Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory and Meaning
Love and Vulnerability
Freedom
Art, Creativity, and Expression
Wonder and Knowledge
Summary
Analysis
New York City. September 7, 2013. Henry waits in line at the Roast and thinks about how much he loves feeling wanted. The last few days have been a blur of various people gravitating toward him for various reasons. But they all have one thing in common: their eyes are filled with a thick, icy fog, which reminds Henry the attention “isn’t entirely real.”
Henry reaches the register. Vanessa is there. She smiles shyly and asks Henry why he never called her. Henry laughs and hands his phone to her so she can enter her number. He feels corny but promises to call her. Henry is about to leave when a voice calls his name. He turns and sees Dean Melrose sitting at a table. Melrose tells Henry that there’s an open position in the theology school—and he think Henry would be perfect for the job. Henry assumes Melrose is kidding and reminds him that he hasn’t even completed his PhD. Plus, Melrose failed him. But Melrose only hands Henry his card and tells Henry to come in to interview for the position.
The irresistibility with which Luc’s deal/curse has imbued Henry isn’t limited to love and physical attraction: it extends to Henry’s professional life as well. Suddenly, Dean Melrose, who previously failed Henry, thinks that Henry is the perfect candidate for a job for which Henry is hilariously underqualified. The ridiculousness of Melrose’s offer seems to put things into perspective for Henry, showing him that everyone’s sudden desire for him is phony and thus meaningless.
Themes
Henry returns to The Last Word and Bea scolds him for being late. Henry apologizes. Then he asks Bea if he seems different or strange lately. Bea doesn’t notice anything different about him. She asks Henry what’s going on. Henry knows Bea won’t believe him if he tells her about the deal, so he drops it.
Bea doesn’t seem quite as affected by Henry’s deal with Luc as everyone else, but it’s possible that her failure to see anything different in him is itself an effect of the curse: she’s seeing Henry as unchanged because that’s how she wants to see him.
Themes
Bea tells Henry about a new idea she has for a thesis. She shows him three portraits, each depicting what looks to be the same young woman, though the portraits all come from different times and schools of art. Bea calls the woman “the ghost in the frame.” One portrait is a pencil sketch, depicting a woman lying tangled in sheets. She has freckles across her cheeks. The second portrait is French and done in an abstract style, but it depicts a woman with freckles, too. The third piece is a silhouette sculpture, consisting of a slab of cherry wood with “pinpoint tunnels” carved straight through it. Henry doubts the works all depict the same woman, but Bea points out that the woman’s freckles are the same. She excitedly wonders who the woman might have been.
The woman in the paintings that Bea shows Henry is clearly Addie, though Henry hasn’t yet met Addie and has no way of knowing this. One curious detail is the role that Addie’s freckles play in each artwork. Part of Addie’s curse is that she can leave no mark on the world—thus, she can’t be photographed, as a photograph would immortalize her image in time. But these works, which foreground Addie’s freckles, are different. They’re less replicas of Addie than they are interpretations that depict the feature of Addie’s (her freckles) that was most striking to each artist. So, these paintings gesture toward the idea that Luc raised earlier: that ideas are separate—and stronger—than memories.
Themes
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