Living, Thinking, Looking by Siri Hustvedt

It is tempting to read My Father/Myself, first in this collection of essays by the novelist Siri Hustvedt, and hope to discover something direct about her character. But the reader is stymied by another essay, The Real Story, about the impossibility of relating the materials of a fiction being narrated by a writer (say, Proust) to a memoir pretending to total recall of the facts of his life. Memoir, like fiction, misleads, though more by permissible misapprehension than by deliberate intention. In short, Hustvedt is rather like the Cheshire Cat in her writings, fiction and non-fiction. “My essays are a form of mind travel,” she writes, in which “I appear and disappear as a character.” The three categories in this anthology, none of them absolute or arbitrary, derive directly from her life, intellect and vision to inform her ideas on literature, science, psychology, art.