Although it was released almost four years ago, Audrey Niffenegger has never once seen the hit Hollywood romantic drama The Time Traveler’s Wife. Which seems somewhat strange given that the movie – which stars Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams – is based on her internationally bestselling debut novel.

“I’m continuing to not see it,” the 49-year-old American author affirms, speaking down the line from her Chicago home.
The movie rights were sold to Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, before the book was even published. However, although the deal made her wealthy, Niffenegger says she never feels tempted to break her embargo. “Well, I read the script, and I thought, ‘Hmmm…’ I suddenly realised that, if I saw it, I could never un-see it. It seemed so incredibly different from my book, and I no longer really felt connected to it, so no, I don’t feel curious at all. I feel whatever the opposite is of curious.”
Prior to the publication of her novel in 2003, Niffenegger had been making a respectable living as an academic and visual artist. “I was successful in the terms of a visual artist, which is to say that I was selling art, and I had collectors, and had been doing it for about twenty years. Chicago is not one of the major art capitals of the world. I was very successful in a kind of medium-sized pond.
“So when I wrote the novel, it certainly changed my life in the sense that suddenly everybody thought of me as a writer. People are still surprised to hear that I’m actually trained as a visual artist, and that was my upbringing.”
People shouldn’t be all that surprised, given that Niffenegger has subsequently published a number of graphic novels, one of which [2008’s The Night Bookmobile] was serialised as a weekly strip in the The Guardian. She still grafts as an artist, and her paintings and illustrations have been described as female versions of the works of Edward Gorey or Egon Schiele.
“I definitely do something connected with writing and painting every day, but sometimes it’s almost more administrative. At the moment I’m getting ready for a retrospective, so my assistant and I have been spending a lot of time framing pictures, wrapping and photographing things, and doing all these crazy organising type tasks. But ordinarily, yes, I would be working every day.”
She’s done all of the illustrations – mostly etchings and paintings – for her most recent publication, a slight and surreal modern fairytale entitled Raven Girl. In an unusual hybrid of artistic genres, it’s currently being produced for the stage by maverick English choreographer Wayne McGregor at London’s Royal Ballet.
“I’m incredibly ignorant about dance, actually,” she admits. Even so, she won’t be boycotting the ballet version. “Well, I have enormous faith in Wayne MacGregor because everything I’ve seen of his I’ve just been really astonished by. So I’m really interested to see what they’ll do. I’m not worried about it at all.”
From her publisher’s perspective, Raven Girl is probably more of an interestingly quirky art project than anything else. Certainly it’s unlikely to match sales of Niffenegger’s second novel, 2009’s Her Fearful Symmetry, which earned her a hefty advance of $5 million from Scribner’s after a fiercely-fought bidding war.
A supernatural tale about ghostly twins, it was largely set in London’s famous Highgate Cemetery. During her research, Niffenegger – who has a second home in the city – worked there as a tour guide
“Yes. I actually still do that. When I’m in London I try to go over there and give a tour or two. I did it a few weeks ago.”
Needless to say, she doesn’t charge a fee. “I volunteer!” she laughs. “I’m not doing it for the cash. All the guides at Highgate are volunteer guides. I try to do it anonymously. Sometimes people come up very shyly after the tour and ask if I’m me because the reason they’ve come to the cemetery is because they’ve read the book.”
Having put it aside to write Raven Girl, she’s currently back working on a third novel entitled The Chinchilla Girl In Exile. It’s reportedly about a girl called Lizzie Varo, who suffers from hypertrichosis (excessive body hair), but it’s far from finished. “It’s still at the early stages. I spent a lot of time doing research. It’ll be out sometime in the remote future.”
Her forthcoming mid-career art retrospective probably won’t hasten the novel’s progress. Awake In The Dream World: The Art Of Audrey Niffenegger opens in June at Washington’s prestigious National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA). Amongst the works that will be displayed are several paintings of the late English fashion journalist and magazine editor Isabella Blow, viewable on audreyniffenegger.com
“I never met her, I just admired her from afar,” she explains. “I thought she was a very interesting person. I have this enormous clipping file that I’ve been working on since I was about 15, and I’ve clipped things from newspapers and magazines for years and years. She was one of the people I always got excited about. So basically I was just a fan-girl. But after she died, I did a whole body of work that was kind of a memorial for her.”
Suffering from serious depression, Blow killed herself in 2007 by drinking a bottle of weed-killer. “She died in a very horrible way. That wasn’t why I did it, though. If she had passed away by being hit by a bus, I would’ve probably still made that body of work. But it just seemed incredibly sad to me that somebody so talented should want to kill themselves.”
A couple of weeks before the Washington exhibition opens, Niffenegger will be making an appearance at Listowel Writers’ Week in Kerry. It will be her second visit to these shores.
“I was in Ireland on a book tour in 2009,” she recalls. “We were in Dublin and it was kind of a funny trip because I really wanted to see the Book of Kells. So we went to see the Book of Kells in the Old Library, and things like that, but we also were staying in the same hotel as Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne.”
Regrettably, there’s no great anecdote to go with that fact. “We didn’t actually speak to them. We just kept on running into each other in strange parts of the hotel.”
What can Listowel audiences expect?
“I’m not entirely sure. I’m much more likely to read from Raven Girl than Time Traveler’s Wife, because I’m sure by now that anybody who had the slightest interest has already read or heard it. My favourite part of these things is the questions and answers. To me, that’s much more interesting than reading out loud. If it were up to me, I’d skip the reading out loud and just let people ask questions.”

Listowel Writers’ Week runs from May 29 – June 2. Audrey Niffenegger will appear on Saturday, June 1. Booking on writersweek.ie