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Time is a capricious thing for Audrey Niffenegger. “I get busy with stuff, and when I look up, a decade has slipped by,” says the bestselling author. Her forthcoming book, Life Out of Order, her ninth, is a perfect case in point. Niffenegger had no intention of penning a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife, the wildly popular 2003 debut that propelled her into literary celebrity. The novel earned rave reviews, sold over nine million copies, became a film. But that was all in the past — until Niffenegger’s agent asked in 2012 if she had outtakes from the novel for a new e-book. She didn’t but pledged to fire off something fresh. Before long, she’d crafted a mini-adventure for Alba, the 5-year-old daughter of the chronologically challenged couple at the center of the book. And suddenly, as so often happens, the past became Niffenegger’s future: Writing that extra scene revealed to her how a sequel could work, though it took her some 13 years to tie up the last of the threads she’d tugged.
Travelers in this world mostly visit the past, but for the new novel, Niffenegger had to invent a future for Alba to age into. She presciently imagined a dystopian world with widespread riots, ubiquitous AI, and rising fascism. The author, who grew up in Evanston and now lives in Irving Park, never intended the process to take a decade-plus. But she ended up restructuring the whole manuscript three or four times, juggling a huge cast and complex story lines for what would become a 560-page epic. “I was putting things in the book,” Niffenegger says, “and then, because I took so long to write it, they would happen in real life, which got pretty peculiar.”
Life Out of Order follows Alba into her adulthood. A gifted violinist, she forms a diverse chosen family with other artists, anarchists, and socialists. At the novel’s heart is a love triangle comprised of Alba, her present-day husband, and a fellow time traveler from China — an arrangement spurred by all the talk of romantic destiny surrounding the first novel. “I don’t believe in soulmates,” says Niffenegger, 63, who is married to comics artist Eddie Campbell. “I think there’s more than one person for everyone. It would be so tragic if there wasn’t and you never found your one soulmate.”
Life Out of Order comes out October 6.
Barry Pearce is a freelance writer for Chicago magazine.
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