Chicago’s Printworks gallery in River North has represented Audrey Niffenegger, now 40, since she was 23 and barely out of the School of the Art Institute. “Ferocious Bon Bons,” which opened the Friday after Labor Day, is her eighth exhibit there. “There’s always been a buzz about Audrey,” says Bob Hiebert, Printworks’ co-owner. “She’s one of those people whose work somehow lodges in people’s subconscious.”
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At one point she thought she’d become an illustrator, but “they sort of drum that out of you in art school,” she says. Still, the inclination to merge pictures and words never left her. In 1994 she and about a dozen others founded the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College. She’s taught full-time in Columbia’s interdisciplinary arts program since ’98, focusing on ways to integrate writing and the visual arts. She’s done two novel-length “visual books,” handmade tomes that tell their stories in pictures with a smattering of text. The Adventuress and The Three Incestuous Sisters are reminiscent of Edward Gorey or Aubrey Beardsley–quaint, absurd, and at times verging on morbid.
The Time Traveler’s Wife tracks the achronological course of their lifelong love affair. Narrated alternately by Clare and Henry, it’s a meticulously plotted Mobius strip that has more in common with heady, literate love stories like A.S. Byatt’s Possession than with The Time Machine or Back to the Future.
Niffenegger’s never been married, and says that when she was writing the book she was “just running into total lemons with the boyfriend thing.” For a while the character she identified with most was Henry’s ex-girlfriend Ingrid–the only character who never achieves absolution. The cool Teutonic pillhead is a minor player, but her presence resonates. She struggles with Henry’s peculiar problem only to lose him to Clare, and she remains to the end a bitter mess and a reminder of the dark underbelly of what Niffenegger otherwise paints as a charmed world.
After she finished the manuscript, in January 2002, she began the process of finding a publisher. “Coming at it from a completely different field, and not having gone through an MFA program, where I would have some wonderful mentor who would introduce me to their agents, I just kind of read a bunch of books on the subject and did what they said,” she says. She sent it out to about 25 agents, but it was nine months before anyone read it. Then, in the same week, she heard from Joseph Regal, a young agent in New Jersey, and the independent San Francisco publishing house MacAdam/Cage, where she’d submitted the novel over the transom.
Niffenegger devoted much of the summer to getting ready for the Printworks opening. Now she’s preparing for the fall semester at Columbia, where she’s up for tenure, and jetting off to bookstore events on the weekends. (She’ll be signing copies of the book at Printworks on September 25, but that’s her only local appearance in the near future.) She’s also working on a second novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry.” Set in and around London’s Highgate Cemetery, it’s the story of a pair of mirror image twins and their respective beaus. The new book, which she describes as “a catalog of every possible cliche of Victorian novels,” will be more conventionally structured than her first and refer less directly to her own life. In particular she’s making a conscious effort to keep her boyfriend–whom she met three days after finishing The Time Traveler’s Wife–out of the book.
