Siri Hustvedt on the Value in Embracing Ambiguity

When Siri Hustvedt was 12 years old, she began reading 19th-century novels by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain that were given to her by her Norwegian mother, and soon developed a passion for literature. She found great satisfaction in how these stories expanded her mind with new ideas and realms beyond. At 13, precociously enough, she decided she wanted to become a writer. Her interest in developing what she calls a “flexibility of mind” led her to eventually reading and studying works in a wide range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. Through her essays, poems, fiction, and nonfiction over the past five decades, Hustvedt’s aim has become clear: to bring together perspectives that might help her—and those who read her work—see the world differently.

Hustvedt’s efforts to break down barriers and build a diversity of knowledge have steered her toward an array of topics. Upon moving from her hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, to New York City in 1978 to attend Columbia University, from which she earned her Ph.D. in English literature, she worked as a waitress, a researcher for a medical historian, a model, and an artist’s assistant. She went on to write seven novels, including the international bestseller What I Loved (2004) and The Blazing World (2014), the latter of which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction in 2014. Since 1995, Hustvedt has written extensively about art and what comes from looking deeply at it, unpacking works ranging from Johannes Vermeer’s “Woman with a Pearl Necklace” (1662–1664) to the photorealistic paintings of Gerhard Richter​​. 

Often, Hustvedt’s subject matter comes to her because it hits close to home. In her 2010 book The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves, she investigated the violent tremors that she first experienced in 2006 while delivering her father’s eulogy. Hustvedt (who with her husband, the novelist Paul Auster, has a daughter, the singer-songwriter Sophie Auster) has also long been interested in the peculiarities of motherhood, and more recently, the placenta, a subject she plans to explore at length in a future book. 

On this episode, Hustvedt talks with Spencer about the mysteries and misunderstandings around gestation, maternity, and being a mother; books as friends; and the problems with putting up walls between disciplines.

Show notes:

• Full Transcript
• sirihustvedt.net
• [05:01] Mothers, Fathers, and Others (2021)
• [47:53] A Plea for Eros (2005)
• [53:24] “The Future of Literature: The Anatomy of the Novel” (2017)
• [01:03:31] The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves (2010)