I was unsure about whether I would go hear Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife speak in Writers and Readers Week.  After all, her work is so gifted and so different from the usual formulaic dross that she could never measure up to my expectations, surely, even if she did cartwheels across the stage in leopard-skin tights.  
But, showing pathetic lack of judgement and irrational optimism, I turned up at the Embassy and plonked myself in the front row. I’m not used to these things and I seemed to be the only one gorging himself on popcorn. Behind me were hundreds of Wellington’s sharpest intellects and connoisseurs of fine writing.
And lo, my heroine Audrey Niffenegger. Only 46 but with a face like your grandmother’s following an all-night binge. A lived-in body with long, flat red hair, and a calm, vibrant voice.  
A centred person with what most would call eccentric tastes in writing and art, even naming two Outsider Artists (some nobody in Chicago and a woman who died in a concentration camp) as important influences on her work.
Someone in the crowd asked: “If you yourself could travel through time, where would you go?” She said she’d go to London in the 1890s to meet Aubrey Beardsley.  He was the gay-guy who did all those dreamy line drawings of the grotesque and the erotic and died of TB at 25. Just imagine that: “Aubrey, meet Audrey”. She knows how to pick’em.
The Time Traveler’s Wife was her first novel.  A small San Francisco publisher gave it a go. It didn’t do too badly. Two and a half million copies at the last count.  She’s got more dough than Terry Serepisos.  
While trying to dig up ideas for her second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, she worked fearfully hard in Highgate Cemetery in London. And still does, she says. You always need “an experience while you’re researching”. And talk to people and ask questions.
Some of her ideas are like revolutionary prescriptions for how to go about writing or staging. For example, the idea that “all the characters have an equal part of reality.  Make them live on the page.”  In this, I thought of Jane Campion’s very human group surrounding John Keats in Bright Star.  
And then, what must have been a world-shattering bombshell for most… Even though she was sitting in front of a huge movie screen, she said she had never seen the film The Time Traveler’s Wife, and did not want to. For a simple reason: in order “to keep the movie I already had in my head”.  
She didn’t actually add, but I wondered if she thought, readers’ visions of a book are worth protecting in the same way. Mmn. Gulp. Cut!
So in the end, it wasn’t a matter of whether Audrey Niffenegger would have any impact on Wellington. The real question is: are there any survivors in the rubble?