Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedtis an American novelist and essayist. Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, six novels, two books of essays, and several works of non-fiction. Her books include: The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, for which she is best known, A Plea for Eros, The Sorrows of an American, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, The Summer Without Men, Living, Thinking, Looking, and The Blazing World. What I Loved and The...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 February 1955
CityNorthfield, MN
CountryUnited States of America
It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering!
Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.
While reading 'David Copperfield' in the middle of the night - probably because of the light, I had insomnia for the first time - I looked out of the window and thought, 'If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do.'
When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and immobilizing lows appeared to be textbook descriptions of classic bipolar disorder. I met other patients who had been diagnosed with myriad disorders. No doctor seemed to agree about what they actually suffered from.
American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me.
I was 13 when I had my first bout of insomnia. My family was in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the summer, and day never really became night.
Children are not in a position to assess risk and safety; it must be done for them, and it must be done carefully.
Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science departments.
As one of four daughters, I grew up with an imaginary brother - wondering what it would have been like if one of us had been a boy. There's no question that there was a phantom boy child in my imagination when I was young.
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.
Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.
I have not been diagnosed with epilepsy. I did have an MRI of the brain, and they found no abnormalities in my brain. Now, there are people with epilepsy who have completely normal MRI's, too. I just think also, you know, epileptic seizures can be triggered by emotional stress, by all kinds of things, lights.
Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future.