Don DeLillo called The Blindfold (1992), Siri Hustvedt's first novel, "a work of dazzling intensity." Michiko Kakutani has praised her "thoroughly original style and her lucid contemporary voice." And Salman Rushdie said of The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996): "Siri Hustvedt writes, literally, like a dream... This dark, sexy, spooky novel is an indelibly memorable fiction. Read it and it will haunt you."

Hustvedt's themes range from the creation and manipulation of identity to the malleability of memory to the sources of erotic desire. Her work is rooted in a sense of place, shaped both by her Norwegian-American youth in the small college town of Northfield, Minnesota, and by her expatriate's embrace of New York. Her first published poem appeared in the Paris Review, followed by the poetry collection Reading to You (1981), and her work has been featured in The Best American Short Stories (1990 and 1991). Yonder: Essays came out in 1998, and last year critics hailed the novel What I Loved.

I talked with Siri Hustvedt in the elegant Brooklyn townhouse that she shares with her husband, author Paul Auster, and their teenage daughter. One of my first impressions: if her writing career ever goes bust, the tall, slim blonde in her late forties could easily fall back on modeling. Her dog came over and lay at my feet throughout the conversation ("He likes women"), and we discussed writing and being a writer—two distinct topics, as it turns out.

Interviewer: You've written in so many formats: essays, novels, poetry, academic discussions of art. Have I left anything out? Have you thought about doing plays?

Siri Hustvedt: A woman in Sweden wants me to write a play. I think we're just going to collaborate, maybe. I've never written a play.

Interviewer: Was it hard to start doing your own creative writing, being so much aware of the great writers? [Hustvedt has a doctorate in English from Columbia University.]

Siri Hustvedt: Well, I was always writing. But what happened to me—I remember when I was in college, I started a novel. I thought it was just wonderful. And then I realized I had no idea how to proceed. I mean, none. So I scrapped this idea of the novel. I'm always impressed that there are people in their twenties who've figured out how to write a novel. So I wrote very, very short stories and poems. I loved poetry, I loved prose. It wasn't that I was really partial to one or the other. I wrote poems throughout college, and then in graduate school, I wrote poems all the time. And that was when I published my first poem, in the Paris Review.

Interviewer: That's a great place to start.

Siri Hustvedt: It was one of those flukes. I had never sent a poem anywhere, and in my arrogance, I sent it to the Paris Review. To my huge surprise, I have to say, it was accepted. I was just amazed. And after that, I remember I sent poems out that were rejected.

Interviewer: What does poetry allow you to express that other forms of writing don't?

Siri Hustvedt: I've always thought of poetry as the highest form of linguistic expression, the arena where language comes closest to music—although prose, too, must be musical. Then again, this may be old-fashioned of me, but my favorite poets—Emily Dickinson, Paul Celan, and Holderlin, for example—are all poets who write in a language that can't be paraphrased, who are mysterious and evoke feelings that seem to come from the words even when you don't fully understand them.

Interviewer: As Robert Frost said, "Poetry is what gets lost in translation." Did you do any formal training in writing fiction, any workshops?

Siri Hustvedt: No, although—no, I take it back. When I was a graduate student, I went to Kenneth Cook's undergraduate class at Columbia. Really formal exercises, mostly. I wrote a lot of sonnets. It was fun to play with form. He was wonderful at that, and a wonderful teacher. But that was the only one. I guess technically that is a kind of workshop. It was very restrictive. None of the students would bring in any work.

Interviewer: I'd like to talk about some of the themes that you explore in your writing. One, of course, is art. Artists, particularly painters and photographers, people your books. Is painting another form of storytelling for you?

Siri Hustvedt: I think the interesting thing about painting is that there are narrative elements, though it's not the ideal form for narrative images. Comics are narratives that need boxes. And of course in Lily Dahl, I have a painter who uses boxes, and then later I also have another narrative artist, Bill, who uses boxes in a kind of sequential way of making art.

