"Interview with the Vampire" was really an
accident, it was a whim.
I'd tried to write other stories and books that were
more pedestrian realism, and I had failed completely.
When I spoke through Louis' voice, when I started to write
from his point of view, and talk about what he saw, and
what he felt, and what he knew, I was suddenly able to
talk about everything that mattered to me.
Faith, the loss of faith, what is good and evil, how do we
cope when we feel we're cut off from God, all of these
things found their way into that novel.
And it was really a very important accident for me to
discover that in that fantasy framework I could talk about
what was my reality.
I think I was born at a perfect time, maybe everybody
thinks that.
I heard a character say one time in a drama, the world was
made when I was born.
And maybe that's what happens with each and every one of us.
I was born in 1941, and I got to see a whole way of life
that passed within about 10 years.
I got to see the world of radio before television, the
world when garbage trucks were still pulled by mules, when
people had no air-conditioning and windows were opened to the
summer breeze.
I got to see all of that.
And I think I really had a wonderful childhood and God
was part of that childhood from before I can remember.
I remember my mother taking us to church during those years
to these beautiful, beautiful churches in New Orleans.
And I think of that time as just a golden time.
I don't remember anything bad intruding on that time.
And I remember that feeling of safety in God's world.
Safety in a huge cosmos, really, that involved God, and
His angels, and His blessed mother, and the saints, and
all of those people who joined us when we went to mass.
I remember my parents being fiercely individualistic.
And I was brought up to think there was something more than
what was material in this world.
And you had to have a spiritual focus in your life.
You had to have a spiritual life, really.
It wasn't enough just to acquire things, or to have a
good job, or to have security.
You had to have some sort of inner life that was burning
inside you.
I guess, I couldn't conceive of a life without
believing in God.
Without feeling that this was God's universe, and we were
privileged to be part of it.
I couldn't conceive of that.
If somebody had said, well at 18 you'll lose your faith, and
you'll walk away from all of this, and you'll walk away
from God, I don't think I would have believed them, but
that's exactly what happened.
I felt a kind of desperation.
I felt that there were so many things forbidden to me as a
Christian, as a Catholic, that I felt a
desperate need to be free.
I felt that if I was going to read about existentialists and
the beat generation, if I was going to know the poetry of
Allen Ginsberg, or understand modern jazz music, if I was
going to read Jean Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus, and
Nabokov's Lolita, that I had to be free.
And I felt desperate, I felt desperate, but I also
immediately felt a terrible grief.
I felt a grief for the loss of faith.
I wanted so much to understand the wide world that was
opening up to me in college.
And the world did open up, but it opened up in a somber and
darkened way and that really never changed.
I thought I was doing the right thing.
I thought I was doing the realistic
thing, the mature thing.
I bought that to grow up one has to put aside God.
And I began my adventures as a student of the modern world
and as an agnostic, or an atheist, and that lasted for
me for 38 years ... 38 years.
The first goal of my life after my break with faith was
really to get a college education.
And I wanted to be a writer, but my aspirations were very
vague at that time.
I didn't have a narrative yet, a story.
And it was, I guess, in my 30's that I wrote, "Interview with
the Vampire", my first published novel and that was a
life changing event.
That was my first professional accomplishment.
All of this just evolved.
I mean, if somebody had come to me and said you're writing
about your life, you're writing about the loss of your
faith, you're writing about your own daughter and her
death, I would have been blocked.
I couldn't have continued, but fortunately nobody said
anything like that and I wrote the novel.
Sometimes my books are referred to as The Vampire
Chronicles.
And they are spoken of as a series, but it's not an
organized series.
Each book is sort of a stand alone story.
And I think that each one of the vampire novels tells
pretty much the same story of grief, and loss, and
suffering, and a kind of revolt against the darkness of
a life without God.
I didn't see that until I'd been writing for
quite a long time.
But that's what those novels are about.
Of course, what all these books were doing is they were
reflecting my own feelings.
My own feelings as an agnostic, an atheist, that I
was cut off from God, that I couldn't ever believe again as
I had when I was a child, and my own increasing
dissatisfaction with the world in which salvation is not a
possibility.
And the reason for that dissatisfaction was simple, I
really believed in God.
Not only did I really believe in Him, I loved Him, and I
wasn't admitting it.
I was a Christ haunted person.
I was a Christ haunted atheist. I was a person
haunted by God and my writing is just littered with
accoutrements of the struggle, and yet there's evidence there
that I was called back again, and again, to the idea that as
long as you're denying God you will not know any rest, you
will not know any peace.
You can't save yourself through art, you can't save
yourself through music, you can't do it through travel,
you can't do it through wealth.
All of your attempts at saving and transcending through other
means will ultimately fail.
You save yourself, or God saves you,
when you turn to Him.
And finally, after 38 years of denying that, I found myself
very ready to go back to God and to give my
life over to Him.
It suddenly hit me, He knows the answers.
To go back to God, I don't have to pass an examination, I
don't have to know.
I can go home.
I can say to Him, look I've always loved you, the universe
has always told me that you exist. You will take us home.
You will bring us home.
And I just surrendered at that moment.
I surrendered the theological and sociological questions.
I surrendered the doubts.
Imperfectly and contrite, I went back.
Returning to Christ changes absolutely everything.
I was no longer able to work with the vampire metaphor.
The vampire for me was a metaphor for the outcast, and
the person in a Godless world.
Well, I wasn't a person in a Godless world, far from it.
What if I just don't write them anymore?
What if I write books that can be dedicated directly to God,
to Jesus Christ?
What if that's all I do?
And at that moment, I made the decision, that is what I'm
going to do.
I have changed and I have to do this.
I have to write for Him.
My name is Anne Rice and I am Second.
What does it mean to be saved?
What does it mean to look at the cross and to think Christ
has saved me?
It means that your sins are forgiven.
That everything you have failed to do, everything
you've done wrong, that all of this has been forgiven by God,
understood, witnessed, by God, by Christ, and
that you are forgiven.
That there is no barrier to your being one with Him.
When you look at that cross, at least for me, that
knowledge that God loves you, God has made you, God has
redeemed you, God has embraced you, and God is
the meaning of life.
And love for Him, His love for you, is what makes this world,
His world and your world.
And Christ is inviting you to come back to Him.
To accept Him as your Savior and to be reconciled with Him
and with God the father, with the maker of the universe.
I think it's a mistake to always ask of yourself that
you emotionally understand, that there may be
moments when you don't.
But once you've embraced God and you've embraced Christ on
the cross, your surrender is total.
And His love is without measure, it's without
qualification.