#405 – Returning to the World of The Time Traveller's Wife with Audrey Niffenegger

0:07Audrey Niffenegger: Hey writers, you're listening to the Kobo Writing Life podcast, where we bring you insights and inspiration for growing your self-publishing business. We're your hosts. I'm Vanessa, author engagement specialist. And I'm Laura, author engagement manager. On today's episode, we chatted with Audrey Niffenegger, who is the author of eight books, including the novel, The Time traveler's wife. Her book art, prints, and paintings are included in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Newbury Library, and the Library of Congress, among others. We had so much fun chatting with Audrey about her journey as a writer and an artist, from growing up making little handmade books to becoming the author of some truly unforgettable stories.

0:49Audrey Niffenegger: We talked about how creativity has always been a part of her life, how she approaches storytelling in bold and complex ways, and how her relationship with writing and publishing has evolved over the years. We also get into her new novel, Life Out of Order, including what it was like returning to the world of Time Traveler's Wife, building Elba's story across different ages, and weaving in bigger themes like climate change, AI, politics, and music. There's so many fascinating insights into this conversation about craft structure, character, and writing across time in every sense of the word. We hope you listen, learn, and enjoy.

1:21Audrey Niffenegger: it. Hi, everyone. We're here today with best-selling author Audrey Niffenegger. Audrey, thanks so much for joining us. And can you start off by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself? Well, I'm a writer and also a visual artist. I am just about to publish my third novel, which is a sequel to my first novel. So I've been working in the world of those two books for a long time. I live in Chicago and a little bit of the time in London with my husband, Eddie Campbell, and our three cats. You definitely exude creativity. So I'm very curious, did you always know that you wanted to be a writer?

2:05Was that always a creative path that you wanted to follow? Yes, my mother is an artist, a visual artist. And so from the time I was very young, I was quite happily making little books and, you know, I was making little stories and little pictures to go with them and use just scraps of paper stapled together and folded up. And so, yeah, it never occurred to me that you couldn't grow up and keep doing that. So I just never stopped. I definitely understand that feeling as an English major, definitely was that child as well, grabbing all the scraps of paper and writing my little stories. How has your relationship with storytelling evolved since your earlier novels?

2:51My second book, Her Fearful Symmetry, is a ghost story. It's set in London's Highgate Cemetery. And for that one, I did lots and lots of research, which was a lot of fun. I actually spent a lot of time in London at the cemetery, I eventually was allowed to become a guide. And so for that one, I learned so much about writing, just kind of experimental ways of putting the narrative together. The first book, The Time Traveler's Wife, the structure and the choices about narrators and how the narratives put together in terms of time is very odd. But it never occurred to me that it was, that people wouldn't be able to follow it.

3:40And indeed, people were perfectly capable of reading it, but I did get a certain amount of pushback before it was published. So the new one actually has six first-person narrators, and so far nobody's told me they can't follow it. So I feel like I'm interested in complexity and in telling stories in interesting ways. And so I'm always trying to kind of open up the way that the story gets told. You mentioned your family was also very creative. So I'm wondering what keeps you very curious as an artist at this stage in your career? What keeps you going and what keeps that brain just thinking of new things to do?

4:23It's just the way I live my life. I mean, I'm constantly telling myself little stories. I have kind of like a radio station in my head where characters are talking to me and just things are happening. And occasionally I think some of those things are interesting enough to write them down and share them with other people. So it's just kind of a quality control issue. There's never a question of whether I would stop making things up. I mean, that's just how my brain works. I love the idea of it being a radio station inside your head. Do you kind of visualize the characters themselves too, or is it more just the voices?

5:04No, I definitely have strong ideas about what everyone looks like. Occasionally they're based on people I know, but oftentimes it's just sort of, it's almost like somebody just jumps into my head and there they are, kind of fully formed. And sometimes the voice of the character is enough to give me a feeling for what they would look like. At this point, you've been publishing for a long time now. Do you feel like your relationship to publishing and the process has changed since your first book came out? Yes, quite a bit and of necessity because publishing has changed so much. My first novel, I went to art school.

