Readers Place

Author Q&A

Audrey Niffenegger answers questions about Her Fearful Symmetry:

What was the inspiration for Her Fearful Symmetry?

The original idea had to do with a man who can’t leave his apartment and a girl who visits him. As I walked around this imaginary apartment inside my head, I saw lots of boxes and when I looked out the window I saw a cemetery. At the beginning this apartment was in Chicago and the cemetery was Graceland, but then I asked myself, “what’s my favourite cemetery?” and the answer was Highgate. So suddenly the book migrated to London.

Why did you decide to include twins in the story? And what was the significance of making Julia and Valentina ‘mirror’ twins?

I think the twins got in there because at the time I was dating Christopher Schneberger, a photographer who was working on a series about twins. And in Wilkie Collins’ book The Woman in White, which was one of the models I was working from, there are two women who are strangely alike and this drives the plot of that book. I think that twins are rather eerie, and mirror twinning reinforces that effect.

The novel has a linear timeline compared to that of The Time Traveler’s Wife. Did this make it easier to write? Or did it throw up different challenges?

The linear approach was more challenging, because it is harder to control the flow of information to the reader and the suspense. I substituted point of view changes for time shifts. So sometimes the reader knows more than any one character, and sometimes the reader is left to piece the clues together.

The romantic relationships in Her Fearful Symmetry are very different from Henry and Clare’s love story in The Time Traveler’s Wife. How important are love and romance in Her Fearful Symmetry?

The interwoven stories of all the couples in Her Fearful Symmetry show a wide variety of relationships. Some are coming undone, some are very solid and steady, some will have happy endings and some won’t. Although the supernatural elements of the book might make it seem fantastical, it is actually meant to be a study of how love holds up under duress.

The relationships between the residents of the block of flats are important to all their lives. What came first the characters or the location?

The first characters were Martin and Julia. Then Martin had a flat, and the flat had a cemetery. The cemetery became Highgate. Then Julia acquired a twin, and Robert became a cemetery guide who lived downstairs. There was no ghost until later in the game, when the twins suddenly needed an aunt to die and leave them their flat.

One of the themes of the books seems to be about gaining freedom despite personal relationships or physical surrounding. Were you aware of this when you were writing the book?

Yes, that has been a great motif of my own life. I always seem to choose for freedom, but I wanted a kaleidoscope of characters who would each make their own choices, with various consequences.

Highgate cemetery is central to the story. Why did you decide to set the story around this famous cemetery? And how much research did you have to do?

I first saw Highgate Cemetery in 1996, when I came and took the tour. It is such a magnificent place, enclosed, full of stories, a secret garden with graves. As soon as I thought of it I wanted very much to set the story there. I had no idea what that would entail, but I knew I would love learning about it. I spent a year reading everything I could find about Highgate Cemetery and taking the tour repeatedly. Eventually Jean Pateman asked me if I would be a guide, and I very gladly began to give tours myself. I am grateful for the help of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery because a great deal of their knowledge is impossible to find in books.

Elspeth, the twin’s aunt, is trapped in her flat as a ghost. Where did the idea of having a ghost as a character originate?

I needed someone to bring the twins to London and give them their flat. The obvious solution was a rich and expendable relation, so I gave them Aunt Elspeth. But the more I thought about Elspeth the more I liked her and I began to wish she was in the book. So she became a ghost.

There is a great twist at the end of the novel. When you started writing did you know how the story was going to end?

No, it took me several years of mental groping before I realised what ought to happen. I started writing in the middle of the book and worked my way to the beginning and ending.
(Only answer this question if you don’t give away the ending!)

Who was your favourite character to write about? Or did it change as the novel progressed?

Oh, I am partial to whoever I am writing about that day.

What are your favourite books? And which writers inspire you?

This book was loosely modeled on The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins and The Turn of the Screw and Portrait of a Lady, both by Henry James. The original project I assigned myself was to write a nineteenth-century novel set in the twenty-first century.

I admire Donna Tartt, Richard Powers, W.G. Sebald, Chris Adrian, Susanna Clarke, Dorothy L. Sayers, Nicholson Baker, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Tracy Chevalier, Virginia Woolf.

Favourite books include the trilogy His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman; the Alice books by Lewis Carroll; the Oz books by Frank Baum; Was by Geoff Ryman and Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.

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.