The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue | Review

I read The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue toward the end of 2020. Addie and Piranesi were the only two books I’d been really excited for last year and thankfully neither of them let me down. VE Schwab gives us a fresh take on the Faustian bargain and makes it so somber and sweet and gentle that it was a balm for a troubled soul, ironically. It took me a solid week to finish it though, simply because I knew I’d never be prepared for the book hangover that inevitably came afterwards.

In case you avoided everything online in 2020, which is understandable, here’s a quick outline. Addie LaRue is a girl, born into a French village in the 1600s. Even as a child she knows she doesn’t want what her mother wants for her; marriage, husband, domestic life (cue some real Belle vibes), she prefers running wild and hanging out with the village wise woman learning about the old gods. So when her mother tries to force her into marriage she calls on the old gods, and a dark one answers, she wishes for escape to live forever to be entirely free, and she is granted all of it with a cruel twist: every person she meets immediately forgets her, and once she is fed of up this existence she can give her soul to the darkness. Addie is a survivor though, and centuries later she finds the one thing she never thought she would; someone who remembers her.

If you happen to be a big VE Schwab fan (and you should be if you’re not) this isn’t like her other books, or at least not like the ones I’ve read. It’s a gentler, more folkloric sort of fantasy, that tackles morality and personhood and memory other wonderfully deep things without a whole lot of world building. This surprised me because Schwab’s world building is kind of what I loved most about her other works, but I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of it in Addie, as the reader we just have to accept what we see and sink into the story she offers us and let it soothe us. And while it definitely does soothe it also hypes you up to possibilities, to enjoying little things like walks in the park, old films, paint stains and good books.

What really intrigued me about this narrative was the jumping through time. Obviously Addie’s story is epic, it spans centuries, centuries filled with mostly the same things over and over; Addie stealing, Addie learning, Addie being forgotten. Schwab keeps it exciting by playing with Addie’s memories, we slip through her consciousness in a way, things she sees spark the narrative back a few hundred years, pieces of art, books, sculptures, memories all weave together to create a tapestry of Addie’s life and stitch it seamlessly to how she exists in our modern world.

Honestly, I wouldn’t even be mad if Schwab dropped her more typical fantasy for this sort of narrative entirely. Next time I need a comfort read I’ll definitely be turning to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

‘Embracing the Hag’: The Older Woman in Folklore

So I’ve been immersing myself deeply in folklore for about a week. I read Dee Dee Chainey’s (creator of #FolkloreThursday) A Treasury of British Folklore and listening to the Feminist Folklore podcast from the very start as I’ve somehow only just discovered it! But in both the book and the podcast I noticed that the figure of the Hag or Crone was popping up quite frequently. It wasn’t exactly news to me, we are all aware of the Hag/Crone figure especially in Western canon, but I realised I’d never paid her much attention as an archetype so I wanted to write down some thoughts.

Statue of Mother Shipton at Mother Shipton’s Cave in Knaresborough, Yorkshire

Before I carry on I want to stress that I am using the term ‘Hag’ to mean the old woman who is often a faery or goddess figure in folklore or representative of the final stage of a woman’s life (i.e. Maiden, Mother, Crone) and not in the sense that edgy dudebros attribute it to any female politicians older than them. So let’s get down to it.

As I mentioned the Hag/Crone figure is often seen as the last stage in a woman’s life. There is the Maiden, unmarried young and energetic, followed by the Mother, the wed fertile caregiver, and finally handed over to the Crone who, despite the negative image, I’ve always viewed as the female equivalent of Gandalf, a wise figure. However, that’s not how most of folklore sees the Hag, she is often a trickster, a cannibal, a scary old witch, or even a younger woman disguised as a Hag to test the kindness of another.

The most prominent two things I’ve noticed about the Hag/Crone is her hideous features. From the sweet, caring mother women (according to folklore) immediately become wrinkled, hook-nosed, bent-backed, warty child stealers. There are a couple ways to read this character though the most obvious seems to be that the second a woman loses her fertility and youth she is discarded from society as a decrepit leftover (I’m using all the descriptive language here, strangely I don’t get to describe ugliness often). But another way of reading it is, as with Gandalf-esque characters, that women become independent mysterious and powerful the more years they live much like men.

Granny Weatherwax from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series

Of course the other way to read this archetype is to not read it at all. Even as I write this staring at my bookshelf the only elderly female characters I can call to mind are Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and one of the Zorya Sisters (I can’t recall which) from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods who fit into the Maiden/Mother/Crone archetype. In film all I can conjure up (pun intended) is Professor McGonagall and casts that demand older actors like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011). The only genre I can really think of that will utilise an older female character is horror, and often then they are the source of fear for those consuming the media.

So why is the Hag so prominent in folklore and fairy tales but so absent from modern media? Personally I think it’s because age is no longer a concept to be respected, life spans in developed countries are longer than ever and one does not have to be particularly blessed, lucky, or even healthy to make it to the ripe old age of the Hag. But there could be other reasons, for such long life spans we are still youth obsessed and the Hag is not feared out of respect but as a kind of warning of what not to be.

Whatever the reason I particularly enjoy the Hag/Crone as an archetype. Since I was a child I was deeply obsessed with elderly witches like Baba Yaga, Mother Shipton, and Black Annis to name a few. Even as I find myself about to become a mother I still align more closely with the crotchety old Crone, and this isn’t individual to me. There are Buzzfeed quizzes to find out how much of a Grandma you are, things like baking, sewing, crochet and knitting are becoming more and more popular and a sort of Grandma Chic seems to have entered the public consciousness. So hopefully (or at least I’m hoping) as a result of this we will see a resurgence of the Hag in speculative fiction that doesn’t see them only as something to be avoided.