5:43I didn't know anybody in publishing. I was coming completely from outside and even my efforts to get an agent were falling flat. I was just, I'm sure, ending up in everybody's slush pile. And I think I queried, I don't know, I got rejections from more than 30 agents. And my eventual agent, Joe Regal, had just started his own agency and was actually looking for people to represent, which was very lucky. for me, but I almost got passed over by him because he had an intern reading his slush pile. And so I was on the, apparently on the reject pile and he, he happens to just look over his own reject pile and he kind of got interested.

6:33He thought, he thought The Time Traveler's Wife was an interesting title. And so he just picked it up and started idly looking at it and the rest is history, but a lot of what happens in publishing for people who haven't published previously just comes down to good luck or bad luck. And so that first one, we ended up publishing with Macadam Cage, which was a very small indie publisher based in San Francisco that doesn't exist anymore. And it was quite lovely because they were so small that they treated me like a big deal. I mean, I might just as well have been Stephen King as far as they were concerned.

7:13And that was fabulous. They just really put everything they had into trying to get my book out there. For my second novel, that one in the U.S. was published with Scribner. And, you know, that was a whole different experience, which I quite enjoyed. And now this one is a different large publisher, Hanover Square, which is part of HarperCollins. And so the access to larger publishers just of necessity makes it a whole different thing. But in the meantime, the publishers have consolidated so much. And of course, everybody that I worked with on previous books has changed houses or changed jobs or just left publishing altogether.

7:59So it's, it never seems to be possible for me anyway, who goes so long between publishing books to have the same experience twice. It's so interesting how much it has changed and we see it all the time, especially with our indie authors. It's either like they're pumping out 30 books a year or it's like, you know, they're taking their time. And then it's just like such a crazy juxtaposition. But I did want to talk a little bit about your next book because Life Out of Order, me and Laura both read it. We loved it. So we want to know if somebody was picking up the book with no prior knowledge at all, what kind of reading experience would you want to prepare them for?

8:42Well, first of all, one of the main characters of the novel is Alba de Tambel, who in The Time Traveler's Wife was a baby and a small child. When we first encounter Alba in Life Out of Order, she's in her early 20s. She's at a party and she's with all her friends. So we meet all her friends. it happens to be the night that she meets her soon-to-be husband Zach but the purpose of the party the party is a little bit different than what it first appears Alba and her friends are trying to catch some neo-Nazis who they know to be very dangerous people and so that that first long scene, it's about 60 pages, is almost like a thriller.

9:32And all the events take place over the course of one long overnight. And everything that happens subsequently in the book kind of harks back to this evening. And so the book begins with a much more dangerous thriller-like vibe than the previous book had. But as the book starts to open out and you see more and more of what's going on with Alba and her family, you start to see what's happening in the wider world and how Alba and Claire and their friends and family are all affected by the big political situation, the big climate change situation, and how all these things are very intimate and very personal and really change everyone's lives on a deep level.

10:30I'm so glad you mentioned that because I thought it was such a cool experience reading this with now a dystopian twist on it. So I'm curious, what was the inspiration for this dystopian twist? In 2012, when I started writing this book, the world felt a lot different than it does right now. Barack Obama had just been reelected. And we were putting out Time Traveler's Wife as an e-book for the first time. I was very late to do that. I kind of held back just because I was waiting to see what e-books were going to be. And I was asked, did I have any extra material? And I didn't really have anything extra.

11:11But I said, oh, I'll write something. I'll write you an extra scene. And so the scene I wrote in the book, it's called The Yellow House. And in that scene, Alba is five, and she's with Claire, her mother. And Henry, Claire's husband, Alba's dad, has died recently. And paperclip to the will was a little scrap of paper with an address on it. And so Claire has done a little research and realizes that the address is a house that is in Alba's name. Alba is the owner of the house. So Claire takes Alba to the house and they go in because the back door is unlocked, which is kind of a common feature of houses that have to do with time travelers.

