Audrey Niffenegger Interview

From Mark Flanagan

December 7, 2003

Audrey Niffenegger is a writer, artist, and professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. She is the author of "The Time Traveler's Wife," the inventive and unconventionally rendered tale of Clare, a luminously beautiful artist, and Henry, a time-traveler. In our interview, Ms. Niffenegger discussed her art and writing, among other things.

Mark Flanagan: Can you tell us about your work as an artist and art professor?

Audrey Niffenegger: I teach writing to visual artists. We concentrate on merging and combining text and images, by means of artist's books, comics, installations, etc. I also teach letterpress printing, lithography, intaglio, fine edition book making, a seminar on visual narrative, and the occasional drawing class.

My own work is primarily visual novels (in the form of books of etchings), drawings and paintings, photographs, and collages. My gallery is Printworks, in Chicago. I love the intimacy, the obscurity, and the quality of the line in printmaking. My work tends to be narrative, figurative, strange, and quiet.

MF: Did you always know you were going to be an artist?

Audrey Niffenegger: Yes, although for a while I thought it would be a good career choice to be a jockey. This did not work out as I am 5'9" and horses scare me.

MF: Who or what have been the greatest influences in your art? How about in your writing?

Audrey Niffenegger: In art, I have been very influenced by Horst Janssen, Aubrey Beardsley, Winsor McCay, Jiri Anderle, Kathe Kollwitz, Joseph Cornell, Goya, Hans Bellmer, and the collage novels of Max Ernst.

As a writer (and a reader), my influences are Richard Powers, Dorothy Sayers, Rainer Maria Rilke, Henry James, David Foster Wallace, Edgar Allan Poe, and Anne Rice. I'm not claiming that I write like any of these authors-only that I admire them, and think about their work.

MF: The premise for "The Time-Traveler's Wife" is fascinating! How did you arrive at it? How did you then transform it into a novel? Did you outline the plot, do character sketches, etc.?

Audrey Niffenegger: I got the title first, and played around with it for quite a long time, slowly evolving the characters in my head. I wrote the end before anything else, and then began to write scenes as they occurred to me. TTW was written in a completely different order than the one it finally took. I understood early on that it would be organized in three sections, and that the basic unit was the scene, not the chapter. It has a rather chaotic feel to it, especially at the beginning, and that is deliberate-there is a slow piecing together, a gradual accumulation of story, that mimics the experience of the characters. I made a lot of notes about the characters. I had two timelines to help me stay organized, but no outline of the plot.

MF: How much of Clare (or Henry) is you?

Audrey Niffenegger: Contrary to popular belief, not much. I dyed my hair red as a way of saying goodbye to Clare, as I was finishing the book. She makes very different art from mine, and she's much quieter and more patient. Henry and I share a quirky sense of humor and a taste for punk, but not much else. Henry and Clare are distant fictional relations of Dorothy Sayer's characters Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.

First novels are often said to be thinly disguised autobiography. This one uses my places and things I know something about (libraries, paper making) but, alas, this is not my life, and these characters are not me. Ingrid, a character who did start out as a self-portrait, morphed so much that eventually I hardly recognized her.

MF: Clare is looking for Kelmscott Press's Chaucer when she meets Henry in 1991. Any particular reason you chose it? What about Rilke, Clare's favorite poet? Dorothy Sayers?

Audrey Niffenegger: Well, I needed a book the Newberry Library actually owns, and that's a very famous and beautiful book, something I often call up to show my students when we visit the Newberry.

MF: The novel's musical references are extensive, betraying your punk rock leanings. What are you listening to, these days?

Audrey Niffenegger: Here's what's in the stack of CDs next to the stereo: the new Duvall album, ELO's greatest hits, Systems/Layers, by Rachel's, The Ballad of the Red Shoes by Andrew and Beth Bird, Hot Shit! by Quasi, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea by P.J. Harvey.

I've been going to lot of live shows lately. The best were Sonic Youth, Quasi, Crooked Fingers, and Danger Adventure, and of course my beloved Avocet (my boyfriend, Chris Schneberger, is their drummer). I also broke down and went to see the Sex Pistols at the Aragon Ballroom, and was semi-amazed to find that it was not too bad. Very peculiar to see them though, and not at all subversive or thrilling.

MF: Henry and Clare have disparate spiritual ideas. Would you like to talk about where you fall on that subject?

Audrey Niffenegger: I'm an agnostic. I don't believe in interfering with other people's religious beliefs. I think it is especially misguided to kill people in the name of God. When I was a child I had a great, encompassing faith, but I've lost it. The evening news wrung it out of me. I stopped going to church and watching television around the same time.

MF: Free will -vs- determinism. I think your novel indicates that we have free will in the present. Is this your belief?

Audrey Niffenegger: Yes. I'm all for free will. As the novel indicates, even if there was no such thing, we would have to act as though there was, to avoid despair.

MF: Was there a central theme that you wanted readers to grasp?

Audrey Niffenegger: I wanted people to think about the intimacy of time, how ineffable it is, how it shapes us. I wanted to write about waiting, but since waiting is essentially a negative (time spent in the absence of something) I wrote about all the things that happen around the waiting.

MF: What are you working on now?

Audrey Niffenegger: A new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry. It's set in London, in a flat next to Highgate Cemetery. It's got mirror-image twins, mistaken paternity, a little tiny ghost, an obsessive-compulsive, and an accountant. I'm trying to write a modern Victorian novel. It's very early in the project, though, so it's hard to say what it will be in the end.

MF: What do you read? What are you reading now? Have any new authors grabbed your interest?

Audrey Niffenegger: I just finished Stiff, by Mary Roach, a terrific non-fiction book about cadavers. And Julie Orringer's book How to Breathe Underwater was quite wonderful. I loved Middlesex (but everybody loves Middlesex) and I am happily reading everything by John Irving, whom I'd never read, and who was thrust upon me by Chris, my boyfriend.

MF: Are you a very disciplined daily writer? What was your routine while writing the novel? How about now?

Audrey Niffenegger: I am very erratic. I write when I have time (which is often in the middle of the night, or on weekends, or whenever I'm not teaching). This past fall I've been book touring, and nothing much got written.

MF: What do you do when you're not reading, writing, teaching, or making art?

Audrey Niffenegger: I go out to the movies, and to hear bands. I also garden, play with my cats, and lounge aimlessly. I could use more aimless lounging, actually. It's been a busy year.

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