The difference between reading a book and looking at art is, with art, you have the story there all at once. The spontaneity, if you wish. And it's the only art form like that. I mean, music is sequential. Reading a book is sequential. Watching a film is sequential. I'm fascinated by the stillness. The only kinds of art I don't like are if you get it in two seconds. You know what I mean? That's my only criterion for looking at a work of art. There are certain kinds of art that are like one-liners, and that usually doesn't interest me. So I think that art does unfold over time for the viewer, but it's all there right away. You don't have to move to page sixty. There's something about that stasis that I find beautiful, because life is not like that.

Interviewer: In your fiction, the relationship between the artist and his model is dangerous and disruptive. Often an older artist paints or photographs women with whom he has a romantic relationship—or at least feels romantic tension. It's both pleasurable and dangerous, as several women find out. What is it that intrigues you about that relationship?

Siri Hustvedt: I don't know. I think you're absolutely right that art, in the books, is scary. This kind of material, I'm not sure where it comes from when I'm making it.

Interviewer: There's kind of a power going back and forth: the artist needs the model, but he's also got the ultimate control over how she's going to appear.

Siri Hustvedt: Right, right. And also, I think for example, maybe particularly with George and that photograph of Iris in The Blindfold, it's that somehow the photograph is an image of, I think, her own fragmentation, and it's just that she doesn't want to look like that. And of course the photograph starts to proliferate. It's sort of all over the place. And then it's stolen. I took that idea from the fact that my sister once posed for a photographer and then the photograph was stolen. She found it very creepy, and so did I.

Interviewer: Because on the one hand, yes, she knew it was going to be seen by anybody and everybody, but...

Siri Hustvedt: ...But someone running off with the photo is really weird.

Interviewer: Did they recover it?

Siri Hustvedt: No.

Interviewer: Another theme you explore is your Midwestern-Scandinavian background. Your family looms large in your work. Is it hard to write so close to your experience? Do you have to take into consideration what your parents or people back in Northfield will think?

Siri Hustvedt: Well, the book that was modeled on my hometown is Lily Dahl. The kernel of the book, the story, came from an anecdote that I heard about a man who had gone into a café, ordered breakfast, eaten it, and blown his brains out. That did not happen in my hometown, but in a nearby town, Faribault. It's one of those stories, you know, that was floating around. I wasn't there; I didn't experience it. But I think I was haunted by the fact that I had known his town. And out of that anecdote, the book grew.

But in my hometown, there are still people who think that every character in the book is modeled on a real person. And it just isn't true at all. And Lily has really nothing to do with me. I mean, I'm closer to the character of Mabel, probably, than I am to Lily. So I'm deeply amused by the fact that people seem to have identified all the characters in the book as real people, because it just isn't so.

Nevertheless, there were these two brothers who were famously dirty, and they came into the cafe where one of my sisters and my best friend worked. I never worked there. [These brothers became the minor characters Dirty Dick and Filthy Frank, case studies for a small town's eccentricities and uncertain rumors.] Then you start seeing how novels come about. It's all mush, you know? But there often are some kinds of links. But especially in my case, by the time the novel is done, the links become more and more attenuated, because the whole story begins to take on a life of its own. The characters begin to leave their models, if they ever had any.

But I was signing a book, I guess when Lily Dahl came out, and someone came up to me and said, "You know, Dirty Dick and Filthy Frank were my cousins." And I didn't disguise that. I knew the men were not alive anymore, and I thought the names were so wonderful that I used them. And I never knew where they lived; I actually never even saw them. I just heard about them from my sister and my friend.

I looked at her—I'm sure I turned completely pale. And then she patted my shoulder and said [Here Siri mimics an elderly woman's voice.]: "Oh, we don't mind." I thought, Whew! Okay! Got through that one. And I said to her, "I did know about them, but I never knew them, I never met them. And you know, characters in the book are just invented personalities." And of course I made them rather nice. So that was a funny experience. I think sometimes there's a tendency, when people see an obvious connection, like, there really was an Ideal Café in Northfield... I intentionally called the town Webster. Webster is the dictionary, and it's like the textual version of a small town.

