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?

(page 2 of 4)

Niffenegger was born in South Haven, Michigan, the oldest of three daughters, but the family soon moved to Evanston, Illinois. Her father worked as a civil engineer and her mother as a paralegal, but some of Niffenegger’s earliest memories involve her mother creating something—quilts, art—with fabric. As a toddler, Niffenegger became fascinated by books and how they looked. She began to create her own publications—much to her parents’ chagrin—by pulling their books off the shelves and scribbling on the pages. Over the years, she progressed to writing poems and then illustrating them, folding pages and binding them together. “I can’t say that I loved drawing before writing,” she says. “They were always so intricately bound together for me, and I just had this determination that the words and the pictures belonged in a book.”

“Audrey has this great love of books that extends to them as objects as well as words,” says Zach Dodson, founder of the independent publishing house Featherproof Books. “She thinks about the ways that form and content intersect. That’s an indication of a true and deep obsession.”

When she was 11, she made a 70-page book in which she described and illustrated her fantasy tour with the Beatles. At 14, a bad ear infection kept her home from school for weeks, and, to keep her entertained, her mother brought in a stack of art books from the library. In one of them, Niffenegger discovered Aubrey Beardsley, the 19th-century English illustrator. “I became devoted to him,” she says, “his amazing, decadent drawings and his dark, scandalous side.” After graduating from Evanston Township High School, she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She had plans to become a book illustrator like Beardsley, but reality set in. “I realized that the world of illustration was shrinking. And I also realized that I wasn’t very good at doing what I was told, so I could never be art-directed.”

But she was still “so hell-bent on this bookmaking thing,” she says, that she started to make her own books. While she concentrated in printmaking, her passion at the Art Institute became elaborate bookmaking projects, involving everything from illustrations to binding.

“Audrey became the only artist we ever picked up as an undergraduate,” says Bob Hiebert, codirector of Printworks Gallery, which specializes in fine arts on paper. At school, she had done an installation that was an illustrated book, The Adventuress, about a woman who becomes a moth. “The type was hand set on handmade paper, the pages hand bound—and then she had deconstructed it,” says Hiebert. “We could see that even then she was a consummate printmaker.”

Niffenegger had eight shows at Printworks before The Time Traveler’s Wife was published; a recent summer exhibition showcased her work The Night Bookmobile, original mixed media drawings for a serial comic that ran for 32 weeks in the London newspaper The Guardian. One of Hiebert’s favorite works by Niffenegger is The Three Incestuous Sisters, a 2005 limited edition of ten beautifully bound books that shows, according to Hiebert, “a dark, closed world” of thoughts, fears, and supernatural powers.

After graduating from the Art Institute, Niffenegger worked as a printmaker and taught classes at the Evanston Art Center. Discovering that she loved to teach, she went to Northwestern for an MFA degree in printmaking. Then she began working as an adjunct teacher in Columbia College’s art department. In 1997, she had an idea for an illustrated novel that would deal with a man who worked at the Newberry Library and hurtled through time with no control; eventually the idea expanded to become a love story about people who rarely connected and yet felt they had known each other for all of their lives. The good parts of the romance were inspired by Niffenegger’s parents’ marriage, and she had her own experiences in failed love affairs to draw on, too. “She talked about this idea for awhile, and then one day she said that she simply couldn’t capture the time-travel element in art,” recalls Hiebert. “She said she had decided she had to write it out.”

The Time Traveler’s Wife was published in September 2003 by the small independent house of MacAdam/Cage in San Francisco. It had paid $100,000 for the novel, and the house mounted an aggressive publicity campaign. But the book truly took off when Scott Turow endorsed it on the Today show. The first print run of 15,000 immediately sold out. Soon the novel became a publishing sensation; Amazon.com named it one of the best books of 2003. Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B Entertainment, purchased the film rights. Directed by Robert Schwentke and starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, the New Line Cinema movie did well on its opening weekend in mid-August, ranking third in the United States (and first in the United Kingdom) in box office receipts and taking in $19.2 million worldwide. (Niffenegger was not involved with the movie nor has she seen it.) Now Niffenegger’s characters may be headed to the small screen: ABC has announced plans to produce a pilot based on the book that could lead to a weekly TV series.

“Today there isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t field an inquiry about works by Audrey,” says Printworks’ Hiebert. “People from all over the world ask us about her now.”

* * *

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.

Did you like what you read here? Subscribe to Chicago Magazine »