Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved is a novel of doublings and divisions: pairs meeting, touching each other's lives, and parting. Hustvedt scrutinises contact points and moments of separation as she recounts both the closeness of friends and lovers, as well as the slowly unravelling relationships between them. The web of relations that makes up the narrative is emphasised through an exploration of touch and its relation to intimacy. In part 1 of this chapter, we explore this intimacy through an examination of the skin. By paying particular attention to the representation of the surface of the body in Hustvedt's novel, we consider it as a site of communication and of division, as marking the possibility of contact and of rupture. Reading scars, spots, rashes and wrinkles, it soon becomes clear that Hustvedt's exploration of the skin runs in parallel with her interrogation of the psyche. Thus, in part 2 we draw on Didier Anzieu's theory of the skin ego in order to consider how the margins of the body converge with the skin of the mind. But Hustvedt's novel is also a book about reading and writing, and the discussion turns to her representation of textual processes and encounters. Opening up the possibility of a textual skin, this chapter thus explores the co-implication of the limits of the body, the psyche and the text. Moving beyond the notion of the skin as a one-dimensional and static surface of the body, we read its passageways, folds and cracks in order to open up the contradictions, complications and complexities of the textual skin, and its capacity to be continually re-written and re-read.

The skin of the body

At the start of What I Loved Leo Hertzberg purchases a painting. The canvas depicts ‘a young woman lying on the floor in an empty room. She was propped up on one elbow, and she seemed to be looking at some-thing beyond the edge of the painting.’ Noting the ambiguity of the title – Self-Portrait by William Wechsler – Leo observes the ‘thick stripes of black, gray, and white that may have been applied with a knife, and in those dense strokes of pigment I could see the marks left by a man's thumb’ (p. 5).