From Vampires to Christ

WHEN A WRITER watches her novels translated to the big screen by Oscar winning director, Neil Jordan, and her characters portrayed by superstars Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, it’s a form of confirmation that she’s touched a chord in the pop culture zeitgeist. In a very real sense, she’s on the top of the world. But if material success and acclaim leave you feeling empty, lost, scared and lonely, what if the only possible refuge is a God you deserted years earlier? According to Anne Rice, it is an “emotional catastrophe”.



Arguably it is the most startling conversion to Catholicism in America in an extremely long time. After two decades of sitting atop international bestsellers lists for her provocative and compelling portrayals of vampires and all things ‘undead’, Anne Rice’s return to the faith of her childhood took much of the world by surprise, but as she explains in her new memoir, Called out of Darkness, it was a journey marked by personal tragedy, extreme personal doubt, and a reconciliation she attributes to personal revelation as well as the loving support of fellow Catholics.



I have long been a fan of Anne Rice’s writings, her sense of struggle and the epic battle for the nature of humanity. When her memoir was published she agreed to take part in a lenghty interview over the phone.





A Catholic upbringing



Anne Rice’s childhood was filled with extremely powerful and positive impressions of daily mass, weekly novenas, holy days of obligation marked by magnificence and nuns and priests that were kind, supportive and willing to indulge a child animated not so much by intellectual curiosity so much as a need to integrate her faith with her daily experience. Born in 1941, and given the rather peculiar name of Howard Allen O’Brien (she herself chose the name Anne on the first day of school, and has stuck with it ever since), she flourished and suffered in a lush New Orleans Latin culture with a devout mother who was also an alcoholic. Her early childhood and schooling took place in a nearly total Catholic environment, “a beautiful, completely Catholic environment”. In her memoir the atmosphere is evocatively depicted as if through the eyes of a child, and her remembrances include a sense that Catholicism was the source of all goodness. Ironically, this perception, and a family tragedy, were to be at the root of her breaking with the Church.



When Anne O’Brien was 14 her mother died, a consequence of years of alcoholic abuse. Her father’s subsequent remarriage took the family to Texas, where for the first time Anne went to school and knew non-Catholics. “I found myself for the first time in an environment where Catholics were the minority, and I experienced what I call a delayed adolescent rebellion. I wanted to explore all the things the modern world was offering. I wanted to read the existentialist writers, be part of the Beat Culture, pursue the idea that the world was meaningless, that life was meaningless.”





A dark perception



There is regret in her voice when she talks about how the exciting intellectual freedom she experienced at university, and with the man who was to be her husband for 40 years, the American artist and poet Stan Rice, ultimately led to her break with the Church. “I lost my faith and came to accept and believe that the modern world was right, that we live in a meaningless world. It was very tragic that that happened. I wasn’t a complete person after that for 38 years.”



The transformation from lapsed Catholic/atheist into super star writer would come several years later after the death of her daughter of leukaemia before she reached age 6. As if that tragedy confirmed her new adult vision of the world, she turned to writing Interview with a Vampire, a book that was to launch her career. Most of the world is familiar with the series of Vampire novels that have sold nearly 75 million copies around the world. The critical acclaim the books received all make mention of two aspects of her story telling: the characters are ‘lost souls’, and the situations they face are struggles over the nature of good and evil. In retrospect, Anne Rice sees the stories as struggles she herself was attempting to resolve: can one be good without God; can one be good and not a Catholic? Looking back she understands “that all the novels were an allegory for a world without God, without meaning. A dark portrait of a dark perception.”



Her return to God and the Church was not the work of an instance, but rather a journey that covered her entire 38 years in darkness. In retrospect she describes it as “38 years of pilgrimage back to the Lord, that’s what it was.” All during this time she and her husband were wandering the world, visiting holy places and religious sites. “I wanted to see the places that had brought so many people such joy and happiness, and everywhere I went I collected rosaries, statues, icons and images of the Saints that had so filled my childhood.” She was travelling as “an anthropologist, an archaeologist” engaged on an intellectual journey.





I felt a brush



Now she accepts that she was being pursued by God. “I wasn’t so much searching for faith as God was searching for me – I just didn’t realize it.” The denouement came during a visit to Rome in 1998. She and a group of ‘devout Catholics’ were attending a night mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. She was, she says, “immersed in the beauty of the setting, the service, the music,” and then during Communion she “burst into tears. I so wanted to receive Communion, but knew that I couldn’t. I had too much respect for my old religion, too much respect for my friends, but I knew deep inside that I desperately wanted Communion. Then I felt a brush, and the brush of something searching for me.”



