Memoir traces Anne Rice’s rejection, and embrace, of faith

c. 2008 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ “I’m not a natural memoir writer,” said Anne Rice. “I’m a natural fiction writer. In fiction you can resolve a lot of things, but writing a memoir is not like that. You churn up material and don’t really resolve anything, so I’m very glad it’s done.” She’s […]

c. 2008 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ “I’m not a natural memoir writer,” said Anne Rice. “I’m a natural fiction writer. In fiction you can resolve a lot of things, but writing a memoir is not like that. You churn up material and don’t really resolve anything, so I’m very glad it’s done.”

She’s speaking of her new long-awaited memoir, “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession,” a tale of her life as a Catholic _ growing up steeped in the rich religious atmosphere of New Orleans, falling away from the church as a young woman, returning to faith in later life.


It is a tale of a writer whose work has embraced both the secular _ all those vampire novels, those works of erotica _ and the spiritual _ her “Christ the Lord” ongoing series of novels.

Rice always has been a writer in touch with her readers, and “Called Out of Darkness” was a book people asked for, she said.

“I was getting e-mails on a daily basis, `Would you tell us more about your story, your return to faith?’ I thought I’d covered it in the afterword to `Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt,’ but I was amazed that people wanted to know more about it.”

Rice, who left New Orleans for California after the death of her husband, Stan, in 2002, summons up her girlhood experiences with sensual detail, lavishing the same attention on religious artifacts that she once gave to a vampire’s imagined kiss.

She describes her early faith as preliterate, rooted in the sensory, the visual _ the walk to church, the smell of the flowers and candles, the habits the nuns wore. “I think that was true for Catholics of my time,” Rice said.

When she returned to New Orleans in the late 1980s, she began to buy pieces of property _ Our Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel and St. Elizabeth’s Orphanage, as well as her childhood home on St. Charles Avenue _ that echoed with the memory of her young spiritual life.

“Bit by bit, I was picking up the pieces of a Catholic childhood with these significant purchases,” she writes. “I was forming alliances with those still within the fold. I was keeping company with their loving kindness and their daily faith.”


But despite her success, Rice still felt a “grief on the edge of despair,” the ongoing loss of faith that came when she was a college student.

“It’s a gradual process for a lot of people,” Rice said, “but for me it was a very traumatic break. Questions of the mind, of philosophy, have always mattered viscerally to me. It was a tragic break for me.”

She returned to the church in 1998. A week later, she found herself in the hospital when physicians diagnosed type 1 diabetes. “My blood sugar was over 900 and my heart had stopped. For a long time I thought I was supposed to have died, and it was very weird being alive. That’s happened to me over and over again _ with a burst appendix, an abdominal obstruction requiring emergency surgery _ I was always being pulled back from the brink.”

Her vampire novels, she says, were “a journey through atheism back to God.”

“People began to tell me early on that they were Catholic novels,” she said. “And many people said that I would eventually become a Catholic novelist.”

Rice describes receiving, as she felt her faith return, a clear message in 2002: “Write for God. Write for him. Write only for him.”

“I wrote one more vampire novel, `Blood Canticle,’ then I realized I should do nothing but write his life” _ meaning the “Christ the Lord” books _ “and within weeks we found out Stan had a brain tumor, and 4 1/2 months later he died, very heroically. That was also happening. It was almost as if God had given me that moment in order to fortify me for the dark months ahead,” Rice said.


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Her newfound fame as a Christian novelist has led to some encounters that would seem _ to her vampire fans, at least _ somewhat incongruous. Who would have imagined Anne Rice sitting down for an interview with James Dobson, of the “Focus on the Family” Christian radio program? The same Anne Rice who knows that the same James Dobson probably would disapprove of her gay son?

“He was incredibly generous to me,” Rice said. “Many Christians like Dr. Dobson would consider me too controversial, but he was extremely generous about talking to me about the things we share. Our belief in the Lord is what matters. I really want to reach out to everybody. Christians have quarreled enough. And anybody who invites me on their radio show, I don’t want to judge them and say I’m a different kind of Christian. I want to belong to the body of Christ all over the world.”

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Writing her books, “I feel very close to the Lord. It’s a prayerful experience, a meditation on his life,” she said. “I want to get it biblically, archaeologically and historically correct. It’s imperative that I do that if I’m going to draw the reader in. When I write, I surrender completely to the framework of the novel. I’ve been on the road to Cana, I’ve entered Nazareth, and tried to be there every day with Jesus.”

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At one point in “Called Out of Darkness,” Rice describes what she calls “The Great Negotiation,” her conversation with God.

“I still slip into that,” she said. “You know, `If you would be perfect, sell all that you owe and follow him.’ We all negotiate with that _ well, except maybe for Mother Teresa. Do I have the courage to do that and just follow him? I did what I could do, which is to write.”

(Susan Larson writes for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.)

KRE/RB END LARSON

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