 |
|
| Audrey Niffenegger with Sylvie (photo: Eddie Campbell) |
|
Audrey Niffenegger is the author of the novels The Time Traveler's Wife, Her Fearful Symmetry, Raven Girl, and several comics and visual novels. She divides her time between London and Chicago. Life Out of Order (Hanover Square Press, October 6, 2026) is the follow-up to the immensely popular The Time Traveler's Wife.
What made you decide to revisit the world of The Time Traveler's Wife more than 20 years later?
I started writing this book in November 2012, when the national mood was very different than it is now. I was interested in writing about climate change. I also had this idea about Alba [the protagonist] having a house, a place she has a strong tendency to return to. It was very different from Henry [Alba's father, the protagonist of The Time Traveler's Wife]--I couldn't just dump Alba in a meadow somewhere; as a female time traveler, the danger for her of that would be tremendous.
I was also interested in writing about art and community. Alba has a strong family, made up of both people she's related to and friends, who are all artists in some way, and also politically involved. I thought it would be interesting to tackle the ways that one's artistic life and the life of the community intersect and overlap. Every work of art has a constellation of questions that come with it, and I've enjoyed this new work with its attendant questions.
The book deals deeply with the role of art and artists in society, especially in times of rapid change.
Alba and Oliver, as well as others in the book, are artists: musicians, sculptors, creators of some kind. A lot of the book is concerned with their attempts to preserve, share, and pass along anything of value. I was also thinking about the way we teach art to children, and how it has such a huge impact. It can make such a difference if you're teaching art to someone in a way that makes them love it, rather than hate it.
There are so many different ways of being human. I like it when people really take it out there and are kind of being their maximum selves--quirky, eccentric, just plain weird. I like variety. I want people to be inventive and crazy, and amuse me with their marvelous new things that I've never seen before. Alba, with her millions of secrets, is also just trying to get along and protect people, and make her art, and love who she loves. All the characters have a kind of desperation to nurture each other, whether it's with art or food or political organizing--any resource that's available. All of them get by by giving.
Because of her time-traveling ability, Alba often knows what will happen in the future, but she can't change these events. She often has to consider whether and how to reveal what she knows. This impacts her relationships with other people.
It's always interesting with a time-travel novel, because I could reveal basically anything to the reader at any point. Trying to figure out how to dole out information, and let the reader experience the building of relationships and plot, is always a delicate balance.
Alba thinks of herself as a chaotic person, but especially as she gets older, she repeatedly realizes she has said something she shouldn't have, or let some piece of information get loose. Because of her time-traveling ability, she finds it oppressive to keep all these secrets, and also to say what needs to be said. It has weighed on her, because she knows well in advance how people's lives are going to go.
The bedrock of both of these books is free will vs. determinism. For most of the characters, as long as they don't know the outcome of a certain event, they are free to make decisions. For Alba, who has already lived through certain events in the future, she knows what's going to happen. Alba is always doing her best not to tell anybody the future, because she knows she's taking away their ability to decide. When she talks about an event, she often ends up saying, "That's just what is." There's no point in telling anyone about events like pandemics or elections beforehand; everyone would be so dispirited, or elated, that they would not be inclined to make an effort, so you're removing their free will. They just become cogs in this deterministic machine.
Artificial intelligence plays an important role in the novel, especially in the form of Isadora.
Isadora kind of got in there by accident. When I had the idea for the Museum of Lost Souls, I thought: it's a museum, so it needs a curator. I'll make a digital robot character to be the curator. Alan Turing wrote an essay about a process for developing a realistic AI: essentially raising them as a child, bringing them through the stages of development. That seemed like an interesting, provocative idea: to have Beck [the museum creator] actually do this experiment, beginning with Isadora as a child, and gradually bringing her along until she's an adult consciousness. She's a benign AI whose purpose is to preserve and curate and keep all this stuff, so at least it's there in some digital form, though I would never argue that the digital and the physical are equivalent. The Museum of Lost Souls is meant to record all these things that have either been lost or might be lost. I wondered: If we're not going to take care of the planet, and we allow things to be lost, how do we carry on? What comes next?
As the novel progresses, the characters, especially Alba and Oliver, must deal with the effects of rampant climate change.
With time travelers, you can go wherever: nobody can enforce a border on you. I wanted to show, over and over again, how things happening at a large level--climate change, decisions that governments make--are affecting people at a very nitty-gritty, day-to-day level. Immigration is a big topic, too, which I've dealt with in my life. I think most readers will be touched by at least a couple of these issues.
The novel's approach to climate change (and other issues) is all about managing decline at some point, and this is true of real life, too. I volunteered at Highgate Cemetery in London for a long time, and they have a policy they call "managing neglect." Societies and civilizations rise and fall, and there's a limit to how long you can keep something going once it has gone past a certain point of excess. Capitalism and consumerism have gotten us into this situation where there's just an untenable amount of stuff. Can we get ourselves into the right frame of mind to do what needs to be done to prevent a series of truly dire outcomes for our planet?
Everywhere in the novel, I have embedded the idea of the characters trying their best: to make things, to help each other, to preserve stuff, even if there might be no one to preserve it for. They are doing these things without any sure knowledge that it's going to pay off. I also wanted to show the appeal of grassroots organizing and all the relationships that go with it: the stubborn hope of doing the best you can, even while the world comes undone. --Katie Noah Gibson