Interviewer: Speaking of small towns: America has this romance with them, even as these small towns are struggling to continue. How do you feel about them, as someone who comes from one? Are small towns a place to come from?

Siri Hustvedt: I'm glad I left. I think that's important. New York is a great place for Americans, and for the rest of the world, too, I think. Many small-town people who end up in New York were people who didn't feel entirely comfortable, like outsiders.

At the same time, I have very tender feelings about my hometown. In a way, those tender feelings have increased over time. I don't think it's simple nostalgia. That small town, Northfield, Minnesota, was a community and remains, I think, a community, although it's become more diffuse. People really knew each other; there was a sense of taking care of each other, that kind of thing. This is very American, too. I think it still exists in many small communities around the country. I find that very moving. My father died in February. They had the funeral there; he was a professor. And because my parents were still there, there were hundreds of people. He was in the nursing home with lots of visitors. That's something to be valued.

Interviewer: At the other end of that spectrum, why is New York a place that people escape to?

Siri Hustvedt: I had a complete fantasy about New York. I moved here, I had visited once. I picked Columbia. That was it. I felt it would be urban, it would be exciting. But I really didn't know anything about it. I was probably one of the few people in the world who moved to New York without knowing a single living, breathing soul. Can you believe that? Everybody has somebody. But I didn't. And that was also very exciting to me.

So I had a very romantic idea about New York. But it wasn't romantic in the sense that I wanted to come to New York and, I don't know, be happier. I wanted to come to New York and have adventures. Actual adventures, romantic adventures, whatever. I just thought it was an idea of adventure. And I think New York lives up to that—for most people.

Interviewer: There are certain things that all big cities offer: anonymity, opportunities, jobs. But people don't move to, say, Philadelphia from around the country the way they do to New York.

Siri Hustvedt: No, they don't. I'm sure it's because of the art, as well. A lot of artists come here, because you feel you can be in a community of artists. Even at Columbia, I felt I met a lot of color at that time. It was wonderful to sit in the Hungarian Pastry Shop and share poems. And also, I found it very exciting, because I had never been in an intellectual environment where my peers meant so much to me. A lot of what I was reading—for the first time it was possible for me to go and ask someone. You know, like, you're trying to read Heidegger, your head is swimming, and there were people—friends—to whom I could go and say, "Please help me." And we helped each other. And that was fantastic.

And I have to say that, when I left, after I got my PhD, the one thing I missed very sorely was that kind of ongoing talk about ideas. You retreat into a different zone. I've been reading a lot about medical topics. I'd love to have a hotline to somebody who could explain something I'm struggling with. And you lose that. I still am grateful to graduate school, even though I never became a professor; I didn't use it in that way. I'm very grateful for that period of my life.

Interviewer: Another theme that you explore extensively is adultery.

Siri Hustvedt: (Laughs.)

Interviewer: It's often between a young woman who's confused and driven and an older man, and it often ends badly for one or both parties. Why has that topic figured prominently?

Siri Hustvedt: I don't know! I mean, that's a very interesting question. I don't think I've ever been asked that. But it's true, it's true... Adultery's one of the great subjects of the novel. I mean, who is that, Tony Tanner—didn't he write that book Adultery in the Novel? It's because, of course, it's a strained situation. Conflict is the source of novels. But I also think because I really am very interested in erotic life and connections between people. Adultery falls into that category. I never even thought about it.

Interviewer: And you also write about desire, especially as a function of the forbidden or unattainable.

Siri Hustvedt: I think unrequited desire—I mean, in What I Loved, Leo really does fall in love with Violet. I remember writing this scene. He finally declares his love and tries to kiss her, and then Violet basically says that he can have her for that night, that she'll do it for that night. There's a funny thing: when you're writing these things, you don't exactly know what's going to happen. And then I thought: Well, that is what Violet would do. She won't pretend that she's in love with him, but she would happily sleep with him once. Of course, he doesn't want that.

