Writing Through the Future with Audrey Niffenegger

by Megan Kirby

Audrey Niffenegger (BFA 1985) wouldn’t call her new novel a sequel. Yes, Life Out of Order is the long-awaited follow-up to her beloved bestseller, The Time-Traveler’s Wife. But all the time travel complicates categorization. “It’s not quite a sequel—it’s kind of a prequel,” she said. “The second book had to be wrapped around and through the first one. That’s the nature of a time-travel story.” 

The much-anticipated Life Out of Order comes out in October 2026. The book follows Alba DeTamble, who has inherited a chrono-displacement disorder that causes her to involuntarily jump through time—the same affliction as her father, Henry. Once again, a large portion of the book is set in Chicago, the city where Niffenegger found herself as an artist and writer. 

As a teen at Evanston High School, Niffenegger fell in with a group of fellow young artists. The tight-knit group even claimed an empty classroom as a sort of clubhouse. A few older peers enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and Niffenegger started riding the L downtown to visit them on campus. When it came time to apply for colleges, her choice felt obvious: SAIC was close by, familiar, and already full of her friends. 

Niffenegger came to SAIC planning to focus on printmaking and photography, but she quickly fell in love with book arts, too. She learned to set type from Ray Martin and how to bind books from Joan Flasch (BFA 1971). At school, she etched aquatint plates to create a book called The Adventuress: 68 images with a sentence or two on each page, telling the surreal adventure story of an alchemist’s daughter. Storytelling through images made sense to her. She went on to grad school at Northwestern University, creating more illustrated books. She didn’t plan to become a novelist. But then she had an idea that defied illustration: the story of a marriage disrupted by time travel.

“Dealing with time in a completely visual realm is not easy,” she said. “It seemed like the easiest way to try this experiment would be to write something.” To keep her timelines straight, she would print out chapters and arrange them on the floor–swapping sections until it all made sense, and tracking major events in a Word doc. The Time-Traveler’s Wife came out in 2003, where it debuted on the New York Times Bestsellers List. Over the next five years, it would sell more than 2.5 million copies. 

At the time, she saw The Time-Traveler’s Wife as a stand-alone novel. But over the years, she couldn’t get the idea of Henry’s daughter out of her head. But the timeline made her hesitate: Alba was born six days before September 11, 2001. Life Out of Order covers a timespan through 2041. “The idea of writing about Henry and Clare’s daughter didn't initially appeal to me, because I would have had to take all kinds of guesses as to what the future would be,” she said. “I didn't think I would be very good at it. It turns out that actually I am very good at it.” 

When Niffenegger began writing Life Out of Order in 2012, the world was different—but she was already working ideas about climate change and AI into the novel. Her first drafts were firmly science fiction, but her ideas were prescient. “The longer I kept working on it, the more these things started to happen,” she said. The new book touches on modern life—from COVID-19 to the Black Lives Matter protests—and also projects forward to a near-future dystopian Chicago, where Alba and her friends must follow strict curfews and overbearing government rules. 

These days, modern technology has eased the process of writing about time travel. Gone are the days of rearranging printed pages on the floor. For the new novel, Niffenegger used a timeline program called Aeon, which allowed her to input the overlapping plot points of the two books. “I started by plugging in all the characters and dates of the first book,” she said. “It’s very visual and color-coded. You can make your timeline as short or as long as you need it to be. It’s super handy.” 

Chicago—the city that shaped Niffenegger as an artist and person—once again serves as a major setting for the new novel. And she isn’t just chronicling Chicago’s past. She’s imagining its future. “You think of Chicago, you think of Nelson Algren or Lorraine Hansberry, and these are great, great writers. But Chicago now is a different city than the one they were writing about,” she said. “I think Chicago is a bit underutilized. It’s just full of amazing, strange, magnificent things. You would think that more people would be setting books here.”■