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
My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I'm aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy.
I have suffered from migraines since childhood and have long been curious about my own aching head, my dizziness, my divine lifting feelings, my sparklers and black holes, and my single visual hallucination of a little pink man and a pink ox on the floor of my bedroom.
Sleep resistance, bouts of insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, crawling into bed with parents in the middle of the night - all these are so common among children, it seems fair to call them 'normal.'
I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia, I have sometimes slept without knowing it.
Having children is one of the most passionate and involving bits of business in human life.
It is tempting to think of this form of insomnia, the inability to fall asleep, as a disease of agency and control: the inability to relinquish high self-reflexive consciousness for the vulnerable, ignorant regions of slumber in which we know not what we do.
In August of 2002, I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself - only its aftermath.
The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.
The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.
Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?
I saw Joseph Cornell's lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes.
Our great cultural error is to assume that 'truth' arrives only through reductive theories.
I watched 'Holiday' in college, and that was when I had my first fantasy of being Katharine Hepburn, standing at the top of the staircase in a huge Hollywood mansion.
If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'.