Henry was the greatest fear that I had going into the drafting process, which is funny because he’s my favorite part of the book now. How did you go about striking that balance? If you don’t self examine and don’t understand your strengths and weaknesses, it’s hard to get to the root of that in other people.Īs Addie starts to realize she’s less human, we see just how wonderfully and painfully human Henry is. Creative vulnerability is uncomfortable, but it’s something I believe is absolutely intrinsic to the creative process. What it came down to was this is a book about vulnerability. Everyone in the book is an artist in some way and I tried to provide artists in all of their manifestations: Sam lives and breathes it and is extraordinarily confident, Beatrice is an art historian trying to find herself, Robbie is a performance artist, Henry is a lost artist. My undergraduate degree is in art and my graduate degree is in art history, and I tried to fold in all of those pieces. How did that influence the way you wrote about art and artists in this book? You’re really passionate about deromanticizing the creative process and being open about the challenges of being a writer. There’s a massive hole in my life that had been filled for 10 years with Addie. Before I wrote it I was gripped by fear, while I was writing I was gripped by fear, and after I wrote it I was gripped by grief. All of my insecurities and fears and hopes became so intrinsically connected to the themes within the book. I’m grateful that the book exists, but it was by no means a pleasant process. I was frightened of that chasm because the idea in my head was so important to me. There’s a chasm between the idea in your head and what ends up on paper. I don’t think I could’ve written this book at any other age and I’m very glad I didn’t try. Everyone in the book is lost and feels at odds in the framework of their world. I had it for Addie as the generator of her deal, but I needed it for everyone. I had this ennui, I had the history, I had the passion and what I didn’t have was the fear of time as a throughline and central theme in the narrative. That was the thing that I had been missing. That’s when I hit the threshold that Henry is dealing with in the novel-the panic that comes with adulthood and feeling as though you’re a mile behind everyone else. The piece I was waiting for would come when I was almost 30. I knew this story was only going to get one manifestation, and I sat with it until I was the right version of myself. Sometimes a story comes along that you realize you’re only going to get to tell once. As authors, we write the same story over and over again in many ways. I opened the first document for Addie in 2011 and every couple of years I’d check back in with new notes. Is there anything that changed really dramatically when you finally sat down to write it? This story has been with you for a long time. It’s probably my favorite cover I’ve ever had. I’ve been fighting for years to have a typography centric cover. It wasn’t the simplest journey to come to the cover but that said, it’s a stunner. I think I emphasized how badly I wanted the constellation to be a part of the cover because I knew I was going to get the constellation tattoo and I wanted to have an official constellation. Confession: I have a lot of tattoos and none of them are markers of any of my books, but I desperately wanted to get an Addie tattoo because of how long this story has been a part of my life. Addie has so many elements to her story, which do you choose to emphasize? For me, the seven stars were important. It was a long time of looking at covers that looked very much like they would sell but didn’t feel like my book, or felt like my book but didn’t necessarily feel like the right market. I wanted Addie ’s cover to be a propulsive force rather than a hurdle. I know the power of a cover A Darker Shade of Magic was one of those books that every time I did a signing somebody brought up the fact that they’d never heard of the book, they’d stumbled across it in a bookstore and the cover drew them in. Everyone on the team felt very aware of that and it became a process of figuring out which direction the cover could go in. This was a book that was going to branch out from my fantasy base to inch roots into literary and general fiction. The book was always called The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, but the cover took a long time to find the right iteration of. What was the design process like for you?Ĭovers, much like titles, rarely have simple journeys.
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