"Violence does not attract me, nor do I try to aestheticize it. In the drawings, paintings and prints she displays on her Web site, skeletons share a meal at a communal table and canoodle with the living. It's a place that Niffenegger got to know so well while writing that the staff suggested she start giving cemetery tours - which she did.ĭeath doesn't just figure prominently in Niffenegger's new novel it's also a common theme of her artwork. London's famous Highgate Cemetery, where Elspeth's lover works as a scholar and where Elspeth herself is buried, also features prominently in the novel.
While Niffenegger recognizes that the setup of her novel may be cliched, she says it is intentionally so: "One of the things I'm doing in this book is taking all the old cliches and the workings of the 19th-century English novel and trying to use them in a 21st century novel in a way that makes sense." And I felt very, very sorry that I had killed her before she even got into the story," Niffenegger says. "The more I thought about their aunt, Elspeth, the more interested I got in her, and the more I wanted to write about her. Though the aunt dies in the novel's first line, the author says she wanted to hold onto the character - so she turned her into a ghost. Niffenegger explores some of those darker themes in her new book Her Fearful Symmetry, which features identical twin sisters from America who inherit their aunt's apartment in London. But all the art I was attracted to when I was young seemed to be, if not macabre, then involving loss in some way."
"Living in America, one tends not to be very death-focused - we're such an optimistic, death-avoiding society. "I think I must have sprung from the womb looking at the other end of my life," Niffenegger says. Though she may be best known for her fictional take on chronological displacement, Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife, tells Melissa Block that she's also attracted to themes of death and dying. Niffenegger says she finds ghosts and cemeteries "beautiful."Ĭourtesy of the artist and Sherwin Beach Press
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