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
The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.
The mind-brain is lived only from a first-person perspective, and it is a dynamic, plastic organ that changes in relation to the environment.
Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.
I love the little garden in the back of my family's brownstone in Brooklyn. Digging out there in the dirt is a joy for me, although by the time August rolls around and my roses have black spot, I need the break winter provides.
We all live in a culture that is continually isolating feminine and masculine aspects, even when they're not related to people.
Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
We live in a culture that is much happier talking about organic brain disease than about psychic illness because the former suggests that something that is physically wrong in a brain is wholly unrelated to that person's upbringing or experiences in the world, but that is not necessarily true.
Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing.
With almost no exceptions, art by men is much more expensive than art by women. Even great women artists, like Louise Bourgeois and Lee Krasner, are only fully embraced very late in their career.
Years ago, when I was in Siena for the first time, I saw the works of Duccio, whose deeply emotional painting from the thirteenth century has never left me.
When I don't get enough sleep, I am cranky, vulnerable to headaches, and my concentration is poor.
There is a difference between using a made-up name and using real people as pseudonyms. People are not costumes you can wear. They are flesh and blood.
Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.
I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're gragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.