Anne Rice's Lessons on Achieving Success

LESSON: CHANGE COURSE

Anne Rice: She Moved Towards the Light

“To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.”

???????????Anne Rice sold 100 million books about a universe without God before she came back to religion.Among her bestsellers have been Interview with the Vampire and Queen of the Damned.

???????????Her 2008 memoir,Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, ranks even above former atheist C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy as a startling tale of transformation to a more optimistic outlook on life and death.

???????????Many of her fans have remained loyal as she has turned to retell the life of Jesus with her trademark vivid detail and spun new tales of angels (as well as werewolves, who are at least human most of the time).

???????????Meanwhile, her return to the Catholic church of her childhood brought adult conflicts that prompted her onto a more recent path that could be best described as a spiritual humanist.

???????????Born in New Orleans in 1941, her father was a Post Office executive, but the family struggled financially and was troubled by the alcoholism of Rice’s mother.

But she did instill a deep faith in her children, with the beauty of the rituals of the church making a lasting impression. As Rice said in an author’s note to Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt: “I had experienced an old-fashioned, strict Roman Catholic childhood…we attended daily Mass and Communion in an enormous and magnificently decorated church…Stained-glass windows, the Latin mass, the detailed answers to complex questions about good and evil—these things were imprinted on my soul forever.”

Her mother also read novels out loud and Rice came to especially love Charles Dickens. Dramas on the radio—especially ghost stories—and movies also stimulated her imagination.

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Why you should know about her

???????????Rice is best-known as the author of 10 novels in the Vampire Chronicles series, which developed a cult following.

???????????After decades of avowed atheism, she went through crises that culminated in her embrace of a very personal Christian mysticism. She faced a tremendous commercial challenge in abandoning the themes that made her famous, but turned her literary skills to novels that retained many of her original fans and reached new ones.

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???????????There were a couple of unusual aspects to Rice’s childhood. One was that her birth name was Howard Allen Frances O’Brien. Howard was her father’s name and her eccentric mother thought naming her after him would make her different (it did seem to break Rice’s sense of identity as female, but in first grade, she adopted Anne as her first name). The children also were expected to address their parents by their first names, treated like adults, and told they could achieve anything they wanted to.

The unconventional upbringing left Rice feeling like an outsider, which fueled her fantasy world. This would lead to the creation of a new type of vampire, one who mirrored her hunger for acceptance and truth.

The other strange thing about her childhood—for a future novelist—is that she had a great struggle with reading. She could do it only very slowly and couldn’t complete a novel until sixth grade, though she loved discovering new books at the library.

Rice could write creatively in school, but not according to the rules of her teachers. Her difficulties meant she couldn’t major in English in college on her first try.

When she was 15, her mother died and the following year her father remarried. The

family moved to Richardson, Texas, in 1958, where she met her future husband, Stan Rice, in a journalism class.

“He was the strangest, most otherworldly person I’d ever met,” Rice told biographer Katherine Ramsland for Prism of the Night. Stan described his reaction: “Just being around her was like being around a lighted sparkler.”

Turn to Atheism

After a strict religious upbringing, Stan had become an atheist. As Rice began reading the existentialist philosophers, she found herself having big arguments with her father about religion and stopped going to church at 18.

After completing her freshman year at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, she transferred to another college, but dropped out after running out of money. Unable to find a job, she moved to San Francisco and lived with friends, working at an insurance company and taking night courses at the University of San Francisco.

?????On a visit home, her relationship with Stan blossomed and they were married in 1961.

She worked towards a degree in political science, which she earned in 1964. The following year, Stan was hired as an assistant professor at San Francisco State University, teaching poetry, and at 27 would become a tenured professor.

?In 1966, their first child, Michele, was born and her brief life would have enormous impact on both of them.

??????After attending the University of California at Berkeley to study literature, Rice became disenchanted with the emphasis on literary criticism and language. “I wanted to be a writer, not a literature student.” She earned an M.A. in creative writing at San Francisco State in 1972.

???????The same year, Michele died of leukemia and the search for a cure drove the Rices into bankruptcy. Her death not only left them deeply grieving, but feeling that death was random, proof that there was no benevolent God. But she, unlike Stan, saw no reason there couldn’t be a supernatural world.

It was during this period that she took a previously written short story and turned it into her first novel, Interview with the Vampire. The central characters of this new mythology are sensitive, tragic individuals, the setting is New Orleans, with a tone influenced by Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

When Stan read the last page of the manuscript, he thought, “Our lives have changed.” But not yet: it was rejected by every publisher she submitted it to, who thought the style and story wouldn’t appeal to a modern audience.

????????The combined recent stress probably lowered her immune system and triggered two health crises. One was Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a viral infection of the nervous system that made it hard for her to move for months. Then obsessive-compulsive disorder had her washing her hands constantly in fear of germs (perhaps overcompensation for feeling her life was out of control), for which she underwent therapy for a year.

The New Vampires

A turning point came in August 1974, when she attended a writers’ conference, where she met literary agent Phyllis Seidel, who sold Interview to Alfred A. Knopf for a $12,000 advance on hardcover sales, at a time when the average was $2,000.?

