Siri Hustvedt: Memories of the Future

This event has been cancelled as part of our preventative measures to stem the spread of coronavirus COVID-19. If you have tickets for this event, we’ll be in touch with you directly via email; refunds will be automatically issued.

Find out more about our response to the coronavirus situation here.

The opening pages of Siri Hustvedt’s new book contain a warning: ‘If you are one of those readers who relishes memoirs filled with impossibly specific memories, I have this to say: those authors who claim perfect recall of their hash browns decades later are not to be trusted.’

Hustvedt’s seventh novel, Memories of the Future, is a work of autofiction – incorporating aspects of her real life alongside imagined events. The book’s protagonist is a 60-something-year-old writer who shares Hustvedt’s initials, S.H. When S.H. rediscovers the journal she wrote in the 1970s as a young woman newly arrived in New York City, she finds an unsettling gap between the journal’s account and what she remembers. 

It’s funny, insightful and everything readers have come to expect from the prolific Hustvedt. As well as a novelist, she’s an accomplished essayist, critic, translator and scholar with a deep interest in art, psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Her novels (including What I Loved and The Blazing World) often turn around mysteries – both at the level of plot, and in her preoccupation with the philosophical puzzles of memory and consciousness. 

At the Athenaeum Theatre in May, she’ll discuss the symbiosis of art and life.