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. And I thought the logical progression of that would be fascism,” she says. The 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. 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.
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