your house and, like you said, clamoring for every lurid detail. Has that changed how you write about your personal life or how you think about what parts of your story to share with the world? It sounds like something you've always been quite conscious of.

[Siri Husfut]

You know, my sense is this, and it's always been my sense when I'm working on a book, is that if you begin to consider or think about how the book will be received, the book won't be worth much. So I do at times worry once I've finished a book, I think, oh, my God, what's going to happen here? And I have to calm my nerves. But while I'm writing, that is not the case. I think it can ruin writers. And I have never felt that. How shall I put it? This is harsh, but pandering to what one imagines will be accepted in some popular way is going to do your writing any good. And Paul felt the same way.

[Maithili Rao]

In addition to writing about his loss and the grief, you also write about the months after he was diagnosed, where you were taking care of him and you're going to lots of doctors and you're navigating the diagnosis and potential treatment together. And there's a Norwegian expression used in this section of the book which roughly translates to. It goes without saying. Can you explain that phrase and what it meant in your marriage and in this phase of the marriage in particular?

[Siri Husfut]

Yes, I think by that time in our marriage, I couldn't have said that. Early on, even after we were first married, we didn't know what we would become. We didn't know what, as I say in the book, the and would be the Paul and Ceres, Syria and Paul, how that end would develop. But by the time Paul fell ill, I don't think there was any question between us that the other, whoever the other was, if I had fallen ill, I know Paul would have done everything in his power to help me through it. And because I knew that and he knew it on the other side, that little Norwegian expression, which is Die Skulle bar, which means. It should only lack a strange translation, but yes, it means. But of course there's no question. But there was no question because of what had been created between us over all those years.

[Maithili Rao]

Towards the end of this book, you turn your attention to the political moment we're in and how it feels to witness America's unraveling as you're in mourning and you write. I can't measure the degree to which Paul's death has increased both my political dread and my sense of powerlessness, but I know it has. The grieving want the impossible. We want the dead back in our lives. Political grief arrives from the same sense of futility. How can all those people vote for him? What can I do? One thing you do to ward off the futility is write this book, obviously. Can you talk a little bit about what you've learned about the connection between political dread and personal grief, where they intersect?

[Siri Husfut]

Yes, it's. It was interesting. I tell a little story about making dinner. I was making dinner for Sophie and Spencer and little Miles, who were coming over, and I had the radio on while I was cooking, and I opened the refrigerator and reached for fennel in the refrigerator to take it out and chop it. And We Shall Overcome, the great civil rights anthem, came on the radio, and I started to sob and I tried to analyze what's going on. Was I, you know, We Shall Overcome? Was I crying for myself? Was it a kind of selfish breakdown because of that text? Or was I crying for the Republic? And I'm still not sure. I think private grief and grief for one's own country can intermingle and increase the other, if you will. And we often we do not separate so neatly as we would like to our emotional responses. I knew very well when I saw animal crackers that I had bought for Paul at Memorial Sloan Kettering, the hospital where he was being treated, that I was sobbing for my dead husband. But with We Shall Overcome, I thought this is where the private and the public mingle. And had Paul been alive, I would have had my ally in political talk and thinking, and he was gone. So I think, and I felt about private grief and public grief, that despair is not an option. Despair can become seductive when you're grieving. You just give it up, you know, it's like, oh, you know, it's too much. But that, as you said earlier, that movement toward the abyss is hugely dangerous. And I found ways by holding to the scaffolding, the routines, the forms of my life. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, waking up at the same time, going to bed at the same time, continuing to read, continuing to work. All of that, even when I felt cognitively splintered, even when it was interrupted by bursting into tears, all of that helped me enormously. And I have continued to stick to those forms and not to be seduced by despair that ruins people.

[Maithili Rao]

I think also you find the humor where it is to be found. I was remembering a passage where you wind up in the bathtub with your socks still on in a state of grief. That's also very funny.

[Siri Husfut]

It's hilarious. And I have to tell you, after I recovered from my shock of looking at those stocking feet, I burst out laughing. And during these two years of mourning, Paul and I actively mourn Paul every day. There have been any number of times when here alone in the house, I just burst out. I don't know. I think this is a wonderful thing about human life, that we are able to represent ourselves to ourselves as others. And once you gain the distance necessary for that representation, humor sneaks in. And also, I do want to say about grief that if you have the capacity to love and if you live long enough, you will grieve. This is not an extraordinary event in life. It is part of many, many, many people's lives. And that sense of shared experience brings both humor and compassion for that suffering self. Because you know you're not alone at all. This is so common. It's an ordinary business, but it happens to be an ordinary business that includes extreme emotions.

[Maithili Rao]

So I want to end on an idea you share in the book about two models of love, mechanical and organic, one like a car, one like a tree. Can you explain these models in a little more detail and what they meant to you?

[Siri Husfut]

Yes. So I was 23 years old, living in New York, my first year in New York, and I was reading a lot of 18th and 19th century philosophy at the time. So these two models have roots. But I was also having what I think of now as a mechanical love affair. The difference is this. In the machine model, say a car, there's no perpetual motion machine. Eventually the machinery breaks down. It can be replaced. But the way you do that is you replace a part, and it has to be the same part. In other words, the overall design of the machine doesn't change. So a mechanical love affair. People repeat over and over the same motions. And out of those motions you do get, I think, arousal and excitement. You know, you think of the elusive lover. That's a very good one. You know, one chases and the other runs and then there's a back and forth and it's all very exciting. But eventually the car runs out of gas. The organic model is something else because it grows and blooms and thrives and then a storm comes along and severs a limb. If that tree survives the storm, the limb does not grow back in the same way. It grows back in another way. And I think that's why the organic tree model is preferable in love relationship to the mechanical model, because you have to adjust to changed circumstances, to a new climate, to a missing limb. And I do feel that over time, Paul and I managed to do that, not without some difficulty adjusting to the person who is always becoming that you live with. You know, we are dynamic creatures, not static creatures, and we go on changing until we die. So when I was 23, I already believed in the organic model and I still do. So that young person and this old person of 71 are together on that thinking.

[Maithili Rao]

Siri, thank you so much. That was Siri Husfut, author of Ghost Stories, available now in bookshops and online. I'm Maitha Lee Rao. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

[Mia Sorrenti]

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a [e-mail] membership and if you'd like to join us at future live events, you can find our full program and buy tickets [e-mail] attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

[Siri Husfut]

Foreign.

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