‘People forgot I existed’: Audrey Niffenegger on taking 14 years to write a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife

Audrey Neffenegger at her home in Chicago. Photograph: Lucy Hewett/The GuardianView image in fullscreenAudrey Neffenegger at her home in Chicago. Photograph: Lucy Hewett/The GuardianInterview‘People forgot I existed’: Audrey Niffenegger on taking 14 years to write a sequel to The Time Traveler’s WifeSophie McBainHer debut made her a global star. Now she has finally written a follow-up – and this time, it’s political. She talks about impostor syndrome, screen adaptations and becoming radicalised

The artist and novelist Audrey Niffenegger began writing the long-awaited sequel to her bestselling debut, The Time Traveler’s Wife, in 2012, just after Obama’s re-election. It was a “rosy” time in American politics, “as good as it gets over here”, she says now, but her new novel required her to imagine what the world might look like in 20, 40, 60 years’ time. In the 14 years she spent exploring various dystopian futures, American politics moved on. And her imaginings began to look worryingly realistic.

An early scene in the new book involves a group of neo-Nazis at a house party. When she was writing it, few people believed the US would witness a resurgence of neo-nazism. It’s not like she is “psychic or anything”, she tells me, the clues were all there. “The first thing I remember reading in the news was Watergate, and so I’ve grown up with Reagan, and the Republicans coming on stronger and stronger, so that every Republican president we get is more of a disaster. And I thought the logical progression of that would be fascism,” she says.

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00:00:0000:05:24The Time Traveler’s Wife – the 2003 novel so popular it became a cultural phenomenon – is about an artist named Clare who falls in love with Henry, a man who is forever disappearing on her because he has a rare genetic condition that causes him to lurch involuntarily forwards and backwards in time. Henry is condemned to keep revisiting the most painful chapters of his life, and knows – but cannot change – hardships that will happen in their shared future. Niffenegger’s sequel, Life Out of Order, tells the story of their daughter, Alba, who was born with the same condition, but has a little more control over her time travel, and a greater willingness to try to harness her special abilities to serve her personal and political ends.

Niffenegger always saw The Time Traveler’s Wife as a much “darker book” than many of her readers. People would tell her the story was “so romantic” – “and I’m like yes, it’s so romantic. It’s also kind of heavy,” she says. “Because there’s a lot of inevitability, and they’re choosing to be happy in the moment, knowing that things are not going to work out so well.” With this new novel, there’s no missing the darkness.

We meet in the book-filled Chicago home that she shares with the Scottish artist Eddie Campbell, her husband of just over a decade. The walls are hung with Niffenegger’s bold, dreamlike paintings, and she has an impressive taxidermy collection: a rhea in the front room, two doves in a bell jar, a pangolin on the coffee table (bought long ago, as an antique). She used to have much more taxidermy on display, but her three cats are “barbarians” and as kittens they started “interacting with it in weird ways”. She worried one would skewer itself on the huge porcupine that used to reside on the kitchen sideboard, which she has since sequestered upstairs.

At 63, Niffenegger exudes a bookish bohemianism, with her cat-eye glasses, dangly earrings and cropped silver hair. She is softly spoken, but when she talks about politics, where the conversation keeps veering, she resorts to scathing sarcasm. She is currently recovering from a long and serious illness, something she doesn’t want to talk about, because she does not want it to detract from her work. People are always obsessed with how an artist’s life influences their work, she observes, and they forget how much art can change the person who made it. Every book she has written has transformed her life. The Time Traveler’s Wife opened up the world to her.

When she started writing it, Niffenegger was working as an artist and a professor at the Columbia College Chicago’s Centre for Book and Paper Arts. She made her own hand-bound, hand-printed books, sumptuously illustrated gothic fairytales that she produced in editions of 10. She was sketching one day when the phrase “The Time Traveler’s Wife” popped into her head. “It’s a good title, because it gives you two people, their relationship with each other, and their situation,” she says. She imagined the novel, which was published in 2003 by MacAdam/Cage, a small independent press, might sell a few thousand copies. In fact it sold more than 9m globally.

She had a few lucky breaks, Niffenegger explains. At the time she didn’t know many other writers, but she gave the book to a fellow Chicago-based artist, Annette Turow, who liked it and passed it on to her husband, the novelist Scott Turow, who then recommended it during an interview with the US Today show. In the UK, the novel was picked for Richard and Judy’s Book Club. Quickly, it became apparent that the romance and tragedy of time travel struck a chord. She began receiving emails, often from people struggling in long-distance relationships. “A lot of the resonance comes from people having that absence in their lives. So, you know, my husband is in the military, my friend is in prison, my wife is in school far away … we’re both reading it together and talking about it over the phone,” she says. She received notes from young people who were sharing the novel with their boyfriends or girlfriends and knows of a “surprising number” of children who were subsequently named Henry or Clare.

Becoming a sudden commercial success was “very odd”, she recalls: “all the running around and doing interviews and having people dig really deep into the novel and have very intricate questions was extraordinary”. The scrutiny didn’t trouble her too much – it reminded her of being critiqued at art school – but she struggled with “impostor syndrome”.

For most of her life so far, Niffenegger had few opportunities to travel. She’d never been west of the Mississippi and, if she had a chance to leave Chicago, she tended to either go to New York or Europe. Suddenly, she went everywhere. Once, she visited a different American city every day for two weeks, which she found too much. At a literary festival in Australia, she knew almost no one – as was often the case back then – but the writer Neil Gaiman, who was interviewing her on stage, introduced her to a young journalist named Hayley Campbell. Hayley would eventually introduce her to her father, Eddie, and for many years the couple somehow made a long-distance relationship between Brisbane and Chicago work, meeting for dates all over the world.

