Audrey Niffenegger’s debut novel “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” a love story set asunder by the husband’s uncontrollable bouts of time travel, was an immediate if surprising best seller when it published in 2003.
Over the 20-plus years since, the novel too has traveled, been adapted as a film, television series and musical.
Still, Niffenegger had no thought of writing a sequel until 2012, when her publisher came looking for outtakes for an e-book version. Saying she had “nothing that would bear anybody reading it,” the author began to write new material. In short order, she found herself hooked.
“I wrote what ended up being the chapter called ‘The Yellow House’, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is kind of fun. Actually, I could do more of this.’”
Fans of her literary sci-fi romance may soon feel the same about her sequel, “Life Out of Order” (Oct. 6, Harper Collins). Written over a 12-year stretch while Niffenegger was living between London and Chicago, it moves beyond the orbit of the original love story between Claire and Henry into the lives, passions and rebellions of a second generation of time travelers, including their daughter, Alba DeTamble, a violinist.
Alba’s world is different from her parents. Time traveling is a known condition, and Niffenegger worked to get “the feeling of daily life into that experience.” There are many more and different kinds of relationships, including Alba’s encounters with her own self at different ages.
In the book’s opening pages, Alba describes the complexity that results from her inherited genetic condition. “Because I am unmoored in time, everything is lost and found all at once, everyone I love is alive and dead or not-yet-born; there are discoveries, revolutions, greets and goodbyes, but not in the order most people would expect.”
That convoluted reality was the author’s, too.
“I didn’t think I could do another book where it’s like, ‘Time travel, isn’t this wild?’ because I feel like the readership has grown up and the fandom for things like ‘Doctor Who’ is so huge now,” muses Niffenegger. “Readers have become much more adept at following things that are not in chronological order.”
Seated at a table in front of a long row of windows in her Victorian-era home, her signature flowing auburn locks now cut fashionably short, Niffenegger notes that she is “not a futurist.”
Instead, she began building the future by scanning the present. “I started thinking, well, one thing we can depend on is climate change. I’m pretty sure that will be a problem.”
Other aspects were less predictable, like the book’s political climate. The opening scene at a house party, set in a Chicago under martial law, involves a group of young people, Alba among them, plotting to take out some fascists.
“I wrote that in 2013 when neo-Nazis were not really a big problem as far as I could tell,” recalls Niffenegger. “The whole return of fascism thing caught me by surprise.”
“Most of my work over my whole life has had to do with loss and grief and love and sex and death and rock and roll,” Niffenegger shared. “So none of these things are new for me. I think that any time you get preoccupied with time, grief will certainly come into it.”
Victor Hilitski for the Sun-Times
AI is also part of the plot, although Niffenegger imagines it as a machine for preserving rather than usurping human experience. The heart of the novel remains the relationships between people, including between Alba and her two husbands, one of them also a time traveler.
Combining a multi-generational tale with a multiverse narrative could potentially lead to sprawl, so Niffenegger imposed some strict boundaries, including limiting first-person point of view to Alba’s immediate family members.
“You always start to have this feeling as a reader of everything’s kind of getting a little hard to handle,” she asserts. “I’m thinking of things like ‘War and Peace’ but also something like ‘Game of Thrones.’ I think the reason he [‘Game of Thrones’ author George R. R. Martin] is having a hard time finishing it is he’s just got way too many people to deal with.”
As Niffenegger was building the book’s alternate world, her own life was evolving. Just as she started writing, she met and fell in love with her now husband, comics artist Eddie Campbell. Her father died in 2016, which she says made writing about Alba and Henry’s relationship “a little bit more fraught and poignant.”
A sense of grief permeates “Life Out of Order,” but this is familiar terrain for Niffenegger.
“Most of my work over my whole life has had to do with loss and grief and love and sex and death and rock and roll. So none of these things are new for me. I think that any time you get preoccupied with time, grief will certainly come into it.”
Now that “Life Out of Order” is finished and entering the world, Niffenegger misses what she describes as the “companionship” of the book she spent the last 12 years writing.
“I feel like I have a radio station in my head, and the characters are free to chime in whenever they want, and I’m just trying to catch whatever wisp of an idea has popped into my head,” she notes. “It feels strange now to get up in the morning and not have that. It feels kind of empty and quiet in here.”
Niffenegger is staying busy. She’s writing another sequel, this time to her 2018 comic “The Night Mobile” and continuing her visual art practice. She remains involved in a passion project she first began in 2019, the Artists Book House, a gathering space in Old Irving Park for studying and making book-related arts, including workshops in binding, calligraphy, typography and zines.
At the age of 63, she’s also considering what her own future holds, which is turning out to be a liberatory project.
“I didn’t have a big plan for being an older person, I was very centered on being in my 20s through my 40s, and after that, I kind of thought, ‘OK, well, I’ve done all this stuff that I wanted to do. Now what?’ So in a way, I was suddenly quite free to do anything at all.”