The Time Traveler's Wife

The Time Traveler's Wife is the debut novel by American author Audrey Niffenegger, published in 2003. It is a love story about Henry, a man with a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel unpredictably, and about Clare, his wife, an artist who has to cope with his frequent absences. Niffenegger, who was frustrated with love when she began the novel, wrote the story as a metaphor for her failed relationships. The tale's central relationship came to Niffenegger suddenly and subsequently supplied the novel's title. The novel has been classified as both science fiction and romance.

The book was published by MacAdam/Cage, a small publishing firm located in San Francisco, California. The book became a bestseller after an endorsement from author and family friend Scott Turow on NBC's Today. As of March 2009, the novel had sold nearly 2.5 million copies in the United States and the United Kingdom. Many reviewers were impressed with Niffenegger's unique perspective on time travel. Some praised her characterization of the couple, applauding their emotional depth; while others criticized her writing style as melodramatic and the plot as emotionally trite. The novel won the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize and a British Book Award.

Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema acquired the film and television rights to the book. A film adaptation was released in 2009 starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, and a television series premiered on HBO and HBO Max on May 15, 2022.

Using alternating first-person perspectives, the novel tells the stories of Henry DeTamble (born 1963), a librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, as he visits a child who will later become his wife, Clare Anne Abshire (born 1971), an artist who makes paper sculptures, with the aid of his uncontrolled ability to time travel. Henry has a rare genetic disorder, which later comes to be known as Chrono-Impairment. This disorder causes Henry to involuntarily travel through time. When 20-year-old Clare meets 28-year-old Henry at the Newberry Library in 1991 at the beginning of the novel, he has never seen her before, although she has known him most of her life.

Henry begins time traveling at the age of five, jumping forward and backward relative to his own timeline. When he vanishes, where he goes, and how long his trips will last are beyond his control. However, his destinations are tied to his subconscious—he most often travels to places and times related to his own history. Certain stimuli such as stress can trigger Henry's time traveling; he often goes jogging to keep calm and remain in the present. He searches out pharmaceuticals in the future that may be able to help control his time traveling. He also seeks the advice of a geneticist, Dr. Kendrick. Henry cannot take anything with him into the future or the past, which means that he always arrives naked and then struggles to find clothing, shelter, and food. He does amass a number of survival skills, including lock-picking, self-defense, and pickpocketing. Much of this he learns from older versions of himself.

Once Henry and Clare's timelines converge "naturally" at the library—their first meeting in his chronology—Henry starts to travel to Clare's childhood and adolescence in South Haven, Michigan, beginning in 1977 when she is only six years old. On one of his early visits (from Clare's perspective), Henry gives her a list of the dates he will appear and she writes them in a diary so she will remember to provide him with clothes and food when he arrives. During another visit, Henry inadvertently reveals that they will be married in the future. Over time they develop a close relationship. At one point, Henry helps Clare frighten and humiliate a boy who abused her. Clare is last visited in her youth by Henry in 1989, on her eighteenth birthday, during which they make love for the first time. They are then separated for two years until their meeting at the library.

Clare and Henry eventually marry. Soon after their marriage, Clare begins to have trouble bringing a pregnancy to term because of the genetic anomaly Henry is presumably passing on to the fetus. After five miscarriages, Henry wishes to save Clare further pain and has a vasectomy. However, a version of Henry from the past visits Clare one night and they make love; she subsequently gives birth to a daughter named Alba. Alba is diagnosed with Chrono-Impairment as well but, unlike Henry, she has some control over her destinations when she time travels. Before she is born, Henry travels to the future and meets his ten-year-old daughter on a school field trip. During this trip, he learns that he dies when Alba is five years old.

When he is 43, during what is to be his last year of life, Henry time travels to a Chicago parking garage on a frigid winter night where he is unable to find shelter. As a result of the hypothermia and frostbite he suffers while sleeping in the parking garage, his feet are amputated when he returns to the present time. Both Henry and Clare know that without the ability to escape when he time travels, Henry will certainly die within his next few jumps. On New Year's Eve 2006, Henry time travels into the middle of the Michigan woods in 1984 and is accidentally shot by Clare's brother, a scene foreshadowed earlier in the novel. Henry returns to the present and dies in Clare's arms.

