INTERVIEW: Audrey Niffenegger made her name with a time-travelling novel that became a book-club favourite, but her latest book, a ghost story based largely in Highgate cemetery, is an altogether spookier proposition, writes Sinéad Gleeson
'I'VE NEVER HADa supernatural experience, but what's lovely about having spent seven years writing a ghost story is that everyone wants to tell you their spooky tales. One I used in the book about the haunted trees is very true for the person who told me it." Despite a delayed flight and a taxi detour through rush hour, Audrey Niffenegger is calm personified, sitting in a high-ceilinged room in Dublin's Merrion Hotel. The story she mentions appears in her latest book, Her Fearful Symmetry, and happened to a friend of hers as a child. One night, the friend woke to see shadows of tree branches across her bed – except there were no trees outside the house.
This is precisely the kind of spine-tingling reaction Niffenegger grasps for in her new novel, even though she maintains she didn’t set out to write a ghost story. “My first idea was about a man called Martin who couldn’t leave his flat because of issues with OCD [Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder]. Then I thought that a young girl might befriend him, and that she would be a twin, and for Martin’s wife to leave him because of his compulsions. Because of the twin thing, I got really interested in the idea of mirroring and opposites, so from there I was able to figure out the structure of the book.”
That structure, which is far more linear than her time-shifting bestseller The Time Traveler's Wife, follows the story of two estranged twin sisters, Edie and Elspeth. At the start of the book, Elspeth dies in London and bequeaths her flat (adjacent to Highgate Cemetery) to Edie's twin daughters, Julia and Valentina, who live in the US, on condition they live in London for a year. Here, they encounter Elspeth's lover Robert; Martin, the agoraphobic neighbour; and a character itself in the setting of Highgate Cemetery. What comes across hugely in the book is that Niffenegger clearly knows a lot about Highgate, but why a London-based cemetery? "When I had the initial idea for one of the characters, he was going to live in Chicago [where Niffenegger currently lives] in a place called Uptown, where there's a cemetery called Graceland. It occurred to me that if the book was going to feature a cemetery at all, why not pick the best one I'd ever visited, which was Highgate?"
Julia and Valentina decamp to London where they are haunted by Elspeth and befriend her lover Robert, who is both attracted and repelled by the twins. A bizarre triangle develops that traverses the boundaries between this life and the next, giving the story its dark heart. Not only did Niffenegger do what most writers do when locating a book so specifically (research meticulously, visit, fact-check), she also trained as a Highgate Cemetery guide and even gave tours – her tour actually features in the novel. “When I first contacted them, they were concerned that I understood what this place was and that I didn’t just treat it in a very cavalier way. After I’d been coming to the cemetery for a year and taking tours by different guides, they suggested that I give one myself. There are 30 people who work there as guides, all voluntarily. Anyone can apply, you just have to ingest an hour’s worth of material, but they let you practise, time yourself walking the paths, and even give you a walkie-talkie.”
It's almost a surprise to hear Niffenegger laugh. In person, she is pleasant, slightly shy and almost stereotypically academic [she is a creative writing professor at Columbia College, Chicago], choosing her words carefully. It begs the question of how an unknown writer and clearly private person coped with the global success of The Time Traveler's Wife. Begun when she was 34 and rejected by numerous literary agents, a small San Francisco publisher eventually published it when she was 40, and she was unprepared for how successful it would be. "I imagined it would be a small, cult novel that a few people would read and would hear about by word of mouth, but MacAdam Cage threw themselves at it like it was going to be a bestseller."
Niffenegger absolutely attributes her success to the power of television. A friend's husband (writer Scott Turow) was asked to recommend a novel on what she calls that "monolith of television", the Today Showin the US, and he picked her book. The sales fast-track phenomenon that was Richard and Judy's book club was also championing it. Heralded as a crossover novel that checked lots of boxes, it had sci-fi, romance and was deemed literary but accessible. Book clubs embraced it in droves and the book sold six million copies worldwide.
What surprised Niffenegger most was the variety of people who read it. “A lot of women picked up on it and then made their boyfriends or husbands read it. It seemed to be a book that people in relationships could share. There was this sense of longing that I was never aware of before; that a lot of men were very touched by the idea of being able to meet their wives when they were younger – not in any weird way – and it’s something you can never be part of. There’s a whole part of someone’s life that existed before you knew them that you’ll never really know about.” She also received a lot of e-mail from people in the military about it. “They identified with the story, and with the idea of being separated from your family, of losing someone you love.”
Having such huge success early on as a writer can be both a blessing and a curse, and Niffenegger has tried to ignore the pressures with her follow-up book. This was compounded when it was announced earlier this year that Her Fearful Symmetryhad been sold to US publishers Scribner for $5 (€3.4) million. With its recent publication, snarky articles have appeared online pointing out that this is essentially $33 (€22) a word.
The success of the The Time Traveler's Wifemight have ratcheted up expectations, but it also allowed her the freedom to produce the kind of work she wanted to write. An accomplished graphic artist, she has published two "visual novels", The Adventuressand The Three Incestuous Sisters. Like the new book, the latter tackles a recurring theme of sisterhood and female rivalry within families. Niffenegger is the oldest of three sisters and says while they're all close, her younger two sisters are more so.
“Obviously, none of my characters are modelled on my family members. My sisters are lovely, artistic people who don’t resemble the dysfunctional oddballs that populate my fiction. But growing up I knew people who had those kinds of relationships with their families and visiting their houses it struck me how much their lives resembled daytime television.”
Niffenegger explains that having events in the book double and come full circle was modelled on some of her favourite 19th-century English novels. "I was trying to replicate a vibe, which pings back and forth between old and new in the life of the cemetery. The characters are extreme, and some of them are 19th-century character types. The twins almost belong to Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White." Henry James's The Turn of the Screwis mentioned in the book, and we discuss the film version The Innocents, which she has never seen. This book, even more so than its predecessor, is very visual and seems to scream film adaptation. It's at this point that Niffenegger confesses to not having seen the recent film version of The Time Traveler's Wife.
“It’s by choice really, due to previous experience of seeing films based on books. Once I see the film, the characters will always be represented by the actors and the setting will be very specific. It would just overwrite my original imagining of it all. Don’t get me wrong, those actors [Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams] are incredibly attractive people, but how could they match my idea of my characters? It was out of my control, but the advice I was given was just to ‘let go’. It’s difficult but I’m pretty Zen about it.”
Would she like to see Her Fearful Symmetryfilmed? "I would, but the cemetery would have to play itself and I think that would be very complicated. It's a very dramatic place, mainly because of its layout. It's all curves, so there's always something you can't see just around the bend. It was designed with a very theatrical quality and parts of it already look like stage sets."
The night before we met, the book was officially launched in Highgate, with the paths decked out with icicle lights and candles. “It was probably the most fun anyone has had in that cemetery in a long time.” She’s probably right.
Her Fearful Symmetry is published by Jonathan Cape, £18.99
