Hush now

Siri Hustvedt has a confession - sometimes in her dreams she is a man. Gender-bending fantasies are hardly risque. But you don't expect them from the likes of Hustvedt (pronounced Hoost-vedt), whose Nordic beauty makes her the very picture of femininity. At 1.83metres tall, with the rake-thin physique, full lips and angular cheekbones of a fashion model, she's the kind of flaxen bombshell that publishers fawn over.

But dreams are rarely frivolous, as Hustvedt - a long-time admirer of Freud - would surely concede. 'I've often wished that I never showed my face and that no one knew whether I was a man or a woman,' Hustvedt, 53, says. 'That's not a very practical route in publishing, but there's a part of me that has fantasised about that.'

It doesn't help Hustvedt's ambivalence about her glamour that she's married to Paul Auster - the cult novelist of The New York Trilogy fame, whose dark good looks make female journalists swoon. Curled up on a couch in the parlour of their four-storey brownstone in Brooklyn, Hustvedt is dressed for comfort.

It's here that America's leading literary couple play host to writer friends such as Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo and Peter Carey. Their 20-year-old daughter, Sophie Auster, is a singer and film actress who recently featured on the cover of Spanish Rolling Stone magazine.

Hustvedt's first two novels, The Blindfold (1992) and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), were psychological thrillers that featured vulnerable young heroines navigating their way through offbeat encounters with often sinister male characters. But despite critical acclaim, Hustvedt didn't win international fame until her 2003 novel What I Loved. A brainy saga that traced the lives and loves of four artsy New York intellectual types across 25 years, it became a global best-seller.

Some were perplexed by A Plea for Eros (2005), Hustvedt's collection of personal essays, in which she described the feelings of anxiety and mental fragility that have pervaded her life. Reviewers wondered how someone living the storybook conception of intellectual happiness - who, by her own account, enjoyed a charmed childhood with adoring parents - could be so emotionally unstable.

But Hustvedt, who once considered becoming a psychoanalyst, knows that the psyche works in complex and unexpected ways. How else to explain why, during her honeymoon with Auster in Paris - after months of what she describes as unprecedented bliss - she had a seizure and fell ill with a migraine that lasted a year? 'I've been conducting a self-analysis for many years, but there's a great deal that I don't understand,' Hustvedt says. 'I'm a stranger to myself in many ways.'