The idea of an author writing about a dystopian future and finding that, over the years they’re working on it, their speculative fiction is becoming reality, sounds like a lazy plot device. But Audrey Niffenegger, who worked on the much-anticipated sequel to her phenomenally successful 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife for 14 years, experienced just that.
Niffenegger, who is also an academic, a printmaker and an illustrator, had never intended to write a follow-up to the bestseller, but when she was asked to write something “a little extra” for the novel’s e-book release, she ended up crafting an entire additional chapter. And then a novel. Mind you, she never intended to write a life-altering bestseller that would sell nine million copies, either.
“It changed my life, entirely. I was prepared to write the novel, thinking if I was lucky, it would get published, and if I was really lucky, some people would read it,” she says on the phone from her home in Chicago. “And then I was prepared to go back to making art and, you know, not think about it too hard.”
Life Out of Order is what grew from that “little extra”. It opens in Chicago in 2022, when Alba, the daughter of Henry and Clare from The Time Traveler’s Wife, is in her 20s - but it’s not the 2022 we remember. The world is politically fractured by climate change, political instability, and advancing technology (OK, perhaps it’s not that far from where we are now?). Chicago is under a curfew, and Alba, who fans of the original will know inherited Henry’s Chrono-Displacement Disorder - a genetic condition that causes involuntary travel forwards and backwards in time - is on her way to a party. But it’s not your average get-together; this is one at which Alba and her activist friends are trying to catch some neo-Nazis.
Which, when Niffenegger started writing the novel in 2012, felt wildly Cacotopian. “Between the end of 2012 and the very beginning of 2026,” she says, “I was putting things into the book thinking, oh, this or that would never happen, and then they happened. I mean, I didn’t think neo-Nazism was going to be relevant.”
The idea of Chicago living under curfew, too, seemed fantastical. “But then during the upheaval of the summer of 2020 when the George Floyd riots were happening, in downtown Chicago the mayor raised the bridges so that people couldn’t leave downtown, and the police were kettling people … it blew my mind. I thought, man, that is strange to be adjacent to mass protests, and then the pandemic. Interestingly, I had nothing happening in the book during the time frame that the pandemic happened in the real world, so I was able to just pop it in there.”
The sprawling story - the book is almost 600 pages - follows Alba and her circle of friends - artists, musicians and political activists - in a world where time travelling is no longer a secret (although Alba doesn’t like telling too many people), and the threat of civil war seems ever-present. More than her late father Henry, though, Alba often enjoys time travelling, and occasionally uses it to her advantage.
And while there are several love stories in this sequel - Alba ends up married to two different men from different time periods - the story is much broader than the original, much more political.
When she started writing, NIffenegger says, she was feeling that things were looking up; Obama had been re-elected, social media seemed promising and fun. “I’m not somebody who feels confident about predicting the future and I thought, well, what seems like a sure bet? And I thought, climate change seems very likely, so I thought I’d centre what I know of the future around that idea,” she says. “And of course, in reality climate change is happening a lot faster than anybody predicted.”
And where The Time Traveler’s Wife focused largely on the implications of time travel on a relationship, the sequel is about family, and the idea of chosen family and how it impacts everybody in a dishevelled world.
“The implications of keeping secrets is a big deal in this book,” Niffenegger says. “I focused on a marriage with the first book, and people used to ask me all the time about the idea of soulmates, which actually is an idea that drives me crazy. I never would like people to think that there’s one person on the planet that’s their person. That just seems terrible because what if something happened to your person - what are you supposed to do then? Just fold up your tent and be lonely?” In Life Out Of Order, she explores different forms of love and affection. “Alba, in some ways, is incredibly loyal and loving, and in other ways does not behave in ideal ways. But that’s just people; people are problematic sometimes.”
Much of the book is also concerned with AI, but not in the way we’re used to seeing it portrayed. One of the main characters in the novel is Isadora, a digital entity, and her creator spends years making a digital “corridor”, The Museum of Lost Souls, which uses artificial intelligence to preserve artefacts and records lost to time.
“I was trying to not be ‘AI, bad, everything else good’ because obviously, it’s just as good or bad as the uses it’s put to,” Niffenegger explains. “I also wanted to make a stab at a more feminist AI. I was trying to figure out what it would be like if AI wasn’t created by tech bros. What would it be like if an AI was meant to be more caretaking and nurturing and saving various things for us rather than destroying it all? I also was quite interested to discover that Alan Turing had written a paper talking about if you ever wanted to have an AI that was convincingly human, that you would probably need to give it a childhood.”
As well as Alba and Isadora (who does indeed have a “childhood” of sorts), the book is populated by strong women. This was partly a counterweight to the world we’re actually living in, she says, which is dominated by technology and the relentless need to make money from everything. “I’m not saying that feminism is inherently socialist, but then again, maybe it is,” she adds.
Life Out of Order took her 14 years to write, but it’s not the only project Niffenegger has been working on. After the success of The Time Traveler’s Wife, she wrote several graphic novels, and the ghost story Her Fearful Symmetry in 2009, and until 2015, she was a professor of creative writing at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, which she co-founded in 1994.
These days, she has cut back on teaching to focus on a non-profit arts school she founded in 2019, Artists Book House. “I’ve been writing and drawing since I was a little kid. I used to make these little folded-up pieces of paper, and I would fold up a piece of paper, and then I would turn it into a book. So I’ve been doing that forever, and I thought I was going to grow up to be a book illustrator,” she says.
But by college age, she realised that being a book illustrator meant a career would likely be in illustrating children’s books. “I have absolutely nothing against children, but that’s not really what my interests are, so I started to make these handmade books where I was both writing the story and making the pictures, and I would take more and more words away and let the pictures do more and more of it, until eventually, there would be one sentence and a picture, and that would tell the story,” she says. “It’s just a really interesting way to tell stories.
I made a couple of books that way when I was in my 20s. One of them is called The Three Incestuous Sisters, and that’s being made into a movie.”
Niffenegger was hands-off for the project, which is co-written by novelist Ottessa Moshfegh and Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, and stars Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronon, Jessie Buckley and even Mick Jagger.
“It’s super cool and I’m quite excited about that,” she says.
Which was not her reaction for the 2009 Hollywood adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams. At the time she told AAP that once she signed away the rights, she “had to let it go. Once you sign on the dotted line, you have no control... I decided it would probably be best if I just did that”.
And 17 years later, she still hasn’t watched it. Seriously? She’s not even a little curious? “No,” she says coolly. “I’m happy to just let it be out there.”
She’s excited though, to finally have the sequel out in the world. “I didn’t give it to many people to read while I was working on it, so I’m curious to see how people will feel about it; I’ve been worrying that it will not hit people in quite the way that they want to be experiencing it,” she says.
“But you know, you can’t write the same book twice.”
Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger (Jonathon Cape, $37) is out now.
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