It is said that Audrey Niffenegger received a $5m advance for her latest
novel, a ghost story called Her Fearful Symmetry, so I ask her about the
little luxuries she can now afford, thinking she might mention champagne and
first editions. She replies that she would simply adore a “stuffed crow” to
keep her preserved badger company. Apparently, the retail temptations of
Paris, where she is headed in November, are not the boutiques of the
Faubourg Saint-Honoré, but the state-of-the-art taxidermy in the shop
Deyrolle. “Now people know I collect, they give me taxidermy as a present,
which is great,” she enthuses.
The author of the monster bestseller The Time Traveller’s Wife began her
curious collection with an “amazing” footless stuffed toad, bought at a
garage sale. Her new book reflects that same unlikely pairing of the creepy
and the cute. Set against the backdrop of Highgate’s gothic cemetery, where
she sometimes acts as a tour guide, it is a story wrought from twisted clichés
of mirror-image twins, wealthy, bequeathing aunts, meddling ghosts and
occasional grave-robbing, but it’s never too dark for comfort. Its heroines
are beautiful, their clothes are covetable (duck-egg blue cashmere
features), and the real star is London, a city the Chicago-raised and based
writer considers a home from home.
With her long Titian hair and pale, unlined skin, she looks a fitting narrator
of the supernatural, slightly and not unattractively witchy. Also an
exhibited artist, and the creator of exquisite hand-made books, she was
painting herself with red hair years before her colourist reached for the
auburn tint. “It was like a character I made to represent myself in a self-portrait.
Red hair is symbolic of women presumed to be troublemakers or artistic or
cursed. I think that’s a good position for an artist to take.” Yet she
is not, thankfully, beyond the standard insecurities: fretting about whether
a photographer might be joining us, clearly concerned about her appearance,
when actually she looks far too young for 46, almost peculiarly preserved.
She laughs at herself: “When I was 40, I wrote this book, and people
suddenly wanted to take pictures of me. I kept thinking, ‘Man, couldn’t we
have done this when I was, like, 23?’”
The weekend before we meet on Highgate High Street, Niffenegger had conducted
three hour-long tours of the cemetery, leading her groups over the hilly
terrain of the architect Stephen Geary’s Victorian Valhalla, lingering over
her favourite tombs — those of the menagerist George Wombwell, with its
statue of his lion, Nero, Elizabeth Siddal and Christina Rossetti. She is
part of the cemetery’s life, almost as proud of “the bees we are keeping on
the terrace catacombs” as she is of her book. Her relationship with the
graveyard is more of a marriage than a fling: when she first visited London
in 1996, aged 33 (she and her sister won a pair of air tickets in a prize
draw), it was at the top of her sightseeing list. She was, after all, a
“cemetery junkie”, the kind of kid who collected skeletons and liked to chop
the hair (though not the heads, reassuringly) off her Barbies.
In 2003, with The Time Traveller’s Wife as yet unpublished, she approached the
redoubtable chairman of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery, Jean Pateman (on
whom her fiercest character is based), for access and help with her
research. Pateman, now aged 88, agreed, but on strict conditions. “I had
sent her a copy of The Time Traveller’s Wife, so she could see I wasn’t just writing
thrillers, and of course it’s riddled with cuss words and swearing,”
Niffenegger recalls. “She said there was to be no sex or swearing in this
book, and I agreed. Jean wants the cemetery to be treated with due respect.
Actually, it’s interesting to have limitations. You find solutions you might
not have thought of.”
Niffenegger often stays with Pateman, to whom the book is dedicated, but their
collaboration has been controversial; some claim to sniff hypocrisy in the
air. Earlier this year, Mrs P admonished the mayor of London, Boris Johnson,
for listing her cemetery as a tourist attraction, yet Niffenegger’s Her
Fearful Symmetry — the second Highgate Cemetery novel, after Tracy
Chevalier’s Falling Angels — will increase the unwanted tourist trade. “If I
had known what was coming,” the writer muses, “I think I would
have hesitated to get involved with a real working cemetery. I am
apprehensive that I will increase the visitor load to the point where there
aren’t enough guides.” She already understands the demands of literary
pilgrimage; the Newberry Library, in Chicago, where her character Henry the
time traveller worked, has armed itself with a printed sheet of FAQs for the
fans of the novel who come to visit the stairwell in which he gets stuck.
