“Vicious” author V. E. Schwab: “I was afraid every single moment”

When V. E. Schwab was 22, she was living in a garden shed in someone’s backyard in Liverpool. One day while she was hiking and thinking about her grandmother’s dementia and what it meant for her mother, she decided to write a book about a girl who was forgotten.

Only now, when Schwab is 33, is “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” finally done, coming out last month, one day after publishing a moving essay on coming out for oprahmag. com.

It’s not that she’s a slow writer. Since 2011, Schwab has published nearly 20 fantasy novels ( as well as comic books and scripts) for adults, young adults and children, and most have been hugely successful, including “Vicious” and her Shades of Magic series. ( Her books for kids and teens are published under her real name, Victoria, but she used her initials to combat gender stereotyping among adult readers.)

While she was writing those books, she kept “Addie LaRue” simmering on a back burner. It’s an epic tale of a 23- year- old in 18th century France who feels stifled by society and sells her soul for a taste of freedom. But the devil, Luc, extracts a steep

Author V. E. Schwab. price: No one can ever remember Addie as she wanders the earth for the next 300 years until she lands in New York and meets another lost soul named Henry Strauss.

Schwab, who lives in Scotland, has been sheltering in France during the pandemic. We spoke by Zoom; this conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Why did this book take so long to start writing?

Some of it was maturity. I didn’t feel I was ready to write something this ambitious because it’s a character novel more than a plot novel. I also didn’t have the right voice.

I’m a technician so I love structure; I’m a math and science kid.

I don’t know how I ended up writing books. So I treat a story like a Rubik’s cube, and if I turn and twist it around enough I’ll find the best combinations. That’s so integral to the way we experience a story; I think people sometimes think about the narrative they want to tell but don’t spend enough time thinking about how they want to present it to the reader.

And I didn’t have the right ending. I never start writing a book until I have an ending that excites me enough that I know I won’t quit writing the book. I figure out who my characters are at the very end of the books and rewind them to figure out what version of themselves they are when we first meet them so I can see their emotional arc.

Q. Did it just pour out then, after all that time thinking about it?

I drafted it in six or seven months, which is decently fast given the length of the book, but it was a fraught process. I was afraid every single moment that I was doing the wrong thing. On a first draft, you’re taking this beautiful glass sphere from inside your head and chucking it against a wall really hard. It breaks and that’s the farthest it will ever be from the beautiful sphere.

The revisions are the process of putting it back together. This time the final book looks almost exactly the way it did in my head.

Q. You’re from Nashville, went to school in St. Louis, and have lived in Brooklyn, Liverpool and Scotland, and right now, you’re in France. Do you feel rootless like Addie?

I definitely built Addie along my own psychic lines of restlessness, wanderlust and the desire to always see more. In a perfect life, we have balance but Addie never got that, the balance of home. I never feel at peace anywhere but I remember traveling so much for book promotion one year that all I wanted to do was sit still. That’s the sensation I gave to Addie; she hasn’t sat still for 300 years so Henry becomes a season of rest.

Q. Do you have any regrets about your own foolish decisions?

I have regrets with a little “r,” none with a big “R.” I will get off this call and will ruthlessly selfassess what I said. I micro- analyze everything. I’ll have regrets about what I ate between breakfast and lunch. But no Big Regrets. I’m cognizant of the fact that every choice I make in life leads me to the next choice. There’s no right answer, there’s no wrong answer. There’s just the fork in the road that leads you to the next fork in the road.

Q. Addie is always surrounded by new people yet always isolated. How do you think your book translates for pandemic readers?

This is not the year I would have asked for, but ultimately I think this is the exact right year for my book.

This is a very nurturing book for a time when we’re trapped in an eternal present with a lot of uncertainty, regarding tomorrow and next month and next year. It’s a book about loneliness, but also about stubborn hope and defiant joy. Addie survives because she has this willful belief that things get better.