12:01They can't be carrying keys. They're not really able to carry anything. And so they go in the back door and walk through the house. And there's all these signs that someone is living there and that this person is Alba at many different ages. There's clothes for her in all these different sizes. And there's even a cake with the words, welcome, Alba, in frosting. And of course, both of them are thoroughly creeped out, but they realize that Alba will be spending a lot of time in this place. So I wrote that scene and then I thought, well, now I can't just stop because I want to know what happens next and, you know, what's this all about?

12:48And so I started trying to work on it, but I have always been reluctant to try to guess at the future. It's so much easier for me to write about time travel taking place in the past because it's easy to make my fictional world align with the real world. And of course, in the future, I don't know what's going to happen. But taking a wild guess, I figured that climate change was almost a certainty. And in the years since I started writing, it seems as though the climate change is happening faster than anybody imagined it would. So it does seem like a safe bet. And so climate change is the thing that's kind of ominous, hanging out in the background and sort of slowly moving into the foreground in the book.

13:35I think as well, another big theme is AI, which we know is like such a last couple of years has been an overwhelming amount of AI. But did you know that that was going to be a big part of this book or did it change as it got more and more, you know, in the world, I guess? Yeah, so there's a character who's an AI. Her name is Isadora. Isadora was originally a real person. She was part of the world of two characters named Oliver and Madeline. and I didn't intend for her to be an AI but an entirely different character in Alba's childhood needed an art project and this Isadora character wasn't doing very much she was she was just kind of hanging about so I grabbed her out of one part of the novel and stuck her in a different part of the novel and then realized that that she could be an AI but this I was thinking about all that in about 2015.

14:36No one was more surprised than me to watch AI just come bursting into everybody's everything all the time. I find it tedious how much AI there is that everybody's trying to ram down our throats. None of it is very much fun. Yeah, it's definitely ramped up a lot in the past years. So I can imagine going from 2015 to now the changes in your mindset when you're writing for sure. What was it like jumping back into your old characters and world that you've built after so long? Well, Henry and Claire are both very easy for me to write for obvious reasons. I've spent a lot of time with them. It was interesting trying to write Alba at different ages, because in the first book, she doesn't really figure much as a character.

15:28She's very, very young when that book lives off. So it was nice to have all that freedom. I didn't have to abide by very much from the previous book in terms of who she is or what she's like. And then of course, there's a bunch of brand new characters that I could just make up from scratch. So on the whole, it's freeing to write a character at many different ages. I enjoy having somebody who I'm going to be writing as a small child all the way up into their later adulthood. I mean, I think the oldest Alba is in the book. I can't remember. She might be in her early 80s. It's gone from my head right now what her maximum age is.

16:16Yeah, I think we end up seeing her in her 80s. Yeah. So it's just pleasurable to try to think about somebody over the entire course of their life and just how they would be. Did you see this novel? Obviously, you've been working on it for a bit. But did you see this as revisiting the emotional territory from the time traveler's wife? Or was it consciously trying to explore something new? Both. I wanted the book to feel like part of the other books so that if you read them side by side, and maybe not even necessarily in the order that I wrote them, that they would feel like one book. but the new one doesn't have the same emotional range that the first one does there if it was music they'd be working in quite different keys but I'm hoping that they work together fairly seamlessly that if you take the trouble to look at the dates and realize when things are happening that it would seem to all make sense.

17:22You mentioned the time and making sense. How did you kind of lay out the timeline for yourself? Did you kind of have to keep track of it at all? Or you just kind of wrote and then afterwards worried about it? Oh, no, I worried about it beforehand. If I had tried to retrofit it, it would be a huge mess. I write in Scribner and there's a companion software for Scribner, which is a timeline. It's called Aeon. It's spelled A-E-O-N. And it's just a big timeline that scrolls back and forth on your screen. And so you can create characters and events and assign them dates and duration. And it's lovely because if you click on your event, it will tell you how old your character is at that moment, which is super handy for me.

