‘People forgot I existed’: Audrey Niffenegger on taking 14 years to write a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife — SkimNews
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- Audrey Niffenegger began writing the sequel 'Life Out of Order' in 2012, just after Obama's re-election, and spent 14 years completing it while American politics moved in directions that made her dystopian scenes—including a neo-Nazi house party—look "worryingly realistic."
- Life Out of Order follows Clare and Henry's daughter Alba, who inherited her father's involuntary time-traveling condition but has more control over it and uses it for personal and political ends, per Niffenegger.
- The Time Traveler's Wife, published in 2003 by small press MacAdam/Cage, sold more than 9 million copies globally after novelist Scott Turow recommended it on the US Today show and Richard and Judy's Book Club picked it up in the UK.
- Her Fearful Symmetry (2009), Niffenegger's second novel set in London's Highgate Cemetery, came with a $5 million advance, a figure Niffenegger said she didn't realize would become news.
- The 2009 film adaptation of The Time Traveler's Wife starring Rachel McAdams was panned by critics and Niffenegger told the Guardian she has never watched it; HBO adapted it as a series in 2022.
- Niffenegger's illustrated graduate project Three Incestuous Sisters is being adapted as a silent film with a screenplay by Ottessa Moshfegh, directed by Alice Rohrwacher, and starring Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan, and Jessie Buckley.
Why it matters: With more than 9 million copies of The Time Traveler's Wife still in circulation and readers waiting 14 years for a sequel, 'Life Out of Order' lands as both a continuation of a beloved story and an inadvertent political chronicle—Niffenegger's imagined neo-Nazi house parties and creeping fascism scenarios were written years before they reflected headlines, giving the novel a prescient edge that transforms a long-awaited follow-up into a cultural artifact.
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