But if the atheist anthropologist was “breaking down, breaking apart… pursued by the Hound of Heaven,” her struggle was not yet over. She returned to America from Rome and “wrote the angriest Vampire Book I ever wrote. Filled with intensely dark images of an intensely dark world with no hope of redemption, a long meditation on good and evil.” And that was it. She was ready to turn her back on 4 decades of what she calls hard work.



“It is tough being an atheist, going around telling yourself that the world is an accident, that everything is without meaning, that the beauty of the sea, the majesty of the planet is simply by chance rather than what God created. It is a tough discipline. Going back to God was actually easy in comparison. It was just acknowledging what is true.”





Coming back to the Church necessitated a lot of changes for Anne Rice. She and her husband Stan, “a deeply good person and a devout atheist,” were remarried in a Catholic church in New Orleans, her childhood home. “He understood what I needed to do, and he was truly sincere in doing it with me.” Shortly afterwards, Stan Rice died of a brain tumour.





Write only for Him



For millions, Anne Rice’s decision to rejoin the Catholic Church was made evident in a decision she made about her career as a writer. “Write for God. Write for Him. Write only for Him.” She knew she had to do something, “I think creativity is God given, and I think I have much too much of the story telling ability, almost too much. I couldn’t stop it.”



She decided to write the story of Jesus, a four-volume novelization of the life of Christ. The first volume, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, published in 2005, led to a flurry of stunned reaction. From Vampires to Christ was the headline above most stories dealing with the beginning of a new series from Anne Rice. And she found, “many of the people who were big fans of my Vampire novels became readers of Christ the Lord, and many people who had never read me started to.” The second volume, Christ The Lord: The Road to Cana, was published in March of 2008, and Rice and her publishers knew they had another best selling series on their hands.





Cruel radiance



Her decision to write and publish the story of her return to Catholicism, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession came from a different motivation than the need to tell the story of Christ. “I wanted to make the intelligent case for God. There are so many books in the past few years calling Christians fools that I decided I wanted to, needed to, make the case of a fairly well read, fairly well travelled, fairly well educated person who made the choice to return to God. For me this was a profoundly intelligent decision.” At the same time she acknowledges that her story also involves a leap of faith, a trusting in a loving God. She accepts that she and her Church disagree on many issues, but that surrender “meant letting go of all your dilemmas about the Catholic Church.” She insists in her memoir and in the conversation that she “has never thought of the Church as perfect.” She resolves her qualms, for instance, about her gay son and the Church’s view of homosexuality by noting that God is a loving God, by appreciating the true nature of surrender: “to go home is to put matters into the hands of God.” She writes that she remembers the pain of having to choose personal beliefs and positions over those of the Church. She believes now that there is a different choice, “I will never leave Him again, no matter what the scandals or the quarrels of His Church on earth, and I will not leave His Church either.”



The reaction to her book has been quite pleasing. “I hear from readers that it speaks very strongly to Catholics who have fallen away.” Time Magazine wrote, “Rice could rival C.S. Lewis as a popular apologist for the faith.” Nick Owchar writing in the Los Angeles Times, “If Rice didn’t acknowledge the contradictions between faith and reason, her book would be another simplistic, 12-step testimony. Instead, Rice’s memoir shows what true belief really involves. It exacts a price. James Agee had a lovely term for this. He called it ‘cruel radiance’.”





I am broken, flawed, committed



Anne Rice neither repudiates her Vampire stories, “they were a part of my life’s journey,” nor does she regret putting them aside. “I have a great need to make stories, write adventures, entertain audiences.” And she has plans to satisfy that need after the Christ The Lord Project is completed. “I have a series planned called The Songs of Seraphim, which will be a series of stories telling the adventures of the angels on earth. I want to write a Christmas book that would rival Charles Dickens. I want to write the novel about the early Church.”



Anne Rice has always been a scholar. Her Vampire novels were acclaimed for their historical accuracy in place and time. She turns the same type of assiduous reading and researching to her new writing. She reads deeply in theology, Church history and the history of the last two thousand years. She accepts that people will and should disagree with her interpretations and elaborations. For the writer and the thinker that is just part of life. But in the end, she wants us to understand that she is a Catholic and a flawed human being. In her new church of St. Francis of Assisi in the Coachella Valley of California, she contemplates a statue of St. Francis of Assisi.



“I am broken, flawed, committed: A Christmas Christian searching for that Stigmata, for the imprint of those Wounds on my heart and my soul, and my daily life.”



At the conclusion of the interview I asked Anne Rice why she was standing behind a statue of Saint Anthony of Padua on the cover of her latest work, Called Out of Darkness. She replied that the Saint had always had a place in her heart, partly because he was a Franciscan, but also because he comes across as seized with strength. All during her childhood Saint Anthony was present in her home as a small statue. When she began collecting images of saints as an adult, Saint Anthony holding the Baby Jesus was the first large statue she purchased. To this day a statue of Saint Anthony holds a special place in her office.