The (Super) Natural

Audrey Niffenegger struck publishing gold with her best-selling first novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, recently made into a movie. Now the Chicago author is back with another story tinged with the otherworldly—ghosts this time. Can the new novel live up to high expectations—and the $5-million payday it fetched?

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Double take: In her new novel, Niffenegger (opposite) tells the tale of Lake Forest twins who settle in their late aunt’s London apartment. Or as she puts it, “Young ingénues come over from America and get into trouble.”

She craves strangeness. The weird, the bizarre, the inexplicable—she is repeatedly drawn to all of it. “It’s the boredom factor,” says Audrey Niffenegger, 46. “If I ever got a tattoo, it would say Easily Bored. On the surface, people seem ordinary. But if you chose anyone and got to know him or her very, very well, there would be something about that person that was extraordinarily peculiar.” And she finds that fascinating.

She has also found it rewarding. Niffenegger has built her fearless and extremely successful career, both as a writer and an artist, around private worlds filled with dark and mysterious experiences. Sometimes these worlds are ominous, such as her prints that show conjoined-twin skeletons or an elaborate funeral for a starling; other times, the worlds are heartbreaking, such as the love story of The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger’s blockbuster debut novel. Published in 2003 and recently made into a movie, The Time Traveler’s Wife tells the story of a man with a genetic disorder that causes him to travel through time unpredictably and the woman who waits for him to reappear. Difficult to classify—some called it science fiction, others romance—the novel was a hit with the public, who saw it as a metaphor for the difficulties and bad luck that even the best of relationships can suffer. To date, it has sold an estimated six million copies worldwide in 33 languages, according to Niffenegger’s literary agent, Joe Regal.

With her tall figure and long titian hair, Niffenegger casts a striking presence in a Lincoln Square café. A faculty member at Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts, she is relaxing during the summer months before the September 29th release of her long-awaited second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry. The phrase “fearful symmetry” is taken from a William Blake poem (although it also turns up as the title of a Star Trek novel and the name of an X Files episode).

Until the official publication of the book, Niffenegger is relaxing, considering herself to be in a state of grace. “I have no idea how critics will react to it,” she says. “I can just enjoy the moment.” Already, though, comments on advance copies of the novel have hit the Internet. Editor and Publisher deemed it “a disappointment,” while the majority of readers at goodreads.com liked the novel, calling it “engaging” and “lovely.”

Niffenegger’s moment of relaxation has taken its time coming. She defied the custom for best-selling first novelists, which is to create only the outline of the second book and cash in with a large advance based on the success of a smashing debut. Instead, she took six years to complete and then sell a finished manuscript. In March, after a fiercely contested auction, Her Fearful Symmetry was bought by Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, for a reported $5 million.

“People seem to think it was a strange thing to do,” she says. “But to me it was the best way to insure that I had the freedom to do what I wanted to do.” What she did was write a supernatural story about 20-year-old Lake Forest twins who inherit an apartment near the famous Highgate Cemetery in London. Moving there, the twins become entangled in the lives of the building’s other residents. And then there is the ghost of their aunt, who left them the flat. “It’s essentially the Henry James plot: young ingénues come over from America and get into trouble,” she says. “The concept was to write a 19th-century novel for the 21st century.” As her models, Niffenegger chose James’s The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw, along with The Woman in White, by William Wilkie Collins, considered to be one of the first mystery novels. “Repeatedly what you get in 19th-century novels are these very sheltered females, and the novel is the story of their education, for better or worse. And I wanted to deal with all the tropes of the 19th-century novel: doubling, mistaken identity, mistaken parentage, and spirits. I got to write it exactly as I wanted, and that was very satisfying.” Beyond that, she says, she—just like many of her characters—has no control.

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Photography: Erika Dufour; Stylist: Amy Lauhoff O’Brien  Hair and Makeup: Sharon Casey Parker  First Assistant: Flynn

This article appears in the October 2009 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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