Who wants to live forever? V. E. Schwab's new novel follows an immortal whom nobody can remember

In The Invisible Life Of Addie LaRue, Schwab gave her heroine the fate of immemorable immortality. PHOTOS: TITAN BOOKS, JENNA MAURICE

Would you choose to live forever if it meant nobody could remember you, or live briefly but never be forgotten?

"It's a hard question," admits American fantasy author V. E. Schwab. "There are days when I have such a fear of losing those I love that I think it would be a freedom to move through the world untethered. But it would be so deeply lonely."

In her new novel, The Invisible Life Of Addie LaRue, Schwab gave her heroine the fate of immemorable immortality. Adeline LaRue, born in 17th-century rural France, is fleeing an arranged marriage when she strikes a deal with a dark god in the woods.

Now she cannot die, but nobody can remember her after they take their eyes off her. No mark she makes on the world lasts. So she wanders through the centuries, stealing and tricking to survive, erased over and over from the minds of those she loves.

Then, in modern-day New York, she meets Henry, a young man in a bookstore who seems to have the reverse problem: he can remember her, but he himself lives as if he has no time to lose.

It took Schwab 10 years to write the book, she says over Skype from her parents' 500-year-old stone cottage in the French countryside, where she has been sheltering during the pandemic. It is located 10 minutes from where she set the opening of her book.

Schwab, 33, operates on what she calls the "six-burner stove" writing model, in which she has several projects on the boil at once, one on high heat and the rest simmering in the background.

She has had Addie LaRue stewing since she was 24. "Even then, I had the sense that it was the kind of story you only get to tell once," she says. "I would check in with it every year or two and I wouldn't be ready."

Before she turned 30, she began to fear she would never be ready. "I thought, I'm going to die without writing this book. This is going be the book I always talk about and never write.

"It turned out that I really needed to hit 30, because some of the themes in the book are about artificial adulthood, this concept that you hit maturity and everyone suddenly assumes you know what you're doing but you still feel like a child."

Schwab, a New York Times bestselling author, made her name in the fantasy scene with her knack for writing villains in novels such as Vicious (2013), in which two college roommates become archenemies and it is unclear who is the hero, if indeed anyone is.

She has always been more interested in the relationship between the hero and villain than in romance, she says.

"There's this weird thing that happens where we devalue every other dynamic in the book in the interest of the romance, and I don't want that."

In the Shades Of Magic series (2015 to 2017), she created a set of parallel Victorian-era Londons colour-coded by the quality of their magic - Red, Grey, White and the destroyed Black.

What she has on the stove now includes Threads Of Power, a new trilogy set in the Shades Of Magic universe; a Vicious comic; a television show she is not allowed to speak about and a dark fairy tale novel she describes as "Secret Garden meets Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro's 2015 gothic horror film)".

But Addie LaRue, she says, is the "biggest book" of her career.

The idea of a woman who is perpetually forgotten comes from something deeply personal: watching her grandmother suffer dementia.

"She had dementia for a decade and I watched it whittle away her entire identity. The hardest part was watching her forget my mother and watching my mother feel forgotten. It felt like a deeper wound."

She was saddened to have the book's release derailed by the pandemic.

"But in some ways, it's the right book to read during this year. This is such a difficult year for so many people and the theme of this book is stubborn hope and defiant joy. It's about a woman who survives incredible hardship and trials and doesn't lose her sense of hope.

"So even though this book isn't going to start with the life that I wanted for it, I've made peace with the fact that it's going to have the life that it clearly needs to have."

• The Invisible Life Of Addie LaRue ($29.95) is available at bit.ly/InLifeOAL_VES

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