Paul Auster, a prolific novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter was described as a “literary superstar” and “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.” But his life was haunted by tragedy and death. In 1961, a 14-year-old Paul Auster watched a friend die after being struck by lightning. Later, he lost one grandmother to a heart attack and another to A.L.S., a disease which Auster said left victims with “no hope, no remedy, nothing in front of you but a prolonged march towards disintegration.” Later there were the deaths of his mother and father; the passing of his 10-month-old granddaughter Ruby, and his son, Daniel, who overdosed in 2022.

Auster wrote that “the world was capricious and unstable, that the future can be stolen from us at any moment, that the sky is full of lightning bolts that can crash down and kill the young as well as the old, and always, always, the lightning strikes when we are least expecting it.”

Sadness permeated Auster’s work. After his death at the age of 77, his wife wrote, “Paul was extremely interested in the idea of the hero who is cast into a new world by grief. He used that device a lot: the stripped person. The person who has lost their most profound connections to the world.”