18:12but it also shows you kind of which characters are present in that particular scene and what else is going on at the same time it's quite handy that is very helpful for a novel about time travel I can imagine yeah yeah but I mean any novel it's just you just keep track of your chronologies yeah you mentioned scales and music just like a moment ago music was such a big component of this novel. I'm just so curious why it was important to show the Alba and Oliver's love of music throughout the whole novel. I like the idea of Alba in particular, but really all the time travelers, so we could include Henry in this.

18:55They need something to ground them, to try to keep them in the present. And one of the things that works really well, and Henry mentions this in the previous book is music but just anything that keeps you in the moment and music certainly is an art form that's extremely time-based uh you know nothing there is no music without time you have to have duration in order to have uh you know any music at all but I feel as though it it gives them something that really binds them together and allows them to temporarily step outside of the worry that they're about to be ripped out of whatever moment they're in and dumped somewhere else.

19:44I never thought about it like that, but it is very, it's like a constant. It's something that they just need to have that brings them back. And very similar to like, maybe a dumb comparison, but like a shifter needs a constant to bring them back to like a human form so very similar to you know the werewolf that I can't remember his name right now escaping me but it like it's very very similar so that that's like a very interesting point that I never thought of so that's that's cool very cool thanks I love the idea too of the music of them being able to visit um Henry's mother's concerts in different times as well um it's very interesting that they're all able to kind of see the music in a different way and experience the music in a different way, even though they never got to meet her in person.

20:34I did want to talk a little bit more about the time travel a bit. In a lot of books, time travel is seen kind of as this magic element, but in Time Traveler's Wife and in Life Out of Order, you have a science behind it. It's something that doctors are looking into and exploring. why was it important for you to have that aspect of it in your world? I was looking for a sort of time travel that would not be voluntary. I didn't want Henry to be hopping in the TARDIS or the Wayback Machine and deliberately leaving Claire and going off and having adventures. I also wanted it to seem analogous to certain diseases, like maybe epilepsy, schizophrenia.

21:23And so I was thinking about those things and how people experience those. And a lot of it is very, you know, people have headaches, they see auras. And I thought, okay, I'm just going to pinch all that for my colonel displacement disorder. Because I felt as though people who experience epilepsy and certain kinds of seizure disorders would probably know exactly what this was like. You know, you feel this coming on, you can't really do anything about it, and then you just can't control things for a short period of time, and then you're back. And I just wanted a method of time travel that was entirely based in the body and was not in his control and was pretty dangerous.

22:13I didn't want it to be desirable. It had some good side effects that he quite enjoyed, but ultimately it was not good for him. And Alba manages things a bit better, as does Oliver, but it's still not something any of them entirely control. Yeah, the lack of control, I think, is what makes it such a good read, too, because you don't know what's going to happen and they don't know what's going to happen. So it's really interesting to read. What was the hardest part about writing this book in particular? For a long time, I was moving slowly because I couldn't get the structure figured out. Originally, the section where Alba's a child was the first section.

22:59And so the book began fairly slowly. It's really more about Claire and Beck and certainly somewhat about Alba, but Zach and Oliver hardly figure in it. And I eventually realized that I needed to flip it, that it needed more velocity. So I thought, OK, well, we'll start with the party scene, which originally opened Section 2. We'll just start with the party scene and just jump right in and see what kind of world they all grew up into and what they're having to do. and all the relationships between friends and between Alba's generation and her mother's generation. So it's a great scene for kind of getting the lay of the land.

