Audrey Niffenegger has completed a sequel to her 2003 bestseller after 14 years of work and told The Guardian the new book places politics at its centre.
She told interviewer Sophie McBain she started Life Out of Order in 2012 shortly after Obama won re-election.
She recalled that period as hopeful by American standards but said picturing the country two, four and six decades ahead drew her toward dystopian scenarios that later appeared increasingly plausible.
She cited an early house-party scene involving neo-Nazis as an example and said few Americans expected such a resurgence when she drafted it.
She denied any prophetic ability and said warning signs were visible, recalling Watergate as her earliest political news memory and describing a trajectory from Reagan onward in which each Republican presidency seemed worse and made fascism feel like a logical outcome.
She summarised the original novel as the story of Clare, an artist, and Henry, who undergoes uncontrollable shifts through time because of a rare genetic disorder while repeatedly reliving painful events and recognising unavoidable future difficulties.
She said the sequel follows the couple’s daughter Alba, who inherits the condition but exercises greater control and shows more readiness to use it for private and political purposes.
She said she always regarded the first book as darker than many readers perceived, noting audiences stressed romance while she saw heaviness, inevitability and a choice to embrace present happiness despite poor future prospects, a darkness she called unmistakable in the new volume.
She spoke from the Chicago residence she shares with Scottish artist Eddie Campbell, her husband of slightly more than ten years, which she described as full of books and decorated with her own vivid dream-influenced artwork.
She listed a rhea in the living area, two doves preserved under glass and an antique pangolin on a table among her possessions, and explained she removed much taxidermy after her three cats began interfering with it as kittens, including moving a large porcupine from a kitchen surface upstairs over fears of injury.
The Guardian described the 63-year-old as soft-spoken with cat-eye spectacles, hanging earrings and short silver hair, and noted her tone turns sharply sarcastic on politics.
She said she is recovering from a prolonged serious illness that she prefers not to discuss to keep attention on her work, and argued observers overemphasise life’s effect on art while underestimating art’s effect on its maker, adding each book changed her and the debut expanded her world.
She recalled working as an artist and professor at Columbia College Chicago’s Centre for Book and Paper Arts when the title came to her while sketching, believing it captured two people, their bond and their predicament.
She said she produced handmade illustrated gothic tales in runs of ten, expected the 2003 MacAdam/Cage release to sell only a few thousand copies, and saw global sales exceed nine million.
She credited Chicago artist Annette Turow with passing the manuscript to her husband, novelist Scott Turow, who praised it on the US Today show, while selection for Richard and Judy’s Book Club further boosted sales in Britain.
She said messages arrived frequently from people in long-distance relationships, including partners of military personnel, prisoners and distant students who read together by phone, and from young couples sharing the story, with what she called a surprising number of children later named Henry or Clare.
She called sudden fame strange, cited constant travel, detailed questioning and interviews that recalled art-school critiques, and said she experienced impostor syndrome.
She said she previously rarely travelled beyond Chicago except to New York or Europe and had never crossed the Mississippi, then toured widely, including visiting a different American city daily for a fortnight, which she found excessive.
She recalled meeting journalist Hayley Campbell in Australia after writer Neil Gaiman, who was interviewing her on stage, introduced them, a connection that led through Hayley to her father Eddie and a long-distance courtship between Brisbane and Chicago with meetings worldwide.
She said Chicago eateries named in the book drew puzzling attention, while the Newberry Library, Henry’s workplace, received so many visitors that staff created an information sheet and a plain stairwell from the narrative became an attraction.
She noted the 2009 Hollywood film starring Rachel McAdams drew poor reviews and said she has never viewed it, stating people may pursue their own versions without her comment, with an HBO series following in 2022 featuring Rose Leslie and Theo James.
She said her success brought a five-million-dollar advance for her 2009 London ghost story Her Fearful Symmetry, for which she relocated and guided tours at Highgate Cemetery, and expressed surprise the sum became public, questioning interest in her finances before concluding people find it odd she earns money.
She described her narrative figurative paintings as unfashionable in an art world favouring works needing lengthy explanation, mentioning self-portraits with butterflies, monkeys and birds and repeated skeletons, including one in a party hat, one with a cat, intertwined figures and a child skeleton lifting a mother’s face like a balloon.
She said income mainly provides time, allowing reduced teaching and concentration on writing, painting and operating Artists Book House, the small non-profit arts school she established in 2019, adding public attention later faded in a way she welcomed.
She said she grew up in Evanston just north of Chicago in what she called an ordinary middle-class suburban American childhood rather than an exotic one, with a father who worked as a civil engineer for JC Penney and a mother who made quilts.
She said she trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, spent several years teaching and framing pictures, then completed an MFA at Northwestern University, where one graduate project, the illustrated novel Three Incestuous Sisters, is now being turned into a silent film.
She said novelist Ottessa Moshfegh and director Alice Rohrwacher developed the screenplay and Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan and Jessie Buckley will play sisters whose intense bond breaks over affection for a lighthouse keeper’s son, adding she has read the script, intends to watch the film closely and finds it wilder than the book.
She identified love, loss, death, rock and roll, sex and romance as enduring concerns but said writing about the future increased her focus on politics.
She explained both Henry and Alba travel backward more easily than forward because the future resists imagination, yet repeated attempts render it more solid, a pattern she applies to the climate crisis, which people struggle to address because collapse feels abstract.
She said the novel depicts submerged cities, failed utilities, scarce food and extreme weather to concretise warming, and recalled growing dissonance between imagining 2040 and observing American debate, expressing contempt for Trump’s bunker plans and billionaires seeking Mars.
She said the current administration radicalised her, turning her from someone who avoided demonstrations into a regular protester, and urged action through voting, donating or marching as capacity allows.
She said slow writing allowed inclusion of pandemic lockdowns, whose absence would have seemed odd, and explained delays partly reflected waiting for real events to resolve, some predictably and some not.
She said she expected the American protests after police killed George Floyd to produce change but compared the outcome to a stone dropped in water, leaving her despondent.
She said she will soon undertake a limited book tour before returning to art and writing, including possible expansion of the graphic novel The Night Bookmobile into linked stories, and welcomes rest after 14 years on one project.
According to publication information, Jonathan Cape lists Life Out of Order at 22 pounds.
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