Ghost writer

On a gray and dismal Friday, the day before Halloween, Audrey Niffenegger is posing for photos in an elegant hotel garden overlooking the Potomac in Washington, D.C. The manicured lawn and tidy annuals would make a romantic backdrop befitting the "love conquers all" message that many have read into her wildly popular novel "The Time Traveler's Wife." But the misty pallor coming up the riverbank is as incompatible to simplistic romance as is Niffenegger herself. Apparently at ease now with the demands of book tours and publicity, the Chicago-based author is still struck with wonder at how her first novel has been embraced as a great romantic epic. "The thing with 'Time Traveler' is there's all this darkness in there, but you really have to look carefully. Both Henry and Claire do things to each other which are remarkably passive- aggressive. But most people are like, 'They're so wuvley, they're in wuv!' I never intended it to be this perfect relationship. They're not meant to be any kind of role model."

Niffenegger, wearing a black tunic-styled jacket that offsets her dyed red hair and now sipping Earl Grey in the hotel dining room, says that for herself, lifelong relationships have scant appeal. "I don't think I'm built to stay in one place, to hang out with the same person for 50 years. ... It actually fills me with horror," says the oft-traveling writer, who takes great inspiration from the disturbing work of photographer Diane Arbus and decorates her home with high-end taxidermy.

So even though many of her fans extrapolate rose-colored love from her first novel, she's not about to sit back and become Chicago's answer to Danielle Steel.

Not the 'Time Traveler'

Indeed, "Her Fearful Symmetry" is dramatically different from 2003's "The Time Traveler's Wife" in tone, style and plot. An elegant ghost story that revels in the imagery of London's Highgate Cemetery, "Her Fearful Symmetry" seems to leave no doubt that love, death and romance don't always bring out the noblest actions, and that selfish evil may lurk under romantic love's veneer.

Although she received a reported $5 million advance for her second book, Niffenegger seems oblivious to the possibility that a publisher paying that kind of money in this economy might appreciate the writer staying with a winning formula. Instead of revisiting the Chicago club scenes and time-tripping clinches that energized her first novel, she chose to draw inspiration from Henry James novels and the "Nosferatu" films. And instead of focusing on a single couple destined to be together, "Her Fearful Symmetry" involves several couples awash in deception, grief and revulsion.

Niffenegger is unapologetic. "For me to settle in on a formula and start producing widgets; that would be intolerable," she says, "I'd quit before I'd do that." And if all those people who read "The Time Traveler's Wife" are disappointed in her new book?

(Bean counters at publisher Scribner may be worried, however; it was reported by Entertainment Weekly in late October that "Symmetry" had sold only 38,823 copies.)

Living near the dead

The geographical and thematic center of "Her Fearful Symmetry" is the London cemetery that's home to the remains of Karl Marx, George Eliot and the parents of Charles Dickens. The story brings two young American women -- waifish, naïve twins -- to the Highgate border after they inherit their aunt's nearby apartment. In a claustrophobic and slow-building plot that winds to a breathless, surprising conclusion, the twins become involved with the building's other eccentric residents as well as their aunt's self-interested ghost.

Along with extensive on-site research at Highgate, Niffenegger liberally and knowingly doused the story with classic literary clichés. "I decided early on that what I would do is raid the 19th-century English novels for plot devices and, to some extent, characters," she says. Hence, "Her Fearful Symmetry" features not one but two sets of twins who like to switch identities, mistaken and hidden parentage, a consumptive heroine and, in a direct nod to Henry James, innocent Americans facing sophisticated European mores and treachery abroad.

In addition to writing, Niffenegger has been and continues to be a provocative visual artist (a sampling of her work can be viewed on her website, audreyniffenegger.com). Her drawings include cavorting skeletons that evoke Mexican Day of the Dead imagery and a striking self-portrait with moths for ears. Born in Michigan and raised in the Chicago suburbs, she trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and earned an MFA from Northwestern.

Movie stars, letting go

But even though Niffenegger was established as an artist and past the insecurities of youth when "The Time Traveler's Wife" was published in 2003, success on the scale of a bestselling novel brings unique challenges: the experience of strangers turning your story into a film, for example. After initially hoping to have a hand in the adaptation, Niffenegger eventually turned it over to the Hollywood machinery to do with it as it would.

"At first I was like 'No! I'll be helpful!'," says Niffenegger. "But everybody was like 'They don't want you to be helpful; give it up.'" She hasn't seen the film, which stars Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana.

The process is not unlike Niffenegger's "letting go" of what her books mean for readers. For although "The Time Traveler's Wife" was, for her, a "thought experiment that examined how you could juxtapose two characters at different ages along a time continuum," Niffenegger is fascinated -- and not unmoved -- by those who have read it very differently.

"I've gotten a lot of response over the years from people who are separated from their lovers for one reason or another," she says, citing military families, the grieving and broken-hearted lovers among the people who have contacted her. She's not surprised that they connect strongly to the book's themes of separation, longing and waiting. But she's been very surprised by the extent to which they find comfort in the story.

Reader reaction to the gothic fable of death and betrayal contained in "Her Fearful Symmetry" is yet to be seen. Perhaps, once again, warm-hearted fans will mine sweetness within Niffenegger's nihilistic cool. Meanwhile, the author is at work on her third novel, "The Chinchilla Girl in Exile" about a child with the Arbus-worthy condition of being covered in fur -- the feel-good, furry girl story everyone will love?