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.'

As a child, Hustvedt suffered from hallucinations and heard voices that made her fear she was going mad. As an adult, Hustvedt's neurological sensitivity has meant being hospitalised with migraines. She knows when a migraine is imminent because she feels euphoric before the crash. 'I have these almost manic arcs, but they're not followed by depression, as in the classic bipolar thing, but by a migraine, usually after excitement.' Sometimes she throws herself into research with such a fevered intensity that Auster warns her to stop. Does she listen to him? 'No,' says Hustvedt, laughing.

At the centre of Hustvedt's new novel, The Sorrows of An American, is a blonde writer named Inga, also prone to migraine attacks. Inga and her brother Erik, a psychoanalyst, are spurred by an anguished letter they discover in their late father's office to investigate his possible involvement in a suspicious death. As Erik remakes his life following a divorce, Inga has an affair with the biographer of her late husband - a dashing literary figure named Max Blaustein, now dead from stomach cancer.

Inga meets Max at a reading while a graduate student at Columbia University; Hustvedt met Auster at a poetry reading in 1981 when she was writing her dissertation on Charles Dickens. Hustvedt says she fell in love instantly - for Auster it took several hours. Books were a major part of their romance. 'Once, very early in our love affair, he grabbed me - and just as he was about to kiss me, he looked at me and he said, 'Who do you prefer, Beckett or Burroughs?'

I said, 'Beckett.' He said, 'Good.''

Temperamentally, Auster is the opposite of the brooding, hard-drinking Max. 'Paul has almost no anger. I have more anger than he does.' Hustvedt and Auster plant cutesy references to each other's books in their work - Auster even borrowed her heroine Iris ('Siri' in reverse) from The Blindfold for his novel Leviathan. Hustvedt writes in an immaculately tidy, light-filled room on the top floor. Auster used to work in the basement, but now rents an office two blocks away. They write for six hours a day, and are each other's first - and most brutal - readers.

Auster reads aloud to Hustvedt after he completes a chapter, while Hustvedt usually waits until finishing a full draft before showing him her work. But she felt that Sorrows was polished enough in its early stages to show him in instalments. 'The book was written in beats, almost like a fugue. I wouldn't leave a beat until I felt it was in pretty good shape. It had its own music, its own feeling.'

After 26 years of marriage, her husband's work still surprises her, arising from parts of him that remain mysterious. This enigmatic quality is attractive to Hustvedt. 'Eroticism always involves some form of distance and not knowing, otherwise it becomes banal and pedestrian.'

With Sorrows Hustvedt created a distance from herself by making Erik, rather than Inga, the narrator. She found that writing about Inga in the third person made the self-portrait somewhat comic. 'That's probably what distance always does. I had this sense of writing a story as my imaginary brother.'

Hustvedt wrote in a man's voice for What I Loved and enjoyed it so much that she did it again.

'You get to occupy this position of greater authority.'

Erik is her first protagonist from Brooklyn, though Hustvedt and Auster have lived there since 1981. 'After a while the intimacy just creeps up on you. I only set books in places that are very close to me. I always need to see the characters walking around in places even if they aren't described.' For The Enchantment of Lily Dahl - about a 19-year-old waitress in the fictional midwestern town of Webster - Hustvedt drew on her familiarity with the American heartland from growing up in Northfield, Minneapolis. 'Everyone believed that every character represented a real person, which isn't true,' says Hustvedt.

Her parents fawned over Hustvedt and her three sisters - now an architect, a businesswoman and a French-literature academic - planting in Hustvedt a conviction that she had a great and unique destiny. 'It's absurd, but if you have parents who look at you like that, you feel that you can do anything.' Yet Hustvedt spent the first two weeks of her life in an incubator, on the cusp of death, with undeveloped lungs. She suspects that this early trauma and separation from her mother contributed to her later troubles. 'I can't remember a time when I didn't carry around inside me a sensation of being wounded,' she wrote in A Plea for Eros.

