Good Night: The Audrey Niffenegger Interview

Audrey Niffenegger's The Night Bookmobile is a short graphic novel based on a fascinating idea: What if there was a library that collected everything you have ever read? Her story follows one woman who encountered her own personal library—and was changed forever. Niffenegger is the author of the prose novels The Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, as well as two novels in pictures, The Adventuress and The Three Incestuous Sisters. She talked to us about her inspiration for The Night Bookmobile and its transition from short prose story to graphic novel.

I know you discuss this in the afterword, but could you please explain the inspiration for this story?

The inspiration was twofold: First was a dream I had years ago, in which I found a sort of celestial library attached to my grandmother's crazy old house. I understood in the dream that I was seeing a form of heaven, that there was no time in the room and that I could stay there indefinitely. The second, more direct, inspiration was a short story by H.G. Wells, The Door in the Wall. It deals with a private but elusive garden, a personal heaven that turns out to be dangerous.

You first wrote The Night Bookmobile as a short story. Why did you choose to tell it as a graphic novel as well?

I was invited to make a serial comic for the London Guardian's review section and The Night Bookmobile seemed like a good fit for them; they were looking for something bookish. The spot it ran in is often occupied by Posy Simmonds, whose comics are satirical takes on the literary world.

How did the story change when you moved from one format to the other?

The story itself is the same. I cut most of the description because the images could show what the words no longer needed to tell. I was also able to give an emotional subtext to the story through gestures and expressions that are more precise in pictures than in words.

I know you used models and reference photos of real places for this story. Why did you choose to do that?

The story features Winnebagos, books and bookshelves, particular Chicago streets, Wrigley Field, all things that are much easier to draw if you have good reference. I wanted a quasi-realist style, to evoke a very particular time and place.

This is your third work that blends pictures and text. How has your drawing style evolved, and how have you changed the way you integrate the two elements?

A great deal of my art has combined images and text; I have been working with them together since I was a teenager. I more or less maintain two drawing styles, one more realist and observation-based, one more linear, which I often use when I make etchings. You can see both at my web site: audreyniffenegger.com.

My strategies for using text and image together vary depending on the medium. When I am making books, I often use letterpress with prints, sometimes setting the type by hand and sometimes by computer. When I'm making a drawing, I usually just write the text above or in the image. For The Night Bookmobile, the typography was a challenge because there is a lot of text and the space was relatively small. I wound up setting the narration on the computer and writing the dialogue by hand, which is quirky but not completely outside of common practice.

Do you have your own version of the Night Bookmobile—do you keep a lot of the books you have read? If so, what does the collection include?

I do have a lot of books. My bookmobile would contain mounds of fiction, but also a lot of old medical books, art and design books, guide books to cemeteries, poetry, cookbooks (which never actually get used but are fun to look at). I also collect comics and unusual books made by artists. I have many books that have to do with Aubrey Beardsley, Victorian housekeeping, Bloomsbury, burial practices, circuses, typography, and birds.

In the book, Lexi mentions remembering reading A Distant Mirror while waiting for a blind date in a coffee shop. Do you keep relatively insignificant books because they have a special meaning associated with them?

Certainly. But who's to say that a book is insignificant? For one reader, it might be a dust catcher, but to another it's a madeleine.

The story raises some interesting concepts, including the notion that we are, at least in part, defined by everything we read—not just books, but also ephemera such as letters and cereal boxes. Yet the bookmobile completely ignores the internet, let alone the Kindle. Why?

Well, the Kindle didn't exist when the story was written. There is a passing reference to the Internet made by Openshaw, but otherwise it doesn't figure in the story. Why? Because it's beside the point. There's probably a computer somewhere on the bookmobile, but individual books have no physical presence on it. If a reader created an electronic copy of a book for their bookmobile by reading…so what? You don't need a personal bookmobile to haul those around. There's nothing to look at, or to draw.

I'm sure there will be lots of emotion gathered around electronic books in the future and I imagine people will write stories about them. This isn't one of those.

I see this story being as much about obsession, and the desire to recapture something lost, as about books. Why does this subject interest you, and why did books seem to be a good vehicle for it?

If you read the Wells story (The Door in the Wall), you'll see that it is about longing, and I wanted to carry that over into my story. Longing prevents us from being entirely in the present and often leads us to make bad decisions. It's a great theme of literature, especially in the 19th century (see: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Proust, etc.) and seems relevant to a 21st-century America that's getting wistful for its past glories.

The story includes elements that are at odds with the notion of a library, such as the blaring rock music and the fact that the bookmobile is a battered Winnebago. Why did you make those choices?

Those things are particular to Alexandra's bookmobile. Someone else's bookmobile might be a Good Humor wagon that plays Turkey in the Straw.

The print volume has a horizontal format, which is usually associated with children's picture books. Is that why you chose it?

No. I was given a half-page in the Guardian review section. It could have been extremely vertical (very tall and thin) or the horizontal format you see here. This seemed more workable.

-- Brigid Alverson