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Siri Hustvedt began her new novel The Sorrows of an American as a way of coping with her father’s death, discovers Nina Caplan

The world is not that disposed to worry about the sorrows of America’s inhabitants at the moment; not since the reaction to 9/11 demonstrated that, for many Americans, there is only one nation under God. But then, Siri Hustvedt’s fourth work of fiction, The Sorrows of an American, is no chauvinistic lament: a simple theme would never inspire her – much less a simplistic one. “The story of 9/11 is woven into the novel,” Hustvedt, who lives in New York with writer Paul Auster, acknowledges, “but it’s not fetishised. That’s why the title is not American Sorrows: there are a number of Americans in the book and they all have sorrows.”

Like its predecessor, What I Loved, The Sorrows of an American has a male narrator from the same Scandinavian-American background as his creator. Erik, a psychiatrist, is mourning his father, supporting his widowed sister through this second bereavement, coping with patients’ traumas – and falling in love with Miranda, a Jamaican single mother who has rented his basement flat. It’s amazing he finds time to investigate a mystery buried in his father’s memoir, or that Hustvedt finds space to include it since, as always, her novel manages to stuff a galloping plot with more intriguing artwork, rigorous intellectual discussion and scientific asides than you’d find in your average university. Yet she doesn’t deluge her characters: they remain honest and vivid, working through grief as best they can.

Grief was the starting point: Hustvedt’s father died in 2003. “I began it when he was dying. Dealing with his death, I began to think of Erik as my imaginary brother. I think my parents had really wanted a son, so I invented one for them.” Which would make her Inga, Erik’s sister, a clever, successful woman in thrall to a famous writer (dead, in this case). But enough cod psychology: there’s plenty of the real thing to deal with here. It was easier, Hustvedt says, to process her grief via Erik. “A daughter writing about her father is difficult: there’s a level of idolatry, and a pressure to do him justice. And there are many things I don’t know about my father. So this was a way of writing more freely; by becoming a son, I wrenched myself into another creative position.”

But Hustvedt is far too intellectually curious to wallow in unhappiness, even via another persona. “Grief is very complicated, more than people realise,” she muses, and her novel looks at a range of emotional traumas, and at the parallels between psychiatry and fiction. For research, she read, spoke to experts and taught writing on a psychiatric ward. “I’ve read huge amounts of psychoanalysis before but I really worked very hard for this,” she says. And certainly, it feels authentic. But issues of authenticity are complicated with Hustvedt. Her last book featured a troubled young man generally thought to bear some relation to her stepson from Auster’s first marriage, an interpretation she resists. In this book, however, there’s undeniably a blending of fact and fiction: the memoir excerpts are taken from Hustvedt’s father’s memoir, used with the dying man’s permission. I tell her that I find her focus on memory ironic, since her books are so layered with fascinating detail they can be quite hard to recall – they slip away like a good late-night conversation.

“I’m looking for a form that creates that kind of complexity,” she agrees. She is interested in the irony of memory (“the older you get, the more memories you have, but also the more you forget”) but also its mutability. The mind is a curious creature: if she hadn’t been a writer, Hustvedt says she’d have liked to be a psychiatrist, or an artist. “I still like to draw. But I tried writing at 13 and it just gripped me. There are people who can do both [write and make art] – I’m not one of them.”

Yet, in the weirdest way, she does make art. A lifelong migraine sufferer, she recently suffered a “Lilliputian hallucination”: “I saw a little pink man and a little pink ox on the floor of my bedroom. It also happens to some stroke victims, apparently.”  Which has impelled her to try to write “a psychiatric history of my nerves, combining research and memoir. I hope it works. But it will definitely be narrated by a woman. I think I’m having a reaction!”

From Time Out London