Her books include The Blindfold (1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), What I Loved (2003), for which she is best known, A Plea for Eros (2006), The Sorrows of an American (2008), The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2010), The Summer Without Men (2011), Living, Thinking, Looking (2012), The Blazing World (2014), and Memories of the Future (2019).

Particularly impressed by Dickens's David Copperfield, she decided that she wanted to make literature her profession after finishing it.

[2] Hustvedt lived in poverty during her college years, and resorted to an emergency loan from the university to survive.

[4] She refers in the dissertation to thinkers who influenced her later writing, including Søren Kierkegaard, Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Mary Douglas, Paul Ricoeur, and Julia Kristeva.

Hustvedt gave the third annual Schelling lecture on aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

She has also given talks at the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and published a volume of essays on painting: Mysteries of the Rectangle.

In 2011, she delivered the annual Sigmund Freud lecture in Vienna, one of a distinguished list of speakers that includes Leo Bersani, Juliet Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, Mark Solms, and Judith Butler.

In her visits to European and German universities, she has given readings from her works and contributed to the interdisciplinary dialogue between the humanities and the sciences, notably in a keynote lecture and panel discussion on the relationship between the life sciences and literature at the 2012 annual conference of the German Association for American Studies in Mainz.

In 2013, she delivered the opening keynote address at an international conference on Søren Kierkegaard in Copenhagen on the occasion of his 200th birthday.

In The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, an account of her seizure disorder, Hustvedt states her need to view her symptom not "through a single-window" but "from all angles.

Hustvedt presents the reader with characters whose minds are inseparable from their bodies and their environments and whose sense of self is situated on the threshold between the conscious and unconscious.

Her characters often suffer traumatic events that disrupt the rhythms of their lives and lead to disorientation and a discontinuity of their identities.

[9] What I Loved was on the initial shortlist for the Prix Femina Étranger in France for best foreign book of the year.

In 2009, Hustvedt signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski, calling for his release after his arrest in Switzerland in relation to his 1977 charge for statutory rape.