Clare is devastated by Henry's death. She later finds a letter from Henry telling her to "stop waiting" for him, though it also describes a moment in her future when she will see him again. The couple reunites when Clare is 82 years old and Henry is 43. The novel's last scene shows a time when Clare, well into her old age, still waits for Henry, as she has done most of her life.

Niffenegger is an artist who teaches at the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, where she prepares editions of handpainted books. She produced some of her earlier works in editions of ten copies, which were sold in art galleries. However, she decided that The Time Traveler's Wife would have to be a novel: "I got the idea for the title, and when I draw I have this big drawing table covered with brown paper, and I write ideas down on the paper. So I wrote down this title and after a while I started to think about it. I couldn't think of a way to make it a picture book because still pictures don't represent time very well, so I decided to write a novel." She was intrigued by the title because "it immediately defined two people and their relationship to each other". Niffenegger said that its source was an epigraph to J. B. Priestley's 1964 novel Man and Time: "Clock time is our bank manager, tax collector, police inspector; this inner time is our wife." Drawing her central theme from this image, she says, "Henry is not only married to Clare; he's also married to time." Other authors whom Niffenegger has cited as influencing the book include Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Henry James, and Dorothy Sayers.

She has said the story is a metaphor for her own failed love affairs and that "I had kind of got the idea that there's not going to be some fabulous perfect soulmate out there for me, so I'll just make him up." She also drew on her parents' marriage for inspiration—her father spent the bulk of each week traveling. Despite the story's analogies to her own life, Niffenegger has forcefully stated that Clare is not a self-portrait; "She's radically different. I am much more willful and headstrong. ... I don't think I could go through a lifetime waiting for someone to appear, no matter how fascinating he was."

Niffenegger began writing the novel in 1997; the last scene, in which an aged Clare is waiting for Henry, was written first, because it is the story's focal point. The narrative was originally structured thematically. Responding to comments from readers of early drafts of the manuscript, Niffenegger reorganized the narrative so that it largely followed Clare's timeline. The work was finished in 2001. With no history of commercial publication, Niffenegger had trouble finding interested literary agents—25 rejected the manuscript. In 2002, she sent it unsolicited to the small, San Francisco-based publisher MacAdam/Cage, where it reached Anika Streitfeld. Streitfeld, who became Niffenegger's editor, "thought it was incredible. Right from the very beginning you feel like you are in capable hands, that this is someone who has a story to tell and who knows how to tell it." She gave it to David Poindexter, the founder of the publishing firm, "who read it overnight and decided to buy the book". However, Niffenegger had acquired an agent by this time, and several publishing houses in New York City were interested in the novel. The manuscript was put up for auction and MacAdam/Cage bid US$100,000, by far the largest sum it had ever offered for a book. Although another publisher outbid them, Niffenegger selected MacAdam/Cage because they were so dedicated to her work. Also, Niffenegger explains that her "own natural inclination is to go small. My background is in punk music—I'd always pick the indie company over the giant corporation."

Reviewers have found The Time Traveler's Wife difficult to classify generically: some categorize it as science fiction, others as a romance. Niffenegger herself is reluctant to label the novel, saying she "never thought of it as science fiction, even though it has a science-fiction premise". In Niffenegger's view, the story is primarily about Henry and Clare's relationship and the struggles they endure. She has said that she based Clare and Henry's romance on the "cerebral coupling" of Dorothy Sayers's characters Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.

Time travel stories to which the novel has been compared include Jack Finney's Time and Again (1970), F.M. Busby's short story "If This Is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" and the film Somewhere in Time (1980). Henry has been compared to Billy Pilgrim of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Science fiction writer Terence M. Green calls the novel a "timeslip romance". The Time Traveler's Wife is not as concerned with the paradoxes of time travel as is traditional science fiction. Instead, as critic Marc Mohan describes, the novel "uses time travel as a metaphor to explain how two people can feel as if they've known each other their entire lives". Robert Nathan's Portrait of Jennie, as novel, or film, is another obvious comparison, although Jennie, as a ghost, travels time in one direction, not randomly.