Artist and novelist Audrey Niffenegger began the long-anticipated follow-up to her 2003 breakthrough, The Time Traveler’s Wife, back in 2012, shortly after Barack Obama’s re-election. Reflecting on that era, she describes it as a relatively rosy period for American politics—a time she characterizes as being “as good as it gets over here.” However, her creative process required her to project the trajectory of the world two, four, or even six decades into the future. Over the 14 years spent drafting this narrative, she observed the American political landscape shift, forcing her to reconcile her fictitious dystopian settings with the evolving reality outside her window. According to it was a “rosy” time in American politics, “as good as it gets over here”, she, Now, but her new novel required her to imagine what the world might look like in 20, 40, 60 years’ time. And I thought the logical progression of that would be fascism,” she says. Sorry your browser does not support audio – but you can download here and listen $ https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2026/10/09/Life_Out_Of_Order_Chapter_1_Audio_Clip.mp3. And knows – but cannot change – hardships that will happen in their shared future, henry is condemned to keep revisiting the most painful chapters of his life.
Niffenegger emphasizes that she is not “psychic or anything,” but rather someone who paid attention to the political warning signs that were present for years. Having grown up during the Watergate era, she watched the Republican Party grow increasingly assertive over the decades. She found that the more she attempted to imagine the state of the world in 2040, the more jarring the contrast became with actual political discourse. She points to figures like Donald Trump with clear contempt, noting that while some prioritize building personal bunkers or contemplating Mars colonization, she believes people should be focused on active engagement with the current reality. She tells me, the clues were all there. “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, it’s not like she is “psychic or anything”.
The writing process was intentionally prolonged by her desire to see how certain real-world events would resolve. Even when imagining civil unrest in her fictional world, she monitored genuine societal ruptures, such as the protests following the killing of George Floyd. She admitted that she hoped for substantive change, but noted with a sense of disappointment that the impact of such events felt ephemeral, like a stone dropped into a large pond. Currently, at 63, she is embracing a period of rest after dedicating over a decade to this single project.
The original Time Traveler’s Wife, a story centered on an artist named Clare and her husband Henry, who suffers from a genetic condition that causes him to involuntarily leap through time, became an enormous cultural phenomenon. While many readers interpreted the narrative as a romantic epic, Niffenegger clarifies that she always viewed her debut as a “darker book.” She recounts how readers frequently remarked that the story was “so romantic,” to which she would agree while simultaneously highlighting the underlying gravity of their situation. The characters’ struggle to find happiness in the present, despite the inevitable nature of their circumstances, was always intended to carry emotional weight.
Niffenegger’s own life has been characterized by a blend of artistic bohemianism and academic work. Residing in Chicago with her husband, the Scottish artist Eddie Campbell, she keeps a home filled with dreamlike paintings and an eclectic taxidermy collection—though she jokes that her three cats, whom she describes as “barbarians,” have curtailed her interest in displaying certain fragile items. Born in Evanston, she recalls a standard, middle-class suburban upbringing, contrary to the more artistic or elaborate childhoods some fans might imagine for her.
Her rise to global fame was an unexpected experience that she described as “very odd.” She faced intense scrutiny, which she compared to the critiques encountered in art school, but she struggled with the sudden loss of anonymity. The commercial impact on local sites was equally strange; locations mentioned in her book, such as Chicago’s Newberry Library, became so overwhelmed by fans that staff had to create dedicated FAQ sheets for visitors. Even with the $5 million advance she later received for her 2009 novel Her Fearful Symmetry, she remained focused on her core interests: love, death, rock and roll, and romance.
Throughout her career, Niffenegger has maintained a consistent focus on narrative and figurative art, often creating hand-bound, illustrated gothic fairytales. She served as a professor at Columbia College Chicago’s Centre for Book and Paper Arts for many years, later moving toward a focus on her writing and the non-profit she founded in 2019, the Artists Book House. Having balanced artistic endeavors with her literary success, she remains grateful for the ability to own her time and pursue the creative work that matters most to her. An early scene in the new book involves a group of neo-Nazis at a house party.