Interviewer: Another important theme in your work is identity, with characters like Lily and Mark Wechsler and Teddy Giles, and especially with Iris in The Blindfold, creating identities, hiding them, being forced to reveal them. Was there a particular catalyst that made you want to write about this?

Siri Hustvedt: I think there are two strains to that. One is the strain of simply my own wobbly self. And the other part is, maybe because of that, I became extremely interested in what it means to be a human being.

When I was in graduate school, I did a lot of reading in linguistics and in psychoanalysis. When people are young—and this relates particularly to Iris and to Mark—there is a kind of trying on of adulthood. And it becomes very frightening, I think, when there's a sense that the self is so unhooked it can kind of move anywhere. I think that's always been rather scary to me, the fantasy of a loved person becoming a monster. And no one really knows what the etiology of psychopathy is. There's been a lot of writing about it, but nobody can really say.

Say you've got two psychiatric case studies of people who had miserable childhoods. I mean, really grotesquely bad—were beaten or hurt or whatever. And one of them becomes a raving psychopath, and one of them becomes, well, maybe not a very stable human being, but someone who's fairly normal. They can't explain it. It may be that brain research will do more, or it may simply be because that no human story can be told in its entirety. We can't put a life on paper. It has infinite numbers. It's very fascinating to me. I'm more and more fascinated by how people become human.

Interviewer: You also explore memory—particularly in What I Loved but also, for example, when writing about your family in Yonder—how memory is mutable and selective.

Siri Hustvedt: I think what happens is, when you concentrate, you do bring out some memories and sometimes you have absolute blanks. You know how some people stage, like, the conversation between the mother and the father, and the four-year-old has reproduced this entirely. Listen, my memory might not be as good as some people's; I'm perfectly willing to admit that. And at the same time, I find it all very peculiar. It probably has to do with certain parts of the brain, or how certain moments can trigger images. Sometimes if you walk down the street, just something in someone's eyes or nose or features... The brain is associative. And I'm very fascinated with all that. But I do not think that memory is a machine at all. Although there are some very vivid memories I think everyone has. Even memories that include, say, whole sentences in the conversation.

Interviewer: I'm rereading Angela's Ashes. I guess in the best cases of these memoirists who remember entire forty-year-old conversations, you almost think: if they do it as well as Frank McCourt, I don't care.

Siri Hustvedt: I think that's the thing. It's acknowledged to be, in a sense, a re-creation of an experience. It's a kind of fictional re-creation of a real story.

I feel that when I'm writing, I'm always looking for some kind of emotional truth, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. For me, anyway, writing nonfiction, I always feel there's a contract between me and the reader in everything I say: the absolute literal truth as I know it. I would never make something up—like, fill in the gaps of my blank memory. I just can't do that. I'm sure it's a sort of Lutheran Protestant thing. But fiction, I often feel, and I think I put this in Yonder—it's like remembering what never happened. What you're trying to remember is something true. That's the very strange thing about it.

Interviewer: Are you aware of the reader? Is your writing sort of a conversation, or are you just following your own thoughts?

Siri Hustvedt: I'm following my own thoughts. But you're always conscious of somebody. It's not a particular person, but for me, these are always, on some level, dialogues. There's a kind of atmosphere. I want there to be an atmosphere of dialogue and intimacy. That's what I like the most about great essays like Montaigne's: you're both inside his mind and feeling very much that he's addressing you. So that you have this kind of intimacy. He's very honest. He's such a non-liar.

Interviewer: Your most recent novel What I Loved was a bit of a departure. That was your first book with a male protagonist, Leo. Did you decide you needed to try something different?

Siri Hustvedt: Yeah, I did. It was the only technical challenge that I—well, there were two, I guess. What I knew for sure is that I could write as a man. I mean, it might have been an inner urge that I answered, but it didn't feel like that. It felt like, "Enough of these girls, and now I'm going to write as a man and see if I can do it." And the other aspect of the book that I began to think that I wanted to do was to set it in time. Lily Dahl is really like a fairy tale set in the fifties or—it could be any time, almost, in America. I thought, okay, in this book I'm really going to treat it almost as the time when I lived in New York—the book starts in 1975.

