Time Traveler's Wife author delights Auckland fans

Audrey Niffenegger

Audrey Niffenegger is dressed in a flowing turquoise scarf and dangly antique earrings. With her flame-coloured tresses and diminutive stature, she could easily have passed for the main character from her bestselling novel, The Time Traveler's Wife.

Ms Niffenegger was in Auckland yesterday as part of an Auckland Readers and Writers event called The Time Traveler's Wife Talks, hosted by Stephanie Johnson.

"People are always asking me, 'are you Clare' or 'is Clare you'. Clare and I are really different," she says.

Of all the characters in the novel, it is surprisingly enough Ingrid, the suicidal ex-girlfriend of the male protagonist, Henry, that she says "started consciously as a self-portrait".

"I always tend to be the person that people date before they get married. That's happened to me about 4 times now. I date somebody, I think 'oh wouldn't it be great', they don't think so and they marry someone else."

She hastens to add that Ingrid grew into someone completely different from her, "the personification of pure anger".

The Time Traveler's Wife is a love story about a married couple, Henry and Clare, but it is nowhere near the sappy offerings of say, a Mills and Boon romance.

Henry suffers from "chrono-displacement disorder", a fictional genetic condition that causes him to time travel without any warning. Clare spends a lot of time waiting, wondering and worrying about his whereabouts in the novel.

Ms Niffenegger has read a lot of magazines while waiting in airports and one of them had an article that said a woman should "pin a guy down" if she really wanted to get married.

"What a horrible idea about human relationships," she says.

She spent a lot of time researching for the novel. The Time Traveler's Wife tackles a lot of hard issues such as miscarriage, suicide and disability.

Ms Niffenegger says "very little" of the story is actually based on personal experience.

"Just about every particle of it is fiction."

She did talk to a lot of married couples to get a real feel for Henry and Clare's relationship.

"I've never actually been married and I've never actually lived with anybody." She gets a lot of mail from people who have had miscarriages and who think she has had one.

She has not.

She enjoyed being asked by Ms Johnson about the sex scenes in the novel, as few people had "dared" to bring that up.

There are a few unusual scenes in the novel, such as one when Henry travels back in time and has sex with his 15-year-old self.

"Nobody's brought that up before," she exclaims when the question is posed to her.

There is often a perception in the writing world that "serious" novels should have less graphic sex scenes. Ms Niffenegger disagrees with this.

Sex, she says, is very important, especially within a relationship such as marriage.

Readers are possessive about her characters, and that is what she enjoys. She gets a lot of email about the scene when Henry loses his feet to frostbite.

When a reader asks her about it, she is not clear on the question: "Did you want to protest?" she inquires. Bubbles of laughter ripple through the auditorium of female faces.

Ms Niffenegger is objective about the possibility of her novel being turned into film. The Time Traveler's Wife has been optioned by Plan B, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston's production company.

She thinks it will be a "difficult" task editing 600 pages down to the 120 required for a 2-hour film.

When Ms Johnson brings up the fact that many women are in love with the character of Henry, Ms Niffenegger jokes that it is interesting because Henry is an alcoholic.

She thinks Henry is not the typical brooding romantic hero as well.

"He's essentially setting Clare up to wait a long time as well. He doesn't really want her to find anyone else. He's asking her to go out and live her life, but he's doing things to undermine that."

Ms Niffenegger has had several interesting jobs in the name of research.

For her yet-to-be-released second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, she worked as a tour guide at Highgate Cemetery in London. She is also a visual painter and as a student, worked as a "performance artist".

She doesn't find it hard jumping between visual art and writing, although she would love to write a comic.

She is very open about the plot of Her Fearful Symmetry.

It is an "ensemble novel" with six main characters who live in the same building. One of them is a ghost, there is a man who has lost his lover, another suffers from agoraphobia and there is a pair of twins who get involved in "varying" degrees of romantic relationships.

* Karen Tay is a journalism student at AUT University.