‘People forgot I existed’: Audrey Niffenegger on taking 14 years to write a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife
Her 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…
Key points
- Audrey Niffenegger began the sequel to The Time Traveler's Wife in 2012 and finished it 14 years later.
- The sequel, Life Out of Order, follows Henry and Clare's daughter Alba, who has the same time-travel condition.
- Niffenegger says the current Trump administration has radicalised her into attending demonstrations.
Audrey Niffenegger started writing the sequel to her bestselling debut, The Time Traveler's Wife, in 2012, just after Barack Obama's re-election. The novel took 14 years to complete. The sequel, titled Life Out of Order, tells the story of Henry and Clare's daughter, Alba, who was born with the same involuntary time-travel condition as her father but has more control over it and a greater willingness to use her abilities for personal and political ends.
The Time Traveler's Wife, published in 2003 by the small independent press MacAdam/Cage, sold more than 9m copies globally. It was made into a 2009 Hollywood film starring Rachel McAdams and a 2022 HBO series. Niffenegger has never watched the film adaptation.
From sudden fame to being forgotten
Niffenegger, now 63, was working as an artist and a professor at Columbia College Chicago's Centre for Book and Paper Arts when she began the novel. She had imagined it might sell a few thousand copies. After it became a cultural phenomenon, she struggled with impostor syndrome and found the sudden success 'very odd'. She received a $5m advance for her second book, Her Fearful Symmetry, published in 2009.
She says that in the years since Her Fearful Symmetry was published, 'People just forgot I existed', which seems to suit her. She has cut back on teaching to focus on writing and art, and runs a small nonprofit arts school, Artists Book House, which she founded in 2019.
People just forgot I existed
— Audrey Niffenegger
Politics and the new novel
Niffenegger says the current administration has radicalised her. 'Until the recent Trump debacle I was not a person who used to go to demonstrations,' she says. 'Now I am.' She feels a sense of urgency and urges people to vote, donate to causes or attend demonstrations.
She says one advantage of being a slow writer is being able to respond to current events. Part of the reason the writing took so long was that she was 'waiting to find out the resolution to certain real world events'. While imagining civil unrest in a fictitious future, she watched the protests over the police killing of George Floyd and felt sure something would change, but says it seems to have been like a rock falling into a pond.
