Readers Place

Audrey Niffenegger answers questions about her book The Time Traveler’s Wife:

It’s a really original idea for a book – where did you get the idea? – Particularly that of Chrono Displacement Disorder?

The title popped into my head one day while I was drawing. Chrono-Displacement Disorder was a name I thought up with tongue firmly in cheek, it was meant to sound very official and mean something radical. I decided to have Henry be a genetic mutant/time traveler so that he would be unable to control it, so that the separations with Clare would not be his fault.

The Time Traveller’s Wife had such a complex timeline in it – how did you manage to keep track of the dates and ages?

I used two timelines, one for Clare (whose timeline is also the reader’s) and one that kept track of the order in which information is presented in the book, and also tracked where Henry was coming from each time he traveled. The practice of announcing the characters’ ages and dates was originally for me to keep track, but I eventually realized that it would help the reader, too, and left it in.

How do you feel about the possible film adaptation of your novel? Will you have much involvement with this?

Well, I’m very interested in it. It will be an education for me, as all of this business of being published has been. And the producers have been very nice about keeping in touch and letting me know what they are up too. My involvement will be minimal, though. They have to make their own movie, without me hanging all over them.

What do you think about the comparison that has been made by the Evening Standard between The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Lovely Bones? Have you read The Lovely Bones?

Yes, I have. I liked it. I would have enjoyed discovering it for myself without all the hoopla, because it is a rather quiet modest book. I don’t see a lot of shared characteristics between Lovely Bones and my book, other than the intersection of the ordinary and the paranormal (and of course the sales figures).

Are you working on a second novel at the moment? Can you tell us anything about it?

I am working on a new novel. It is called Her Fearful Symmetry. It’s set in a group of flats next to Highgate Cemetery. It features mirror-image twins, an obsessive-compulsive, and a young man who is a tour guide in the cemetery. My goal is to use as many of the clichés of 19th century fiction as possible, while still writing a very contemporary novel.

Was it difficult deciding on the ending?

No, I wrote the ending first. It was very helpful to always know where things were headed.

Why didn’t you ever send Henry back to change things in the past?

All speculative fiction must have rules, and the success of the work depends on keeping to the rules you have set for yourself. In this case, the most important and basic rule was that things happen once, and only once. They can’t be changed, no matter how much one may want to change them. This is what saves the book from being sheer wish fulfilment.

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

Carpe diem.

Did the popularity of the book or the wide range of people it appeals to ever surprise you?

Yes, very much. I wrote to please myself and a few friends, and it never ceases to surprise me that my book has found so many readers. I am grateful, but amazed.

Is there anything of yourself in the characters of Clare and Henry and did you miss them after the book was completed?

I missed them very much until I began to work on Her Fearful Symmetry. When you write you have the characters voices in your head, you can stand in a room and see through their eyes, you are never alone when you can summon them like benevolent ghosts. I still flash on Henry and Clare when I am in a spot that belongs to them such as the Meadow or the Newberry.

The description of Henry’s time travel was very believable; did you do any research into the scientific theories behind this phenomenon?

I read up on the physics of time, but I was mainly thinking of diseases such as epilepsy and schizophrenia.

I cried many times while reading The Time Traveler’s Wife were you ever reduced to tears while writing it?

The only time I actually cried was while writing the letter from Henry to Clare at the end of the book. I laughed at a lot of my own jokes, though.