Audrey Niffenegger is really into cemeteries—particularly London’s Highgate Cemetery, resting place of Karl Marx and Douglas Adams and stomping grounds of the fabled Highgate Vampire. Niffenegger—whose best-selling first novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife, is now a movie, opening nationwide August 14—worked as a guide at the cemetery in 2004 as research for her new book, Her Fearful Symmetry.
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Between stints at two artists’ colonies this summer (Oxbow in Saugatuck, Michigan, and Yaddo in upstate New York) Niffenegger, 46, found time to make her regular pilgrimage to London, where she likes to “hang out” at Highgate and still gives tours of the cemetery. “I have a little fantasy about living in London part-time,” Niffenegger says. “But since I travel so much it would be silly to have two homes to be away from.” The city on the Thames, she says, is “quirky, literary, old, and full of strange things that make sense only to Brits.” London is also the setting for “The Night Bookmobile,” published last year by the Guardian newspaper as the first installment of her serial comic The Library. Work from “The Night Bookmobile” is on display through August 22 at Printworks, 311 W. Superior.
Niffenegger was an unfamous visual artist and maker of art books when she wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife, which has sold about 2.5 million copies since 2003. The film version, starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, was developed by Brad Pitt’s company, Plan B Entertainment, as a vehicle for Pitt and Jennifer Aniston before their divorce; Plan B has stayed on to coproduce it with New Line Cinema and Industry Entertainment. The Chicago-set movie shot here for a few days in 2007, but was filmed mostly in Manitoba. Bana plays a librarian at the Newberry who slips in and out of time, first meeting McAdams as a young girl on one of his temporal forays. Their eventual marriage is tested, but also kept fresh, by his tendency to disappear into the ether. (Some of the most dramatic responses to the book have come from readers in the armed services, Niffenegger says. “Military personnel are far from home and their partners, and my first novel often resonates with them because of that separation.”)
Niffenegger says she’s rarely recognized in public, and in the visual art realm she toils largely free from the attention showered on her as an author. “Very few people see my visual art. I have always had the luxury of working for a small but loyal and curious audience.” The illustrated books she’s been making since the 1980s, and even her two recent graphic novels, The Three Incestuous Sisters (2005) and The Adventuress (2006), have made much smaller splashes than her straight prose.
Through 8/22: Tue-Sat 11 AM-5 PM, Printworks, 311 W. Superior #105, 312-664-9407, printworkschicago.com.
The Time Traveler’s Wife Opens 8/14, multiple venues, thetimetravelerswifemovie.com.
Audrey Niffenegger reads from Her Fearful Symmetry Tue 9/29, 6 PM, Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton, 312-255-3700, newberry.org.
Wed 9/30, 7:30 PM, Swedish American Museum, 5211 N. Clark, 773-769-9299, womenandchildrenfirst.com, free with the advance order of a book.