Interviewer: You did a tremendous amount of research. Did your interest in psychological disorders precede What I Loved, or did it grow out of writing the book?

Siri Hustvedt: It preceded it. But I did actually do a lot of reading while I was working on the book. I have a very dear friend who said, "You don't need all those acknowledgments at the back of the book." And I said, "The reason I'm doing it is because I want the reader to understand that I lifted a number of these cases about eating disorders, first of all, from real people." And some people, when it was anecdotal, you want to give them credit. And my sister, particularly, who has spent years researching hysteria—I wanted people to know that she gave me a lot of this original research. And since she's publishing a book on the subject, I don't want people thinking it was the other way around.

Interviewer: What are you working on now?

Siri Hustvedt: Actually, I had to pause. I'm working on a book about art, about painting, at Princeton University Press, a coffee-table book. And I think it will be a small, purposely spare book, with small but very high-quality reproductions. I'm just so pleased, because I always thought that that's one thing about publishing essays about art: you've got to be able to look at the art; you really do. So I'm very happy about that. And then Picador's going to do a book of collected essays, on subjects other than art. "A Plea for Eros" will be in there. And I'm starting a novel called The Sorrows of an American.

Interviewer: So sometimes your projects overlap.

Siri Hustvedt: Sometimes they do. Also, while I was writing What I Loved I was asked to do a number of essays about painting. Actually, in one case I was not asked to do them. I sat down and spent a year after I finished What I Loved writing about Goya. There are two essays, and it's not hundreds of pages. It probably adds up to about sixty-something. So sometimes I do stop and do other things, or sometimes I'm forced to.

Interviewer: Do you show your work to others as you're writing?

Siri Hustvedt: My main editor is my husband. I only show him complete drafts. And a year or two can go between the drafts. It's not on a daily basis.

He's more generous than I am. He likes to hear my feedback. And he's a more efficient writer. He can do several books in his head at once—writing one book and thinking about the next—which I can't do. I can have little seeds, little thoughts, but I'm just not good at that. He has much more finished versions to share with me than I do with him. So he's really my first editor. Very brutal. That's the pact.

Interviewer: Having two writers in one house must be either a great advantage or a great challenge or both.

Siri Hustvedt: Yeah, it's probably both. But I think in terms of editors, it's good to have someone who writes.

Interviewer: Do you have a strategy for starting a novel?

Siri Hustvedt: I wish I did, because I think it would be helpful. Mostly, I've just sort of plunged into the murk and written many different drafts, one after another. Usually from scratch. What I Loved—I wrote three entire drafts. I wrote the whole book again.

Interviewer: What happened? Did you have a feeling you were heading the wrong way?

Siri Hustvedt: It just wasn't right. I knew everything about these characters. [At one point,] Leo had a girlfriend. I still assume she was part of Leo's life; she just didn't make the last cut. I remember feeling sad about some passages that went out, but they just didn't work.

Interviewer: Some writers focus on character; some focus on plot. Are you a plot person or a character person?

Siri Hustvedt: I think I'm definitely a character person; characters always come first. Although there are certain aspects of the story that also appear to some degree. Mickey Spillane said this wonderful thing; he said, "Nobody reads a book to get to the middle." I never forgot that.

Interviewer: Here's another "writers fall into two camps" question: there are those who map a book out at the beginning, and those who write their way toward the conclusion...

Siri Hustvedt: I'm the "write my way toward." I so write my way toward. I think it's because, too, for me, books really are organic.

Interviewer: After a book is done, do you not even want to look at it anymore?

Siri Hustvedt: That's an interesting thing. I don't look at my books. Although once I opened one in the middle and started reading, and I remember thinking: This is very good. I thought, God! Hey! Who did that? That's good. It was the most distant view. It was many, many years after, and there were things I'd forgotten about it.

