"Sidelights"

Siri Hustvedt is the author of several novels and books of essays, as well as a volume of poetry and a memoir. She has wanted to be a writer since she was a teenager, even declaring her intentions in a profile written in her small hometown newspaper in Minnesota when she was fourteen years old. Through her teens and early twenties, Hustvedt wrote poetry, and she published the first poem she submitted to the Paris Review at the age of twenty-three. After becoming blocked while trying to write a book of poetry, Hustvedt began writing prose and did not return to verse.

In an interview with Robert Birnbaum for the Identity Theory website, Hustvedt said: "My first two books are in a way initiation books about very young women." Both The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl focus on central characters who are not unlike the author in some way. The Blindfold is based on what the author experienced when she moved to New York City as a graduate student at Columbia University, but with a darker twist. The Enchantment of Lily Dahl looks at the emerging life of a teenage girl in a small town in the Midwest, through bizarre events. The novel is inspired by the author's hometown.

Hustvedt once told CA: "I think The Blindfold was generated by a fear of secrets. Any encounter between people carries vast unspoken material, and it was this content I hoped to get close to, circle, push at in the novel. The place between the narrator, Iris, and the other characters in the book is what determines both events and identities. Iris is made through the eyes of others, as, I think, we all are. Her lot is particular: she is poor, young, and plagued by an unstable nervous system. Despite the fact that her behavior on occasion veers into the pathological, I don't regard her as a bizarre person. Alone and single, Iris looks for a fixed point of reference--a truth in which to ground herself--but can't find it. The world slips and slides beneath her. Her sexual identity shifts as well. She courts the attentions of men and hides from them, finally playing out her own erotic ambiguity by disguising herself as a boy, Klaus, the character in a German novella she has translated with the professor she loves. Klaus is a fiction that takes hold of her, and in a real way is her. But every character in the book is a storyteller: Mr. Morning, the recluse who saves the objects of a murdered girl and asks Iris to describe them; George, the photographer who roams the city stealing pictures; Stephen, Iris's fickle lover; the gossips at the university who spread rumors; Professor Rose who reveals fragments of his obsession with evil; even the devastated Mrs. O., with whom Iris shares a hospital room. All these people are moved by fictions of their own which infect Iris, influencing her thoughts and actions. I suppose the mystery...