Who

Hustvedt is famous for her semi-autobiographical fiction—and for being married to novelist Paul Auster.

Backstory

The important details of novelist and essayist Hustvedt's life can be gleaned easily from her novels. Her debut, 1992's The Blindfold, published when she was 37, follows the adventures of a sensitive young woman studying for a literature PhD at Columbia while working odd jobs to support herself, as Hustvedt did in her twenties. Her second novel, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), contains scenes from her childhood growing up with three younger sisters and Norwegian parents in Northfield, Minnesota. But it wasn't until the publication of Hustvedt's third and most accomplished novel, What I Loved (2003), that her use of life as fictional fodder took a disturbing turn (see below). Most recently, Hustvedt published a collection of essays, 2005's A Plea for Eros, and a new novel, 2008's The Sorrows of an American. She's represented by ICM's Binky Urban.

Drama

In 1998, 20-year-old Daniel Auster, Paul's son from his first marriage to the writer Lydia Davis, was given five years probation for stealing $3,000 from drug-dealing club kid Angel Melendez. Melendez, it turned out, had been murdered by party promoter Michael Alig, and Daniel admitted to being in the room at the time, passed out on heroin. Hustvedt appropriated the scandal for her novel What I Loved, which features the (gorgeous, talented) characters Bill and Violet Wechsler as stand-ins for Auster and Hustvedt, with the emotionally-crippled Lucille Alcott representing Auster's ex-wife, the writer Lydia Davis. The novel was met with mixed reviews—Michiko Kakutani bemoaned that it "devolves into a hokey thriller"—and some were critical of Hustvedt's unorthodox melding of fact and fiction. "One must fight the temptation to conclude that What I Loved is Ms. Hustvedt's way of expressing her unvarnished feelings about Daniel Auster and his birth mother, Lydia Davis," wrote Joe Hagan in the Observer.

Personal

The six-foot-tall blonde Hustvedt first met Paul Auster at a poetry reading in 1981, when he was separated from Davis. They have one child, Sophie, who recently took a break from studying at Sarah Lawrence to pursue a career as a model, singer and actress. They live in a Victorian brownstone on 2nd Street in Park Slope and socialize with A-list friends such as Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie and Lou Reed.

No joke

Hustvedt says that back in the '70s she once wore nothing but a bikini to Studio 54.