Imagine if you could live forever, but no one would ever remember you.
Schwab’s sweeping, emotional new novelThe Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
“I didn’t feel mature enough,” Schwab tells EW.
Credit: Jenna Maurice
“I didn’t feel like my voice was strong enough.
At some point along the way, I realized I was going to die without writing this book.
I realized it was just going to be the thing that I talked about that I never actually wrote.
I started to think about time, and about this sense of it passing very, very quickly.
In advance of its release, we called up Schwab to talk about memory, muses, and magic.
SCHWAB:I was living in a big garden shed in an ex-prison-warden’s backyard in Liverpool.
[A housemate] dropped me in a small town in the Lake District called Ambleside.
I don’t know why I began to think aboutPeter Pan.
But at the same time, I was losing my grandmother to dementia.
She had been ill for a decade.
I had watched my grandmother forget my mother.
The pain that my mother experienced being forgotten was so pointed.
I started to wonder what kind of person it would take to survive immortality.
She had to have a positivity and a defiant joy.
You’re spanning more than three centuries of history.
How did you decide what places and historical moments you’d drop in on?
It’s a very daunting prospect.
I became a collector of memories for a really long time, a collector of places.
I would go on research trips where I would try and figure out what path Addie would take.
In the end, I realized that I needed to narrow it down in some way.
I needed to focus it.
I didn’t want to treat Addie as a doorway to these places.
I needed to remember that Addie is a unique individual, and as a person is several things.
She’s a very proud French woman.
She is somebody who did not sign up for immortality to travel.
She wanted time, not space.
She is a hedonist.
She enjoys art and culture and refinement.
So, I started looking at tracing Addie along the path of cultural development in the Western world.
You reference others who’ve made their own deals, prominent artists and historical figures.
How did you choose which ones to feature?
Do you feel there’s something a bit otherworldly about the power of creation or true genius?
I’m fascinated by muses.
Even in one of her earliest incarnations, I knew that I wanted to make Addy a muse.
We talk about creative genius.
I wanted to set the village along not only a spatial line, but a theological line.
That’s something that happens across all of Europe, across all of the world where monotheism displaces polytheism.
I wanted to do that within the village of Villon [where Addie is from].
I really wanted Luc to be introduced as an old god.
When she prays to him, she’s not praying to the Devil.
She’s praying to one of the old gods of the village.
I have never seen him as solely the Devil.
I see him as an old god and specifically a god of promise.
He is the Devil, he’s just not only the devil.
Addie has these seven very distinctive freckles, like a constellation.
How did that come to you?
She can’t be rendered, she can be interpreted.
Plus, I really like freckles.
I wanted to give her her own constellation.
Do you identify more with Addie or with Henry?
This is such a hard question.
I truly don’t have the answer to it.
It depends on the day.
But I put all of myself into Henry.
I will tell you for six months after I turned it in, I grieved.
I felt like there was an open grave inside of me.
It was like losing a companion, losing a loved one.
You said you had to mature into writing it, and this book grapples really profoundly with huge ideas.
Was this book that for you?
I’m never stopping working.
I’m always planning six books ahead.
I’m always looking for the next creative high.
