To be fair to the story’s author, Niffenegger has always seemed to understand that she was putting something deeply weird and sad out into the world, no matter how it was received at the time. Auto-fellatio barely skims the surface of its bizarre depths. In fact, it’s one tiny (frostbitten) step away from being a full-on horror story. Now, having revisited the novel and watched the first two episodes of the series, I’ve arrived back from the past to not only reiterate that Henry’s going to town on himself was lifted directly from the source material, but more importantly, to offer a warning about said source material: Despite its whimsical book cover and titular focus on a couple overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds, and despite selling over 8 million copies while mostly being categorized as a romance, The Time Traveler’s Wife is not a love story. Because, years ago, I read The Time Traveler’s Wife, and you better believe this little detail stuck with me.
The viewing public was floored by this scene-as opposed to Henry’s dad, who seemed fairly chill.īut not me.
Earlier this week, certain subscribers to HBO Max were exposed to an unprecedented moment in television: In the second episode of The Time Traveler’s Wife, a TV adaptation of the 2003 novel by Audrey Niffenegger, a teenage time traveler named Henry was caught by his father giving a space-time-continuum-bending blow job to a past version of himself.
