FAQs

Have you always been a writer and an artist? How do your writing and your visual work connect?

I have always done both, since I was small. I often think it's a pity that people feel they have to choose between all the things that they love as children. My "first" novel was an epic about an imaginary roadtrip I went on with The Beatles, handwritten in turquoise marker, seventy pages long, which I wrote and illustrated when I was eleven.

As a visual artist I have specialized in artists' books. Artists' books as a genre are extremely diverse and can be sculptural, minimal, conceptual, sometimes almost unrecognizable as books. Mine are more book-like than most. They usually have both images and text, and use the codex, portfolio or accordian format. Two of them are novel-length, and one of these, The Three Incestuous Sisters, will be published in a trade edition by Abrams in the fall of 2005.

The thing that unites all my work is narrative. I'm interested in telling stories, and I'm interested in creating a world that's recognizable to us as ours, but is filled with strangeness and slight changes in the rules of the universe.

Where did you get the idea for The Time Traveler's Wife?

I was drawing one day in 1997 and the title popped into my head. I initially thought it might become one of my visual novels, but soon realized that time travel does not lend itself to depiction in still images. So I began to write a novel. The first images I saw in my head became the final two scenes of the book, in which Clare is an old woman.

Are any of the characters in The Time Traveler's Wife based on you?

Well, Ingrid started out as a self portrait, but by the time I got done with her (or she with me) she'd long since lost any resemblance to her maker. Many people wonder whether Clare is based on me (we are both artists, we were both raised Catholic, etc.) but in fact Clare is very different from me in her personality and worldview. When you write fiction you need to take the basic ingredients of your characters from somewhere, and so they all have a bit of me in them. But the great adventure of fiction writing is to firmly and realistically inhabit many kinds of people, and I delight in writing characters who are not much like me at all (Gomez, for example).

But you and Clare both have red hair.

That started as a way to say "goodbye." I woke up one morning just before finishing the book and felt sort of bereft. So I dyed my hair red as a tribute to Clare, and everyone who saw me said "Yowza, that's a huge improvement." So I've kept it. But now I'm writing about twin girls who are white blonde, and I don't think I'll be bleaching my hair any time soon.

How long did it take you to write The Time Traveler's Wife?

Four and a half years, all written in the middle of the night, on weekends, and over summer vacations.

What's going on with the movie?

The film rights have been optioned by New Line Cinema, Plan B (Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston's production company) and Nick Wechsler. There is a screenplay, which was written by Jeremy Leven. I haven't read it yet, but I'm told it's groovy. The producers are currently in the process of hiring a director.

Have you ever met Brad and Jennifer?

Nope.

What are you working on now?

I'm working on my second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry.
The novel concerns a pair of mirror-image twins, Julia and Valentina Poole. The twins are young, sheltered American girls who inherit a flat on the edge of Highgate Cemetery in London, bequeathed to them by their recently deceased aunt. Julia and Valentina are inseparable, and function almost as one being, although in temperament they are opposites. As the story begins, they arrive in London to live in their aunt's apartment.
Their presence disrupts the lives of their upstairs and downstairs neighbors. Martin Wells is a translator who never leaves his apartment and struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Robert Fanshaw works as a guide in Highgate Cemetery and is devoted to all things associated with death. Julia takes it upon herself to "cure" Martin; Robert falls in love with Valentina and begins to pry her away from her twin. Valentina starts to crave autonomy. Julia becomes more demanding and possessive. Things get out of control, as you might imagine.

Are you going to quit teaching?

No, I like teaching. I have entertaining students, and the Book and Paper Center is lovely. Plus, if I stopped teaching I would have to move out of my office, and where on earth would I put all that stuff?

Will you come and visit my book group?

Sorry, but I don't visit book groups-not because I don't like them (I think they are swell), but because there are zillions of them, and if I visit one, word will leek out and I'll be spending all my time at book groups. If you're in a book group, and you are reading The Time Traveler's Wife, thank you.

Will you read my book and write a blurb for it?

I'd really like to, but probably not. I know how elusive and maddening it is to try to find people to blurb first-time fiction, but I have very little time to read. I have actually blurbed five books out of the bazillion I've been sent. It's not a reflection on the quality of the books I didn't blurb; they went into the pile of guilt-inducing unread books that sit in my dining room looking malevolent.

Who are your favorite authors/artists/bands?

Writers I admire: Donna Tartt, Richard Powers, David Sedaris, Chris Adrian, Geoff Ryman, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Dorothy Sayers, H.G. Wells, Martin Amis, Ingrid Hill, Jennifer Stevenson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rex Stout.

Artists who have influenced me: Aubrey Beardsley, Horst Janssen, Jiri Anderle, Max Klinger, Egon Schiele, John Singer Sargent, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Andrej Klimowski, Goya.

Bands I love: The Beatles, Iggy and the Stooges, early Brian Eno, Roxy Music, The Golden Palominos, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Dinanogah, Built to Spill, Crooked Fingers, Wilco, The Ponys, Duvall, Talking Heads, Television, Avocet.

What are you reading these days?

A whole bunch of books about London, cemeteries, and funerary practices. Of these, I have especially enjoyed Stiff, by Mary Roach, and London: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd.

Chris Schneberger, my boyfriend, turned me on to John Irving, so I've been reading him with pleasure. And I'm about to run right out and get myself a copy of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.