Siri Hustvedt
Hustvedt was born in Northfield, Minnesota. Her father Lloyd Hustvedt was a professor of Scandinavian literature, and her mother Ester Vegan emigrated from Norway at the age of thirty. She holds a B.A. in history from St. Olaf College and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University; her thesis on Charles Dickens was entitled Figures of Dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend.
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.
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 facits 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 (see "Essay collections") and painting and painters often appear in her fiction, most notably, perhaps, in her novel, What I Loved.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, writer Paul Auster, and their daughter, singer and actress Sophie Auster.
“Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.”
“We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.”
“Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.”
“Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question.”
“The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.”
“Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.”
“Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.”
“The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.”
“Memory changes as a person matures.”
“It seems to me that going backward sometimes means going forward.”
“Worries about the power of a doctor's suggestions to influence and shape his patient's mind, whether they are made under hypnosis or not, are still with us.”
“There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.”
“Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.”
“Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.”
“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”
“I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.”
“That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.”
“Jede Geschichte, die wir über uns erzählen, kann nur in der Vergangenheit erzählt werden. Sie spult sich von dort, wo wir heute stehen, nach rückwärts ab, und wir sind nicht mehr ihre Akteure, sondern ihre Zuschauer, die sich entschieden haben zu sprechen. Manchmal ist die Spur hinter uns mit Steinen markiert, wie die, die Hänsel hinter sich fallen ließ. Dann wieder ist die Fährte fort, weil bei Sonnenaufgang die Vögel herabgeflogen sind und alle Krumen aufgepickt haben.”
“In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.”
“The second anniversary opened an internal crack in Sonia, a fissure through which she released the explosive feeling that had horrified her for two years. The conflagration that had burned so many, that had pushed people into the open air, onto the ledges from which they jumped, some of them on fire, had left its unspeakable images inside my niece. ...Sonia didn't want a world in which buildings fell down and wars were fought for no reason.”
“I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.”
“I've come to think of consciousness as a continuum of states, from fully awake cogitation to daydreaming to the altered consciousness of hallucinations and dreams. Still, interpreting dreams can only take place when we're awake. I believe meaning is what the mind makes and wants. It's essential to perception and to consciousness in all its forms. But the important meanings of psychotherapy are subjective. There's a lot of research that confirms that drem content reflects the dreamer's emotional conflicts.”