?????The editor, Victoria Wilson, recalled reading the first version: “I kept saying to myself, this is the strangest book I have ever read in my life…I have never read anything as extraordinary and peculiar and sensual.”

???????The metaphor of the cosmic outsider would create a bond with readers, especially in the gay community.

???????????“Anne had gone within herself into an abyss of inarticulate, painful subconscious images, surrendering to them to formulate characters who represented complex realities typically relegated to the dark, secret places in the psyche,” wrote Ramsland. “The novel is a chronicle of seduction, with suffering as a central element…Anne found the perfect medium through which to deal with questions about good and evil.”

????????When it was published in 1978, Interview rode a wave of interest in horror, science fiction, and alternative spirituality, but the hardcover only sold 26,000 copies initially. The following year, however, the paperback caught fire.

???????Their son Christopher was also born in 1978. Stan and Rice had taken to drinking excessively after Michele’s death, but the next year, decided to become sober to avoid the risk that their son would grow up in the chaos of her childhood.

????????Instead of following up with a sequel, Rice wrote The Feast of All Saints,a historical novel about free African Americans in New Orleans in the 1840s.

Other detours followed until 1985’s The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned in 1988. By the time of the latter, the initial hardcover printing had been raised to over 400,000.

??????But while the movie version of Interview, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt,would be a big success in 1994—grossing $223.6 million at a cost of $50 million—these next two novels were combined into a film called The Queen of the Damned in 2002, with Stuart Townsend and singer Aaliyah, which lost money.

????????In 1988, the Rices moved into a pre-Civil War mansion in the Garden District of New Orleans, since she was powerfully drawn back to the city. The southern Gothic ambience was the perfect place to write her novels and Stan took up a new career as a painter.

????????Of the 10 books in the Vampire Chronicles series, the deepest, in her own assessment, was the fifth, Memnoch the Devil, in 1995. In it, Lestat meets the Devil, the former archangel Memnoch, who takes him a tour of heaven and hell and all of history to try to convince him to join forces against God. The God of the book does not know how he came to be and created the universe to better understand himself, with little care for mortals (similar to the Creator of Gnostic Christianity, the subject of my God Reconsidered: Searching for Truth in the Debate Between Atheism and Religion).

?????????In the 1990s, Rice also began writing another bestselling series, The Lives of the Mayfair Witches, also set in New Orleans.

Pilgrim’s Progress

???????????In her memoir, Rice describes an adulthood of constant spiritual longing, repressed by the rational mind’s insistence that this was superstition and facts had to be faced.

???????????“I truly didn’t think faith was possible again for me,” she wrote. “Atheism was reality and one could not turn away from that reality into a cowardly embrace of religion which one knew to be false.”

???????????But she found herself collecting religious art, watching films about religion, fascinated by reading the history of the Jews, making a trip to Israel, visiting churches in Rome, and drawn to the grand statue of Christ in Rio. She even began reading biographies of Jesus and restoring historic chapels.

???????????And she was surprised to find that the Catholics of New Orleans were loving and accepting, never bothering her about her reasons for leaving the church.

???????????“I was being doggedly and religious faithful to an atheism in which I no longer believed. Yet every step of the way was marked with pessimism, sadness, and a grief on the edge of despair. Every step was marked by darkness—by a tragic certainty that belief in God Himself was quite beyond my conscience and my heart. There was no returning to any church without faith in God.”

???????????In 1998, she asked her 19-year-old son whether he believed in God and his affirmative answer shocked her, since he had been brought up to have no faith(Christopher is now a bestselling author in his own right).

???????????She suddenly realized that everything—great music and art, her visceral response to the beauty of creation, her obsession with Jesus—was telling her of God: “I came to be in awe of the unique power of the story of the Incarnation. I began to sense that I was being blinded day in and day out by an inexplicable light.”

???????????On December 6, she began reading St. Augustine and the next day took communion for the first time in 30 years.

“In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questionswhich had kept me from Him for countless years…It was only as I felt this love and this trust, that I realized I believed in Him.”

Stan even consented to be remarried in the church, even though he was still a committed atheist.

???????????Then on the 14th, she slipped into a diabetic coma. She had unknowingly developed type 1 diabetes, which is normally diagnosed in childhood, and was saved by surgery.

???????????After Stan died in 2002, she underwent gastric bypass surgery to lose weight and help with the diabetes. But the following year she nearly died again,when there was an intestinal blockage, a common complication of the procedure.

???????????Also in 2003, she moved from New Orleans to the Palm Springs area of California, which seemed symbolic of her personal journey towards light.

???????????In 2005, her second book in a series on the life of Jesus came out, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, which she regards as the best novel she has ever written.

???????????The inevitable conflicts of a social progressive with the church led her to announce in 2010that she was no longer affiliating with any organized version of Christianity, though she says she still puts Christ and prayer at the center of her life.

???????????Rice maintains a remarkably close relationship with her readers for a bestselling author, through www.annerice.com.

???????????There, fans can be apprised of her next incarnations.

Real Life Lessons

*Listen to your heart—the mind alone will make you unhappy.

*Make your creative goals as big as you can conceive.

*Develop your mind’s eye to see things vividly and bring your vision alive to others.

*In the pursuit of truth, share the answers you have.

*Don’t be afraid to change course more than once.