Audrey Niffenegger on the 14-year wait for a sequel to The Time Traveler's Wife
The author tells the Guardian how a book begun in the hopeful days of Obama's re-election turned, over more than a decade of writing, into something far darker.
Audrey Niffenegger, whose 2003 debut The Time Traveler's Wife became a worldwide bestseller, has told the Guardian that she began writing its long-awaited sequel in 2012, shortly after Barack Obama's re-election. She describes that moment in American politics as "rosy" — "as good as it gets over here" — even though the new novel required her to imagine the United States decades into the future.
According to the Guardian, the 14 years she spent writing the book saw American politics shift in ways that made her invented futures look increasingly plausible. An early scene depicts a group of neo-Nazis at a house party, written at a time when, she says, few believed the US would see a resurgence of neo-Nazism.
The first thing I remember reading in the news was Watergate, and so I've grown up with Reagan, and the Republicans coming on stronger and stronger, so that every Republican president we get is more of a disaster. And I thought the logical progression of that would be fascism.
Audrey Niffenegger, to the Guardian
In the interview, Niffenegger also reflects on impostor syndrome, on the screen adaptations of her work, and on how long an absence from new fiction can feel — she says people had assumed she had simply stopped writing. No title, publisher or publication date for the sequel is given in the available material.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
