Siri Hustvedt

I had a lot of them. Not everything went in, but there were actually two essay collections printed. One on painting and then one on various other subjects.

It does seem to be that we definitely have a divided country. But if you think American culture has always had a very strong strain of Puritanism and revivalism. It’s pretty old and I think every once in awhile it goes on its upswing. Of course the whole book is not really about sex. There’s a very long essay on Dickens, for example, that’s not really about sexuality. But certainly some of the essays certainly touch on that.

I think wearing a corset is something that most people don’t do anymore. It’s not an everyday garment. There has been so much anti-corset feelings even during the period because doctors were very alarmed about the corset, but a lot of women were attached to it. By wearing it for eight days on that movie set, I understood why. It’s like a permanent embrace. There’s something very nice about wearing a corset, especially if your stays aren’t pulled too tight.

I don’t know anyone who wears a corset every day. I have no knowledge of any such person. But certainly fashion goes in and out and there are what you call dresses or clothes that use corset-like apparatus.

The Great Gatsby is a book that I love. That essay was printed first in Conjunctions, a literary magazine for a series called American Writers on American Writers. There were a lot of writers who had already picked their person but it turned out that no one had picked Fitzgerald. So I was absolutely delighted to write about The Great Gatsby because it really is a hugely important American book.

Yonder is really a book about memory. It’s really a long essay about memory, about making images through the memories of other people. In some way a lot of the essays I wrote are stories of the self, or what does it mean to have a self. I think that Yonder is part of that. Memory is a very important way of building what you think of as a story of the self. For me, there are things that are quite continuous. But some of the things we remember are not entirely accurate. We create narratives or stories for ourselves and edit them in our minds. We don’t remember everything either. It’s a pretty deep, philosophical question, why do people become who they are? It’s a question that I’m thinking about all the time. I live with an idea of a certain continuous person with my name who was born where I was born and has a particular story. Obviously that story has influenced who I am now. So there are things that are the same and some things that are different. Obviously if I hadn’t moved to New York, my life would’ve been different. If I hadn’t married the person I married, etc., etc., if I hadn’t had a child. All of these things would’ve made my life different. But at the same time, I feel there’s a certain real continuity. I can remember even when I was a child, that I don’t feel that I’m recalling someone wholly different from myself now.

I’m deep in one actually. This one also has quite a bit to do with memory and childhood. I’ve been doing a lot of research because the narrator is a psychiatrist. I actually went to a brain group, which is where neuroscientists and psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are trying to tease out the questions of what are brains are and what influence it has on psychiatric illness.

I teach a writing class to in-patients at Payne Whitney, which is a New York hospital. So that’s one part of my research. Then I’ve met people both in the neuroscience and the psychiatric community, some of whom have become friends. Sometimes I attend the conferences.

They’re finding out a great deal more about how the brain works than they ever have before and that there’s a huge amount of questions that they still have no answers to. For example, scientifically nobody knows why we sleep or why we dream. That’s a big mystery and there’s a lot of controversy about it and they’re doing a lot of research, but there are no hard and fast answers.

My husband’s making a movie in Portugal and I’m going to go over there to see him for the end of the shoot.

Yeah, but we took our names off of that movie. But I think a screenplay is one of the few things that is a very good collaborative form, because it’s dialogue. It’s the bones of something. That’s something I wouldn’t mind collaborating with him again just because it’s fun. Screenplays aren’t like novels, where I really would never want to collaborate with anyone, somehow it’s a very solitary form. With a screenplay, you can edit each other and it’s all dialogue and so having two people working on it together makes a lot of sense.

[laughs] I think that’s a very funny and sweet answer. Listen, it’s always good if you can avoid fights. I think that’s something important. Sometimes fighting is good. Sometimes it’s good to say what you mean and if it creates a conflict, then you have to go from there. But I’ve been married for almost 25 years and over time you do learn modes of interaction with your spouse that minimize conflict. That is one of the benefits of being married for a long time.

We are each other’s first reader. We always have been. Of course I decide when I want him to look at it. We’re absolutely truthful and sometimes even brutal about the work. I think it’s because we have a sense that I am really writing for him and he is doing the same for me. We want the best for the work so I trust him implicitly. He’s a great and very sensitive reader and I think I am too. So we trust each other’s commentary and edits.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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