23:50And then the scene that follows it, you get more farther into that. And so between those two scenes, it's about, I think, 100 pages and you're well into the book. And I thought, yeah, it's really better to start in the middle, as it were, and then back up and see Alba's childhood and kind how we ended up where we were. So when you're writing it, trying to picture like you writing a time travel novel like this, is it you're not going from beginning to end? Because everybody's all ages sort of throughout the book. So is it like you're, I'm going to start with Alba 21 today when you're writing, or is it how you put it all together?

24:28And I know you use the software, but just like in your brain, I can't imagine. So I've always, and even with a more conventionally structured book, like Her Fearful Symmetry, I have never been able to start at the beginning and work through to the end and say, here is my first draft and then go back and have a second draft. I just don't work that way. And so in this case, I wrote something that ended up toward the end of the first section, the yellow house. And I think the next thing I wrote was the party scene. And then just kind of off and running. I wrote the ending after maybe two years of working on it.

25:04So, yeah, I just I just always end up with this. If you can imagine a brick wall where some of the bricks are just floating in midair with nothing to support them. And just every now and then I think of a new a new section and I just pop it in there and eventually hope that it's all going to join up. I mean, I often know where I want things to go and can vaguely see the overall plan. but occasionally have to change the order that the reader is introduced to things so that they are not hopelessly confused. A little bit confused is okay, but completely confused, don't want to keep reading is not good.

25:47This leads perfectly into my question about editing this novel. So how do you know when a novel is finished enough to give to your editor, especially one that has such non-linear elements, or do they get it out of order and then edit it like that? Or how does it work on that end? Right. So my agent, Joseph Regal, has been editing my work since we first joined forces back in 2002. And he is an absolutely genius editor. And so he, I think he read this thing about eight times and had a lot of input about various things, including the structure. And so once we eventually decided it was finished, which took forever, obviously.

26:30The editor that we turned it into was not the editor who ended up publishing it in the end. There was a lot of head scratching and we ended up with someone else different. We ended up at Hanover Square with Grace Tauri. In the UK, my editor, Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape, had retired. And so now I have Hannah Westland. Also in Canada, my editor had ascended to a more elevated job. And so I had a new editor there as well. And so they teamed up, the three of them, and did a heroic job of editing the book. And, you know, obviously, I don't take every single suggestion that anybody makes, but certainly they did a fantastic job of it.

27:21Do you think that the book taught you anything new about your writing process? Because you've been writing for so long and in so many different mediums, but this was kind of a bigger project. I did not know at the outset that it was going to take so long. I imagined that I was going to be done in 2018. I don't know why I thought that, but it was probably good that I didn't manage it by then because the pandemic happened and it was kind of it would have been a glaring omission to not have that in the book. There's so much that's happened that it would be it would be strange and the book would look seriously out of date almost immediately if it hadn't taken as long as it did.

28:05I guess, you know, once again, I have learned to trust that I will eventually figure it out. There were certainly moments when I just thought, oh, no, this is never going to get sorted. I think that's kind of good advice for any author is just to trust the process and it will all work itself out in the end. Just keep writing. I mean, it doesn't have to, but I think eventually if you persevere, you can probably solve the problems. You touched on this briefly, but I did want to talk about it a little bit more. Originally, there was no e-book for Time Traveler's Wife. What kind of made you change your mind and decide to explore that medium eventually?

28:44It just became the norm. I happened to have published Time Traveler's Wife at the last moment that you didn't automatically sell the e-writes along with the book. And so I happened to control my e-writes and it just took me a while to figure out what to do with them. I was just sort of watching an entirely new method of publishing come into being. And I thought, well, instead of just throwing this out there, let me see what it is and who's good at it before I start putting it out there. For a very long time, my e-book was self-published, which is a good way to go. We agree. You must have had the publishers clamoring for e-book rights.

29:31Yes. And the e-book is different in each country. Yeah, it's sort of like every publishing deal. It's been sorted out country by country in some countries, especially because of issues with translations. The e-book went along with the print rights. I'm curious, do you read e-books or normally paperbacks? Paperbacks, yeah. Fair. I don't even do audio books. I'm so old fashioned. I read a tremendous amount of stuff on my phone, but it's usually things like the London Review of Books or the New Yorker. If I want to read a book, I usually get physical copy. I'm so curious as somebody who is a fan of Time Traveler's Wife, what you also are excited for readers to discover in this book and going back to these characters.

