In Sabine Lidl’s documentary Dance Around the Self, American-Norwegian writer Siri Hustvedt opens up about her life, her work, and her refusal to conform to a culture of dishonesty. The film explores Hustvedt’s distinctive way of living and thinking, her relationship with her late husband, Paul Auster, and the ways her writing engages with life’s defining themes of love and loss. We spoke with Hustvedt about the filmmaking process, her political activism, and the nature of memory.
What was it like to make a film about your life and work?
Filming took place over four years, so it was a rather long process, though of course it wasn’t continuous. This wasn’t reality TV. They didn’t hang up a camera in my house and watch me do the dishes or go to the bathroom. When filming began, I couldn’t have known what would happen over those four years. When we first met Sabine Lidl, the director, in Berlin, I didn’t know that my husband would die [in 2024] The film happened to be made during a dramatic period in my personal life – and, as it turns out, in political life as well. Sabine finished it before the beginning of the second Trump administration. Throughout the process, I wanted to be as open and honest as possible. We live in a culture of constant lying, and honesty has become part of my rebellion against it.
There has been considerable debate about whether the Berlinale should stay out of politics. Can films or books ever be apolitical, particularly in the current climate? I sensed a political undercurrent in the documentary.
Listen, it’s complicated. But when I was a teenager, one of the slogans of the women’s liberation movement was: “The personal is political.” Where does politics begin and end? It doesn’t. If we believe, as I and many others do, in the sanctity of every human life, then equality must mean that every life is as valuable as every other. We have to stick to our guns. Political art has a role to play, although it can also be simplistic or simply bad. But we are once again living through a moment in which no one can escape the realities of politics. I come from the country, supposedly, of free speech, where expression has traditionally been protected in ways that can sometimes seem almost frightening. But that protection, really, has ended. They are stomping down. Many people in the United States are genuinely afraid to speak out. In my lifetime, I cannot remember another moment like this. At the same time, I have to remember that I am a white woman living in a racist country. Racism is old in the United States. When the Constitution was written, “We, the People” meant white men with property, let’s face it. Fortunately, the Constitution doesn’t actually say, “We, the white men with property.” It says, “We, the People.” For me, the story of the United States – and of the amendments to its Constitution – is about expanding that “we.” Now, however, the “we” is contracting again. It is narrowing towards wealthy white men. Misogyny, xenophobia, and racism are no longer attitudes people feel compelled to hide; they’re openly expressed. When Donald Trump calls Kamala Harris “stupid” or says she has a “low IQ,” he is trading in racist tropes – and that’s Donald Trump lite, right? Seventy-seven million people in my country were able to ignore that kind of Nazi rhetoric and vote for him. There is something sick in the country. That sickness has to be addressed. We simply have to keep fighting it.
At the documentary’s premiere, you said that we are all plural beings. How does that idea influence your writing?
When you create a character in a novel, you become someone else. But, in some sense, that other person is already present within you. Where does that presence come from? It comes from the experience of living in the world with other human beings – people who come to inhabit us in various ways. I often think that writing fiction is like dreaming while you’re awake. When we dream, we are all creative beings. But where are the dreams coming from? In French you say faire un rêve [to make a dream]. In English, [the construction] is passive: we have a dream – but both are true. We aren’t consciously making the dreams; they happen to us. And yet all those characters must come from somewhere. In that sense, we are plural. The people we love continue to inhabit us. Even the dead remain with us, because we carry them inside us. Our culture is crazy about the self as if we are an immutable monad that walks alone. But we’re all born from another body – remember that – connected to that body by a placental cord, to this other body that’s cut. What replaces that placental space after birth? Social space. That’s where all the action happens. Even when you’re alone writing a book, you’re drawing from that social space. It’s in you and, through writing, it emerges again. William James says we’re loops, stimuli come in, work within us, and then pass back into the world – through the mouth, or in sexual love, or in writing. If you think of existence as a kind of looping reality, it changes how you think about the world. We are not as these little fixed, isolated consumers, endlessly buying more and more and more. Self-care is important, but other cares are important too.
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