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. July 13, 2014. It’s Henry’s birthday. Addie and Henry join Bea and Robbie at a music venue called the Knitting Factory to celebrate. Henry reintroduces Addie to Bea and Robbie. As usual, Robbie is sulky around Addie. His moodiness bothers Henry more than Addie, though. Henry goes to buy a round of drinks, leaving Addie alone with Bea and Robbie. Addie mentions that Henry talks about Robbie all the time. Robbie looks doubtful. Addie can tell that there’s a distance between them, but she’s more accustomed to navigating Robbie’s moods now, so she presses on. She says that she’d love to see one of Robbie’s performances—that Henry is always singing Robbie’s praises—and this seems to make Robby happy.
Addie’s repeat efforts to win Robbie reinforce how much she’s come to value human connection since making her deal with Luc. Being invisible has made her understand just how much one’s interactions with others shape one’s life, and this philosophy guides her to keep trying with Robbie, even as he makes every effort to discourage her from being friends with him.
Themes
Henry returns to the table, and everyone toasts to Henry’s 29th birthday. Just then, a man appears onstage and asks everyone to welcome the opening act: Toby Marsh. Addie freezes. Toby walks onstage. He sits before the piano and begins to play the song that he and Addie wrote together: “I’m in love with a girl I’ve never met,” Toby croons. The music transports Addie back to her days and nights with Toby. She realizes that though she didn’t give him lyrics to the song, “he found them anyway.”
Addie’s realization that Toby “found [the song’s lyrics] anyway]” reflects the novel’s broader argument that ideas are more powerful than memories. Though Toby can’t remember Addie specifically, the experience—the idea—of writing with her stuck with him and inspired him to write these lyrics about “a girl [he’s] never met.”
Themes
Addie runs outside. Henry calls out for her to wait, but she ignores him. Addie wants to feel happy to hear Toby’s music, but she’s not. She’s seen herself depicted in art so many times before. But these pieces had no context. They were totally different from seeing her old mother standing in the doorway, or seeing Remy at the salon, or hearing Toby play the song they wrote together. Addie has learned that the only way to make her life bearable is to look forward.
These three experiences (seeing her aged mother in the doorway, Remy at the salon, and Toby at the music venue) affect Addie because they force her to confront the change and growth that go on all around her while she, alone, remains unchanged. They show her that she exists separately from the rest of the (mortal) world. She can bear seeing herself depicted in art because art exists outside of the context in which it was created—it, like Addie, is immortal in this way. But Addie can’t separate Toby’s song from the past songwriting sessions that created it, and ruminating on the past makes Addie understand that she experiences time differently than mortals, that she exists outside of their world, and that they’ll continue to move forward without her, even as they incorporate the “idea” of her into their art.
Themes
Henry finds Addie outside. He asks if Addie knows Toby. She admits that she knew Toby once. When Henry asks if Addie still has feelings for Toby, she could be honest and say that yes, she does, because her life affords her no closure. But instead, she lies and says that she was just not expecting to see him.
Addie’s grief over Toby underscores how meaningful human relationships rely on reciprocated communication and understanding. Addie never gets any closure because her cursed invisibility makes reciprocation impossible. She can’t ever break things off with Toby because Toby doesn’t understand that there’s anything to break off in the first place.
Themes
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