Shreeya Sharma Week #15: Remembered and Forgotten, the Story of an Invisible Woman
 |
| Image credit |
In The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab, twenty-three-year-old Addie LaRue desperately begs a god for freedom in order to escape an arranged marriage, but she doesn’t realize that she has asked the wrong god to fulfill her desire. Instead of receiving a blessing—freedom from her marriage—she is given a curse: Addie will be freed from people’s memory, including her family and hometown. Another caveat is that Addie can’t write anything, including her name, or even say her name. With no connections to the past and no way to form connections, reasons the Devil-like god, Addie has no bonds restraining her in life; in short, she is free. The only person who ever remembers her is the god who cursed her, later named Luc.
For the next three hundred years of her life, Addie spends her time living and reliving conversations, interactions, and three hundred years of European—and eventually American—history from 1714 to 2014. Every time she interacts with someone, they look at her anew; before this moment, they have never met her, and after she leaves, they will have no memory of her at all. For Addie, this cycle of forgetting morphs into a mantra: “Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vécu.” Originally in French, these phrases translate to: “Already seen. Already knew. Already lived.”
Seeing this mantra repeated every time Addie speaks to people she’s spoken to before is an intriguing step into Addie’s mental state. For three hundred years, she’s been unable to even say her name and has used countless others, and not a single soul, except Luc, has been able to remember her. I think it’s a miracle that Addie didn’t drive herself crazy by remembering every interaction she has had with the people who forgot her. By addressing Addie's mindset, Schwab indirectly indicates how many similar interactions we have during our lives are taken for granted.
When Addie meets Henry, the first person who ever remembers her, she feels amazed and hopeful for the future—she can finally make a friend. The first meeting between Addie and Henry begins the book's main storyline, and Schwab uses these two characters to show how our memory of people is directly affected by our perceptions of them. Addie views Henry as someone who is, in a sense, freeing her from her curse, giving her the ability to live her life anew.
Granted, I read this book a while ago, so some of my descriptions may be a little rusty, but overall, this book is unique compared to other popular books. The author provides a fresh perspective on memory and life, telling her readers how the simple things in life, even though we don’t always remember them, are essential to how we lead our lives. Without them, we become the way Addie was during her 300 long years of being remembered and forgotten—free yet lost spirits who drift around the world, living invisible lives and craving to fulfill an invisible purpose.
Hi Shreeya, you have unlocked so many memories from quarantine through your blog! I remember reading this book in 2020 and thinking that it was the most creative and mind altering book. The memory aspect of the book is extremely intriguing, as people lose their memory of Addie the moment she leaves their sight. I couldn’t imagine living like that for 300 years, being absolutely alone. This curse took away Addie’s ability to rely on people, have constant people to talk to, create a family, have a career, and anything else one would need in life. This seems to be extremely suffocating, as she is in a constant loop of loneliness that she cannot escape. I remember one scene in which she met a guy at a bar and he bought her a drink. When she left his sight, he forgot her, but she returned shortly after, and she relived the entire conversation with him, which ended up in him buying her a drink again. This scene demonstrates that there are certain advantages to the curse and that she is trying to make the most out of a bad situation. However, there is another scene where she spends the night talking to a guy and grows fond of him, but in the morning when they wake up, he completely forgets about her, leaving her disappointed. It is absolutely heartbreaking to not be able to form connections with others or leave your mark in the world.
ReplyDeleteHi, Shreeya locking back on that book from 2020, I was struck by its unique narrative about Addie, a character whos' been forgotten the moment she's out of sight. The concept of living centuries in solitude, without the ability to form lasting connections is kind of scary, The captures the moments of joy and the pro found issues of loneliness. From the scene at the bar to where she encounters the connections to the heartbreak of weaking up alone.
ReplyDeleteHi Shreeya,
ReplyDeleteI want to start this by saying that I love that you read because I read this book too. I've loved V.E. Schwabs other books as well so when I read the blurb of this book I was immediately sold. The concept seemed so fascinating to me and also in a way poetic. So I finally read it, but unfortunately I didn't enjoy it much. The prose was exceptional as is all of V.E Schwabs writing, but when it came down to the progression of plot and events in thee book I felt like the pace was slow and the storyline didn't play out well. There were parts that had me hooked and I didn't want to put the book down, but then there were parts where the book dragged so much I just wanted to stop reading. The entire book built up to this huge climax only for it to end anticlimactically and pretty much open to interpretation. I think the author was trying to convey a message about time and people, but it came across as incomplete and in need of editing.