by Kelly Pickerill
I never read The Time Traveler’s Wife. I have a copy at home, but for some reason I was afraid it would be too romantic and whimsical for my tastes. But when Audrey Niffenegger’s new book, Her Fearful Symmetry, was released, like Norma was afraid of, I was incredibly attracted to the cover. 
To make matters worse (or better, depending on how you feel about owning two copies of the same book), there’s an equally if not more attractive SIGNED limited edition. It features an illustration by Niffenegger on the cover and fabulous black page edges.
Niffenegger’s new book is an exploration of identity. The twin girls who inherit their aunt’s flat aren’t exactly identical; Valentina is a mirror image of Julia all the way down to her organs (which, as you may have guessed, results in many health problems for Valentina). The twins are vapid, extraordinarily lazy, and besides a few failed attempts at college, have sponged off their mother (their aunt’s estranged twin) and father in Chicago since high school.
After their mother’s twin dies, the twins inherit her estate in London on their 21st birthday on the condition that they live in the flat for a year before they decide to sell it. The back garden of the flat borders Highgate cemetery, where their aunt is buried in a family plot. Julia and Valentina soon discover that their aunt Elspeth, whom they’ve never met, will be quite a large presence in their lives even after her death. For one thing, they live one floor above her lover, Robert, a tour guide at Highgate who is writing his doctoral thesis on the cemetery, and who, though shaken by Elspeth’s death, finds strange comfort in getting to know her twin nieces who so uncannily resemble her. Julia and Valentina also begin to unravel the mystery of their mother and Elspeth’s shattered relationship, which ended just as they were born, and which the reader grows to suspect may have a bigger influence on their lives than they know.
Niffenegger’s prose is refreshingly terse and quickly paced. When I began to read the book, which is written in British English, I assumed she was British. She’s not; she lives in Chicago. But I like that she chose to write in that style (mostly just spelling differences: realize=realise, and a few idioms) because it allows the book to be “narrated” by a British presence. The book is written in the third person with a pretty thorough omniscience, but because the “it” narrator is British, in some ways it feels as though Elspeth is narrating, relating the events that take place after her death, both because of and in spite of it.
Niffenegger’s book made me think a lot about the choices an author makes when they unfold their story. And how much of that responsibility is “given” to their narrator, that presence that we get to know as we read, who is only partly the actual author of the book. Which brings me back to my first statement about Her Fearful Symmetry: that it is a book about identity. How much of the identity of a twin is dictated by her sister? How much are any of us defined by our family or our work or who we surround ourselves with? How much should we work at protecting that identity so that we don’t begin, as Valentina finds herself doing, fading away? And how difficult would it really be, if one were determined enough, to slip into another person’s identity?
Her Fearful Symmetry is many things: a ghost story, a family saga, a coming of age story, and an exploration of what makes us unique.
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