“Writing in the first person would have been too exclusionary,” says Auster, who speaks in a velvety baritone with a slight nap, perhaps from the Dutch Schimmelpenninck cigarillos that he chain-smokes throughout the day. It’s the story of Paul Auster, but Paul Auster as everyman, which he emphasizes by writing in the second person. What it’s like to feel the ache of physical desire and the relief of urination to abandon yourself to sports as a boy, and to girls as an adolescent to walk aimlessly through snowy city streets and run recklessly down the baseline of a spring-green ball field to endure searing pain and express soaring joy to know love and know loss to grow up to grow old. Winter Journal also explores what it means to be human and to live inside our bodies, with their curious collection of yawns, coughs, and sneezes. The death of his mother is one of the experiences that Auster recounts in his latest work, Winter Journal, a memoir of the sixty-five-year-old writer’s life, from childhood to the present day. It’s a horrible thing to see your parent dead, especially your mother, because your body began inside her body. “I didn’t see my father’s corpse, but I saw my mother’s corpse.

The chair is where Auster ’69CC, ’70GSAS suffered his first panic attack, soon after his mother died suddenly in 2002. Staring blankly, he adds, “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.” “It happened right there, in that chair.” Paul Auster points to one of the upholstered Parsons chairs surrounding the Bordeaux-colored dining table in his Brooklyn brownstone. Paintings by Sam Messer, who has been painting and drawing Paul Auster, and Auster's Olympia typewriter, for many years.

Paul auster graphic novel