“It’s sweet,” she says appreciatively; though probably the librarians use
other words.
The success of TTTW, which took four years to write and mere days to jump into
the US bestseller lists, surprised her. She was a teacher at Columbia
College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts, in Chicago, where she still
teaches one class a year; her publishers, MacAdam/Cage, were six years old
and tiny. Was it scary to be shot from obscurity to selling millions (now
more than 2.5m)? “I was such a naive puppy, I didn’t know there was anything
to be scared about.”
Next September, Niffenegger (the name is Swiss, from a tiny town called
Nyffenegg, near Bern) will mount a show at Printworks, her gallery in
Chicago, for which she has so far done no work. “I have no idea what the
theme is,” she shrugs. “It’s going to be mostly drawings, because I can take
the materials on book tours with me and work in hotel rooms.” A couple of
years ago, she did a memorial show for the fabulously exotic fashion stylist
Isabella Blow, whom she had never met: “I was a lifelong fan of hers, and I
wanted to do something for her when she died.” She made a series of etchings
called Hats for Isabella Blow to Wear in Heaven, and 12 paintings of crows
silhouetted on a gold background. “When you look at them on the wall
together, it looks as though the crows are walking around in a big gold
field, like the Elysian Fields, where the souls of the heroes go.”
Despite her subject matter, she doesn’t believe in ghosts. She was raised a
Roman Catholic, which she thinks has enhanced her imagination for
otherworldly subjects, but no longer cleaves to the comforts of an
afterlife. “I’m one of those horrible, sceptical secular humanist people,”
she laughs. “I’m willing to embrace ambiguity and just not know things.” Nor
does she worry much about how her fiction is marketed (only about how much
it is enjoyed) or that a ghostly love story might relegate her from the
prestigious literary bracket to lucrative chick lit.
“Younger people have grown up with Star Wars and X-Men,” she says. “I don’t
see any reason why I should have to write like John Cheever. To me, the most
tedious thing in the world would be a book about a middle-aged, alcoholic
white guy in the suburbs of New Jersey. Originally, I didn’t set out to do a
ghost story, but my character Elspeth gets to be a ghost because she's so
determined and won’t let go. She gets her wish, but you better be careful
what you wish for...”
It seems many of Niffenegger’s own wishes have been granted. One of three
daughters of a civil engineer and a legal assistant, she grew up nurturing
her sense of the macabre to liven up wholesome suburbia, devouring fairy
tales, Sherlock Holmes and Alfred Hitchcock’s books for children. Her next
book, The Chinchilla Girl in Exile (currently a “tiny nib of a novel”), is
about a nine-year-old girl who is covered in hair and decides, after years
of lonely home tutoring, that she wants to go to school. When might it be
finished? She smiles: Her Fearful Symmetry took seven years. “Oh, any time
in the next five or seven years. I’m sure people think I’m just sitting
around eating chocolates. But it’s not the typing that takes a long time,
it’s figuring it all out.” It also sounds as if she travels for
her books more than she stays at home. Maybe as a result, she is single, has
never married, but has not given up on love. “My ideal is the permanent
boyfriend who lives nearby, and we get together and do fabulous things.” She
has never wanted children, imagining her sisters would do the breeding, but
they have so far declined.
As we talk, the film of The Time Traveller’s Wife is showing all over town,
but its originator has stayed away. “If I were to see it, for ever
afterwards Henry and Clare DeTamble would look like Rachel McAdams and Eric
Bana to me.” And, though she is careful to be fair to the film-makers, one
imagines she also fears being horrified by the shortening and sweetening of
her 520-page novel, the rights of which were sold (to Brad Pitt and his then
wife Jennifer Aniston, and others) before publication. “At the beginning, I
was told repeatedly and emphatically I would have no control, and the best
thing to do would be to let go. That's what I did.” In a literary world of
hissy-fit sensitivity and wounded egos, Niffenegger is a clever operator, letting
others remodel her work and impose rules on it without complaint; cashing
her cheques, considering her good fortune, purchasing her dead animals and
moving on, in her own good time, to the next chapter of success.
Her Fearful Symmetry is published by Jonathan Cape on Thursday at £18.99
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