The American writer Paul Auster is receiving treatment for cancer that he was diagnosed with last December, as revealed by his wife, also the author Siri Hustvedt, in a message on his Instagram account.
In the text, Hudtvedt expresses her love for her husband, whom she married in 1982, and explains with her characteristic literary style that both move in a space called "Cancerland", whose borders are crossed by those who suffer from the disease or love someone who suffers from it
Auster, 76, felt ill a few months before the cancer diagnosis - of which he does not specify the type or stage - and is being treated at the Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York, the city in which they reside.
"Some people survive it and some die. This is something that everyone knows, and even so, living close to that truth changes the reality of every day," reflects the 68-year-old novelist, who describes her experience as an "adventure on closeness and separation.
"One has to be close enough to feel unnerving treatments as their own and far enough away to offer genuine help. Too much empathy can render a person useless! This tightrope is not always easy to walk, of course, but it's the real labor of love," he says.
Auster, who this year published 'Bloodbath Nation', an essay on the crisis of gun violence in the US, went through a complicated 2022 on a personal level after the overdose death of his 44-year-old son Daniel, that he was immersed in a legal case for the death of his baby months before.
Ruby, daughter of Daniel and granddaughter of the writer, died at the age of 10 months in 2021 from exposure to heroin and fentanyl, and the father had been charged with negligent homicide and released on bail three days before he was found unconscious in the subway, from which he did not recover.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
