Audrey Niffenegger started the sequel to The Time Traveler's Wife in 2012, when Obama had just won re-election and she was trying to imagine what the world would look like in 20, 40, 60 years. She spent the next 14 years finding out that she didn't need to imagine very hard. An early scene involving neo-Nazis at a house party, written when such a scene felt like provocation, aged into something closer to documentary. She is clear she's not psychic — she's just been watching American politics since Watergate and extrapolated the trend line. The new novel, Life Out of Order, follows Alba, the daughter of Clare and Henry, who inherits the genetic condition that sends her involuntarily lurching through time. Alba has slightly more control than her father did, and more willingness to use that control for political ends. The world she inhabits is one Niffenegger has been constructing across 14 years of American drift — a timeline that kept catching up to the fiction rather than the other way around. Niffenegger has always been clear, to anyone who would listen, that The Time Traveler's Wife was never the soft-focus romance its readers wanted it to be. She received the 'so romantic' response for two decades and she absorbed it graciously, while noting that it's also a book about the impossibility of changing what you know is coming, about choosing happiness in the shadow of certain loss. The sequel, she suggests, removes that ambiguity. The darkness isn't subtext anymore. The interview takes place in her Chicago home, shared with the Scottish artist Eddie Campbell — a connection that traces back, improbably, to a literary festival in Australia, a stage interview with Neil Gaiman, and a journalist named Hayley Campbell who turned out to be Eddie's daughter. The house is hung with Niffenegger's own bold, figurative paintings — self-portraits with butterflies and skeletons — and stocked with taxidermy that has been partially relocated upstairs after her three cats 'interacted with it in weird ways.' The porcupine that once lived in the kitchen has been banished. She seems unbothered. She is recovering from a serious illness she declines to name, explicitly because she doesn't want it to overshadow the work. It's a consistent position: she's suspicious of the critical tendency to explain art through biography, and argues instead that art transforms the person who makes it. The Time Traveler's Wife opened the world up to her — gave her travel, gave her Eddie, gave her 9 million readers she hadn't anticipated. Her $5 million advance for the follow-up, Her Fearful Symmetry, became public in a way she found bewildering. 'That's just my finances. Why would anybody care?' The commercial logic of the sequel cycle is part of what makes Niffenegger's situation interesting. She produced one of the bestselling debut novels in recent memory, watched it become a film she has never seen and an HBO series, and then spent the next 14 years doing roughly as she pleased: teaching less, running a small nonprofit arts school called Artists Book House, making narrative figurative paintings that she acknowledges are out of fashion, and working on a book that nobody was actively demanding. 'People just forgot I existed,' she says. This suits her. Meanwhile, her graduate illustrated novel Three Incestuous Sisters is being adapted as a silent film by director Alice Rohrwacher, with a screenplay by Ottessa Moshfegh and a cast including Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan, and Jessie Buckley. Unlike The Time Traveler's Wife adaptation, Niffenegger plans to watch this one. 'It's going to be wild,' she says. 'It was just so over the top.' She sounds genuinely delighted, which is a different register than the polite detachment she deploys when discussing Rachel McAdams.