View image in fullscreenRose Leslie and Theo James in a scene from the HBO series of The Time Traveler’s Wife (2022). Photograph: Landmark Media/AlamyMeanwhile, the ordinary Chicago restaurants she mentioned in The Time Traveler’s Wife got a lot of attention “which I’m sure confused them”. The city’s Newberry Library, where Henry works, had so many visitors that they had to print a Time Traveler’s Wife FAQ sheet for the front desk and an unremarkable stairwell, featured in the story, became a destination in itself. In 2009, The Time Traveler’s Wife was made into a Hollywood film, starring Rachel McAdams. The adaptation was panned by the critics. Niffenegger has never watched it. “I mean you can let people do their own thing, and not have anything to say about their thing, that’s OK,” she says. In 2022, it was also made into a series by HBO.

Thanks to her runaway success, Niffenegger received a $5m advance for her second book, Her Fearful Symmetry (2009), a ghost story set in London. For her research, she moved to the city and became a tour guide in Highgate Cemetery. “I didn’t expect people to know about it,” she says when I ask her about the advance, her manner polite, her meaning very clear. “I didn’t understand that it was going to be news and that people would know about it and ask me about it. It was like ‘That’s just my finances. Why would anybody care what’s going on with my bank account?’.” And then she answers her own question: “People are kind of fascinated because it’s weird that I would make money – ever.”

Her paintings were never very “fashionable”, she says, and in the art world she is relatively unknown. “Something where you kind of need a long explanation from the artist seems to be very in,” she observes, while her work has always been narrative and figurative. She paints self-portraits with butterflies, monkeys and birds, and skeletons are a recurring motif, a skeleton wearing a party hat, curled around a cat, skeletons intertwined with people, a child skeleton holding up his mother’s face like a giant inflatable balloon.

The great advantage of earning money is that it buys you time to do creative work, she says: “Like if you own your day, that’s great.” Over the years she has cut back on teaching so that she can focus on her writing and art, and run a small nonprofit arts school, Artists Book House, which she founded in 2019. While she has been doing all this, in the many years since Her Fearful Symmetry was published, something nice happened. “People just forgot I existed,” she says, which seems to suit her just fine.

Niffenegger was raised in Evanston, a city north of Chicago and a short drive from where she lives now. “I think people imagine I had some baroque childhood. I actually just had a very American middle-class, suburban childhood,” she says. Her father was a civil engineer working for the department store chain JC Penney and her mother was a quiltmaker. Niffenegger studied at the School of Art Institute in Chicago, took a few years out to teach and work, mostly as a picture framer, and then did her MFA at Northwestern University. One of her graduate projects, the illustrated novel Three Incestuous Sisters, is currently being adapted as a silent film with a very illustrious cast: the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh worked on it alongside the director Alice Rohrwacher, and Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan and Jessie Buckley will star as the sisters, whose suffocatingly close bond is ripped apart over their love for the lighthouse keeper’s son. Niffenegger has read the screenplay, and this time she plans to “watch the hell out of” the film. “It’s going to be wild,” she says approvingly. “It was just so over the top, I mean it’s far weirder than the book, and I can appreciate that.”

Over the decades, her artistic interests have not wavered: “Love and loss, death, rock and roll, sex and romance, to me those are the biggest issues,” she says. Except now, because she has been writing about the future, she’s been thinking much more about politics. Both Alba and Henry find it easier to move backward than forward in time, because the future is harder to imagine, but the more they do so, the more concrete the future becomes. Niffenegger realised this is true more generally. We find it hard to respond to the threat posed by, say, the climate crisis, because we find climate meltdown hard to visualise. In her book, she describes scenes in which whole cities are underwater, utilities no longer work, food is in short supply, and the weather is apocalyptically weird in an attempt to make extreme global warming feel less abstract. And she found the more time she spent trying to imagine 2040, the more jarring the disconnect with the US’s political discourse. “I’m just like OK, sure, build a bunker for yourself,” she says of Trump, oozing contempt. “Like OK, billionaires, go to Mars, that’s OK.”

The current administration has radicalised her, she says. “Until the recent Trump debacle I was not a person who used to go to demonstrations. I was political in some ways, but I was not somebody who would drop everything and, you know, hit the street yelling. Now I am,” she says. She feels a sense of urgency. “I feel like whatever you can be doing, now’s the time. If what you can do is vote, vote. If that’s all you can do, cool. If you can give money to a cause, yay. If you can, go to a demonstration. Excellent. People should be paying attention and acting accordingly.”

She says one advantage of being a slow writer is that she is able to respond to current events. It would have been strange, she realises now, if she’d published the book before the pandemic and the coronavirus lockdowns had not been mentioned at all. Part of the reason the writing took so long, she says, is that she was “waiting to find out the resolution to certain real world events”. Some outcomes felt predictable, others not at all. While imagining civil unrest in a fictitious future, she watched the protests over the police killing of George Floyd rock the US and felt sure something would finally change, “But no, it just seems to have been like a rock falling into a pond,” she says, sounding despondent.

Niffenegger will leave on her book tour soon, though it will be a small one. There is art to make and new writing projects to get stuck into. She’s thinking of expanding her graphic novel, The Night Bookmobile, into a series of interlinked short stories. She’s also thinking about not doing too much at all. “After spending 14 years on one thing, I’m happy to have a little rest,” she says.