On Time Travel and Twinning

Audrey Niffenegger's books are literary in the true sense of the word—she counts Henry James and Virginia Woolf among her influences, and she structures her works according to very tight thematic constraints that resonate long after one has finished reading.

In her conversation with Jerry Wasserman on Tuesday night she noted that she worked with the conceit of time travel in bestseller The Time Traveler's Wife in order to talk about memory, and referred to new book Her Fearful Symmetry as having "the structure of an Elizabethan dance." The symmetry (a pun on "cemetery", as in Highgate, a main setting of the book) extends into character, plot, and structure, but the lingering image is that of the separated half longing for reunification. Both novels feature fantastical elements that within their contexts seem entirely plausible: we would of course expect to find elements of time travel and ghostly hauntings in sci-fi or horror, but the way Niffenegger writes them they become stand-ins for far deeper meditations on life, love, relationships, existence.

The young mirror twins (incidentally a real-life phenomenon; who knew?) of Her Fearful Symmetry are written as if they are 19^th century literary characters, a conceit that caused some consternation among editors, according to Niffenegger. (Julia and Valentina are thin to the point of being skeletal, pale with white-blond hair, fragile and beautiful, and entirely innocent.) The editors needn't have worried; this is a writer who knows what she's doing.

In person Audrey Niffenegger possesses a dry and understated manner with a rather punchy sense of humour, though that may have been the jet lag, as she'd just flown in from England. She occasionally punctuated Wasserman's musings with particularly good zingers: He mentions that Her Fearful Symmetry has "not much sex," to which she responds, after half a beat, "Yeah...sorry about that."

Fans of The Time Traveler's Wife (the book of course; even the author has not seen the movie—more on that later) may be disappointed to learn that there is No Sequel in the works. ("If you catch me doing that, you know I'm broke.")

Also a visual artist whose pictures are as rich, layered and cleverly gothic as her writing, (visit audreyniffenegger.com to see) Niffenegger likes jumping from ‘picture making' to writing because she likes to "exploit the ambiguity in words," though I'd argue that her writing is in fact dense and precisely rendered. She was drawing when the phrase "time traveler's wife" came to her, and her visual memory is so acute that she cannot see the film version of The Time Traveler's Wife because it would forever ruin her ability to give public readings of the book without the faces and voices of the actors crowding out her own.

This writer has not read The Time Traveller's Wife (I admit I was turned off by the hype surrounding the movie—I can be so judgy) but it is certainly on my must-read list after this event, and I heartily endorse Her Fearful Symmetry. I've even taking to calling my kitten "Little Kitten of Death," after Valentina's cat, whom you'll meet when you read that book.

Niffenegger says her next work centres around a 9-year-old girl covered in fur. I, for one, can't wait.