30:19And what's kind of, I don't know, what are you excited to see from readers? Well, an entirely new generation of people has come along since I published the first book. I mean, that was published in 2003. So, I mean, there are 23-year-olds who were born that year. So I'm hoping that maybe people who never read the first one at all might give it a chance. The new book is written, I think, from just a different vantage point in my own life. I mean, the first book started writing when I was, I think I started when I was about 35 and finished it when I was 40. and this new one I started at 49 and finished at 62 I think so it's just a different lens to look at the world and your characters it's very easy for me to write Claire as an older woman because you know I'm 63 now and so I at least have that much experience and it's interesting to try to remember what it's like to be in your 20s or to be eight, you know, just trying to project oneself backward and really channel a much younger person is a very good exercise.

31:33So yeah, I'm just hoping that the readers are willing to be very open about what these characters might be getting up to. I do expect to get some pushback. The book is very political. The book is opinionated, but that's just me. I couldn't not do it. I love the idea of your characters growing with you. That's a really cool concept to think that they've been with you for 20 years and you get to write about them. That's amazing. Is there a genre that you haven't yet dabbled in that you think you'd want to? I always think I would maybe be good at writing detective fiction. I mean, some of my literary heroes are detective writers, people like Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tay, just really old school writers of detective fiction.

32:25It's such an interesting genre and people have done so much with it recently and really expanded it. It's become almost all encompassing. I mean, it sometimes seems like everything you look at on Netflix is some kind of detective thing. But yeah, so that would be one. There's a true crime phase going on right now. So people love to read and watch true crime. So yeah, I mean, I took a crack at ghost stories and I could always happily go back to that. That interests me quite a lot. There is a little bit of almost like a thriller element to Life Out of Order. so I could see you going there. Thank you.

33:07Thank you so much for joining us. And we've taken up a lot of your time. So I'll just ask, what are you working on next? And what can readers expect from you next? I am not entirely sure. I have a giant grab bag of ideas that have been patiently waiting for me to get to them. The most immediate thing is to walk into the studio and work on some art. I had a show last year and everything's been gathering dust since then, so I would really like to do some drawings. But beyond that, I'm not entirely sure. I've certainly thought about, there was a book that I did a while back called The Night Bookmobile, and I'd like to expand upon that, possibly in the form of linked short stories.

33:56So that's a maybe. Of course, you know, the minute that's out of my mouth, I'm thinking, no, no, do that other thing. So, yeah, not quite sure. That's great. And where can readers find you if they want to look you up online? I actually have a website. It's just my name, www.audrienefenegger.com. And it has a bunch of my art and links to various interviews and things about books I've done that are not available in bookshops or online. just odd little handmade things. So yeah, that's one place. Awesome. We will definitely link it in the show notes. So can't wait for people to see that. It's very cool.

34:37But thank you so much for joining us. This was very exciting. I feel like we got a lot of new info. So thank you so much for being here with us. Thanks so much, Audrey. Thank you. It was a lot of fun. Thank you for listening to the Cobra Writing Life podcast. If you're interested in picking up Audrey's books, we will include links in our show notes. If you're enjoying the podcast, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe. And if you're looking for more tips on growing your self-publishing business, you can find us on social. We are at Kobo Writing Life on Facebook, Blue Sky, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok.

35:11Audrey Niffenegger: This episode was hosted by Laura Granger and Vanessa Salemi with production by Terrence Abrahams. Editing is provided by Kelly Robotham. Our theme music is composed by Tear Jerker. And thanks to Audrey for being a guest. If you're ready to start your publishing journey, sign up today at kobo.com slash writing life. Until next time, happy writing.