Double Bill: Up in the Air with the Time Traveler’s Wife By Elizabeth Buzzelli In a true double header, the National Writers’ Series is bringing best selling writers Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry) and Walter Kirn (Up in the Air) to the Traverse City Opera House on July 15, 7 p.m., to talk about their books, writing, life, art, and inspiration. Audrey Niffenegger, a native Michiganian, was born in South Haven and now lives in Chicago. Far from starting as a writer, she wanted to paint, training as a visual artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and receiving an MFA from Northwestern University’s Department of Art Theory and Practice. The wildly successful writing career came later, with The Time Traveler’s Wife, which shot to the top of the New York Times Best Seller List, and has now been followed by her second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry. While plotting the second novel, Niffenegger says she set out to do something different from the first, a poignant story of time travel and a transcendent love. She turned to London, and an apartment house adjacent to Highgate Cemetery, a hauntingly dramatic cemetery in North London. “I had been there in 1996,” she said in a recent interview. “I took the tour and was completely amazed by the place: so beautiful, so bizarre. When the novel I was writing acquired a cemetery, I was planning to use Graceland Cemetery in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, but soon remembered Highgate and decided to get in touch with the group that owned it to see if I could set the novel there. At the time there were no ghosts in the novel, Robert (the tour guide), long preceded Elspeth (the woman dead at the beginning) as a character in the book.”
WHO’S WHO OF GRAVES Choosing Highgate was an inspired choice; from its impressive front gates to its haunting walkways passing the graves of people such as Karl Marx; John and Elizabeth Dickens, parents of Charles Dickens and the models for Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby in Dicken’s books; George Eliot; Christina Rossetti; and even Adam Worth, a criminal said to be the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes’ Professor Moriarty. And it was used as a setting in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Against this impressive backdrop, Niffenegger set her ghost story of “couples coming together and coming undone,” where two sets of twins are entwined and separated, where a lonely ghost roams the rooms of her old apartment being felt by her lost lover and others but still alone and unseen. The title of her latest book, Her Fearful Symmetry, comes, she says, from William Blake’s poem, “Tiger, tiger, burning bright…” and is about doubling, twins, about death and loss. Death has been a theme in all of Niffenegger’s work, beginning with prints she did in the 1980s and 1990s which portray skeletons and suicides. Asked whether the prints and their portrayal of death came first or if the visual leap followed the written page, Niffenegger says, “The images tend to be first, but the images always hint at story.” The Time Traveler’s Wife was originally planned as a graphic novel, leaning heavily on her artistic background, but she quickly found it too difficult to “represent sudden time shifts with still images” and her writing career was born. Now teaching courses in text-image relationships at Columbia College in Chicago, she’s discovered the close relationship between the arts of writing and painting. “Many of the writers I teach are artists,” she says. “I’ve noticed that description, physicality, and a sense of place are all very easy for artists when they become writers.”
NOT RELIGIOUS With death being a major subject in both of her novels, I asked Niffenegger her own feelings about this very deep and eternally puzzling question. “I am not at all religious, and believe that death is the end for each of us, so we had all better live as beautifully, kindly, and honestly as we can. Of course, in my stories, people often fail to do this and trouble ensues,” she answered. And as to love, another of her themes, sometimes skewed by time travel, sometimes by death, she says “It’s a simple and important facet of our existence: we are brief creatures. We love, we die. Most of literature sprouts from these hard facts.” As to coming to Traverse City for the Writers Series, she says in an email interview, “I have only been there briefly, always on the way to somewhere else, so it will be nice to get a longer glimpse of the city. I am typing this in New York City, it’s almost 100 degrees, and I imagine that Traverse City is cool and green, very inviting.”
HIGH FLYING Walter Kirn, New York Times best selling author of the 2001 novel, Up in the Air (turned into the successful film of the same name starring George Clooney), will be guest host at the opera house event, giving a talk, signing books, and interviewing Niffenegger. Writing during a tough winter on a ranch in rural Montana, Kim was inspired to write the book by a first-class passenger he had once met on a plane. That man became Ryan Bingham, “a man who makes his living traveling to workplaces around the United States and laying off employees for bosses too cowardly to do it themselves.” When Ryan encounters a young coworker promoting a plan to cut costs and lay off people over the internet, he grows incensed, and claims she knows nothing about the process of firing people. Together the couple learns some hard truths about hard times though the truths don’t quite stick and Ryan is soon back to the life he knows. With this kind of doubled talent, the new National Writers’ Series event shapes up to be one of the best. The series, spearheaded by our own best selling author, Doug Stanton, is fast becoming nationally important due to visiting writers such as Tom Brokaw coming to Traverse City. Monies raised will go toward providing scholarships for local writers on their way to college, with winners of the first scholarship contest to be announced this fall.
Tickets for “An Evening with Audrey Niffenegger” are $15 advance/$20 at the door for adults, and $5 for students. They can be purchased at the City Opera House box office or online at www.cityoperahouse.org Doors open at 6 pm, complimentary desserts provided by Morsels. Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli’s mystery, Dead Sleeping Shaman, is in bookstores everywhere.
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