'I'm afraid that thresholds and boundaries won't hold, that things will go to pieces.'

Her father was a third-generation Norwegian immigrant, who, like Erik's father, grew up in the Depression and fought in the Pacific war. He became a professor of Scandinavian studies at St Olaf's College, where Hustvedt earned her first degree among well-behaved, conservative midwesterners. Sorrows includes extracts from a memoir Hustvedt's father wrote shortly before he died in 2003. Writing the novel was a form of mourning. 'But I'm not sure that it was the expiation of grief. Writing fiction doesn't create solutions.'

Hustvedt says that moving to New York in 1978 to pursue her doctorate at Columbia was a liberation from her hometown's 'prairie egalitarianism - the idea that nobody is supposed to be any better than anyone else. In New York flamboyance of various kinds - intellectual, clothing, take your pick - is much more tolerated.'

But her Lutheran, midwestern upbringing still shows in her warm humour and strong moral compass. 'Being good is not so important to me when I write, but is very important to me in my daily life.'

She wrote poetry throughout high school and college, making her publishing debut at 24 in the prestigious journal The Paris Review. 'But many people rejected me after that,' says Hustvedt. 'It wasn't some success story.' In 1982 she published a collection of poems, Reading to You, but she turned to prose after her poetry took on an increasingly narrative quality.

Although fiction is her mainspring, Hustvedt occasionally lectures on art theory; her essays on painting were collected as Mysteries of the Rectangle in 2005. Hustvedt's criticism, like her fiction, is all about ambiguity. 'One can never capture or nail down a work of visual art in words. There's always something superfluous, always something escaping you. It's a very dialogical thing between the person looking and the work of art.'

Hustvedt describes the process of writing as a dialogue with different voices and characters, which means that she never feels lonely when she writes. 'The idea of an integrated self is a distortion of the truth. We're all inhabited by the voices of other people. We're not singular.'

Despite never having been psychoanalysed, Hustvedt felt like she was involved in Erik's dialogues with his analysands. 'It was as if I was both people and participating in that weird dialogical process that is analysis.'

Teaching weekly creative writing seminars at a psychiatric hospital helped her to write about mental illness. 'Psychotic patients are more creative than the average bear. I have taught patients who have written, in half an hour, three or four pages of perfectly rhyming metrical verse.'

After finishing What I Loved, Hustvedt's mental state became precarious. 'I just felt like lying down on the floor and crying for about three weeks.' But Sorrows was less draining. 'Erik, I feel, has moved past something. It's the end of the year of grief.'

For the past two years Hustvedt has attended regular meetings with a group of neuroscientists and psychoanalysts, trying to reconcile psychoanalysis with neurobiology. Psychoanalysis has more scientific basis than is often believed, she says, citing research into how the brain's development requires a nurturing environment from infancy until the age of six.

She's started writing a non-fiction book about her research but, having failed to interest Auster, is unsure whether it will work. Meanwhile, Hustvedt is writing another novel. But this time she's writing as a woman.

Writer's notes

Genres Literary fiction, memoir, literary and art criticism

Latest book The Sorrows of an American

Next projects Another novel, and an examination of the neurological makeup of the psyche

Age 53

Family Married to novelist and film director Paul Auster. One daughter, Sophie, a singer, actress and model

Home Brooklyn, New York

Other books Reading to You (1982), The Blindfold (1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), Yonder (1998), What I Loved (2003), Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (2005), A Plea for Eros (2006)

Other jobs Teacher of English literature, creative writing and art criticism

What the critics say 'Hustvedt is a serious, ambitious writer whose novels are intelligent, involving and engrossingly textured, like the highest class of thrillers.'

- The Financial Times

Author's bookshelf

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

'It's one of the greatest evocations of being a child ever written.'

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

'It's so ambiguous and frightening.'

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

'Everything that ever happened in a novel is in Don Quixote.'

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

'Pride and Prejudice is a formally and emotionally perfect book.'