Interviewer: Critics. Discuss.

Siri Hustvedt: When I published my first novel, you find that you can't keep yourself away from reviews. It's all so Wow. I read everything. I tried to even decipher my German reviews. Because I was really curious. Some writers say, "I don't care." I don't believe that's true. But now I have a policy of total avoidance. There are certain things you can't avoid; often your publisher will not allow you to avoid the New York Times. But my feelings of avoidance have gotten much greater.

What is a review? A review is, let's face it: you sit down and read the book as fast as you can, you write something as fast as you can, and you get $300. You know? This is not literary criticism; it's an impression. That's what reviews are about; they're about an impression. Either you liked it, or you didn't like it. Reviewers are sometimes intimidated by a book. It's a crapshoot, and it's important for writers to remember it's all a crapshoot. Reviews serve their moment, but they don't serve other moments.

Interviewer: You often play with the names of your characters: women named after flowers, plays on words like the staid Hank "Farmer"; you stick your family names in there. Do you do it just for fun, or is it symbolism?

Siri Hustvedt: "Symbolism" is a little strong, I think. But I love names. And sometimes I even look in the phone book, looking at wonderful names. "Laszlo Finkelman." Great name. It's funny because Laszlo—the first time I saw this baby, his hair was really was sticking up. You know those kids? And I'm sure that was the inspiration. I made this Laszlo have stick-up hair. And then my daughter's pediatrician when she was a small girl, his name was Finkelman, and I thought that was so great: Finkelman. Some names are just like that.

And other names I choose for meaning, the way Dickens would choose. I think it's mostly fun. And I love flowers, and I just so far have always had a female character. Iris—that was symbolic because it's my name [backwards], and it's also the iris of the eye, and it has the first person "I." That was quite a conscious thing. So Iris initiated the flower names. Iris really was a sort of alter ego, in a way. I gave her my mother's maiden name [Vegan].

Interviewer: We've talked about the art of writing; let's talk now about the profession. What's been your experience with promotion? After you give birth to this wonderful piece of fiction, you have to get out there and sell it.

Siri Hustvedt: This thing we were at in Brazil was a literary festival. [Hustvedt and Auster attended the Paraty International Literary Festival in July 2004.] Martin Amis and Ian McEwan were there, as well. They did a panel together. Everybody did panels. I did one with Colm Tóibín, who wrote that Henry James book. Very nice guy, I really enjoyed him, we had fun.

We were talking about the writer who now has to go out and push their wares. And I think this experience ranges from a very satisfying, highly flattering thing where you go and there are just huge crowds of people standing there overwhelmed, to shades of Willy Loman. You're there with your little thing to sell and nobody comes, or three people come, or four people come.

I've had all those experiences. I've had the entire range, I would say. From the spectacularly, fabulously well attended to the pits. And I think in a way, some writers leave the pits behind and it changes, but I think almost every writer has to have these kinds of experiences. No—some not; the early-first-success people probably never have to deal with that. But you begin to feel like a stranger to your work. And I think that's strange.

I like to talk, and I like to think about ideas. But you never can really explain your work, because so much of it is unconscious. But this is now part of it. Most writers feel a certain obligation.

Interviewer: Does your work get a different reception in the United States than in Europe?

Siri Hustvedt: Yeah, I've always done better in Europe. I've always sold more copies and gotten more publicity. It's too hard to interpret that. It means what it means. It's nice, because it's a living. But in terms of literature, it doesn't mean much. I mean, Dickens sold very well, and he was a great writer. Poe was a great writer, and he sold next to nothing. Then there are people who are forgotten and are brought back again.

Interviewer: Let's close with one more question on the writing profession. Why do you encourage writers to train themselves by reading as many other writers as possible?

Siri Hustvedt: Language is not private. You have to figure out what you love. If you like a writer, then you find out why, and it opens you up. It's going to enrich you.