http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/012/11.50.html

Interview with a Penitent


How Anne Rice moved from fascination with vampires to renewed faith in
Christ.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/012/11.50.html

Interview with a Penitent


How Anne Rice moved from fascination with vampires to renewed faith in
Christ.

Why is Anne Rice, once the literary queen of darkness, now writing
about Christ, the light of the world?

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/012/11.50.html

Interview with a Penitent


How Anne Rice moved from fascination with vampires to renewed faith in
Christ.

by Cindy Crosby



Christ the Lord:
Out of Egypt
by Anne Rice
Knopf,
336 pp.; $25.95

A young girl plays in the streets of New Orleans. Around her, gnarled
oaks drip with Spanish moss, guarding crumbling mansions where ghosts
are said to walk. She clutches the hand of her father, Howard, as she
visits the aboveground crypts of Lafayette Cemetery, tracing with her
fingertips the names of those who died from yellow fever. In her mind,
she's making up stories. A whisper of corruption mingles with
historical beauty. Voodoo lingers, despite Christianity's presence. The
light and the dark coexist, shadows imprinted on sunlight.

Today, novelist Anne O'Brien Rice's darkly themed books have sold more
than 75 million copies. Her first novel, Interview with the Vampire
(1976, adapted as a movie in 1994), has sold more than 8 million
copies. Rice has also written historical novels, as well as pornography
and erotica under the names "A. N. Roquelaure" and "Anne Rampling." Her
books are widely assigned in high school and college English and
philosophy classes.

Last summer, Knopf, her publisher, stunned the literary world with its
announcement of Rice's newest volume: Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, a
novel about Jesus' life at age 7.

"This book means more to me than anything I've ever done," Rice told
Christianity Today from her home in La Jolla, California. "I'm not
offering agnostic explanations. He is real. He worked miracles. He is
the Son of God! And there is so much more to write."

Why is Anne Rice, once the literary queen of darkness, now writing
about Christ, the light of the world?

Loss and Change
Born with the unlikely name Howard Allen O'Brien in 1941 (she later
changed her name to Anne), into a devout Catholic home full of music
and literature, she was fascinated by the trappings of her faith-and
afraid of the dark. The darkness became real when Anne's mother died
from alcohol complications in 1955. Her father remarried in 1958 and
moved the family from New Orleans to Richardson, Texas. Enrolled in
public schools for the first time, Anne was exposed to ideas banned
from her Catholic education. At 17, she attended Texas Woman's
University and read books on philosophy and existentialism. It was a
heady elixir.

"I couldn't believe in the principles I was brought up with when
thousands of people I met who were not Catholics were very good
people," Rice says. "They were reading what they wanted to read,
studying what they wanted to study. ... I wanted to find out what
existentialism was, but that had been forbidden to me as a Catholic. I
lost my faith in God."

After her freshman year, Anne moved to San Francisco to work. In 1961,
she married former Texas high school classmate Stan Rice, a poet and
Methodist turned adamant atheist. Anne went back to school, getting her
degree in political science at San Francisco State (she would
eventually earn a master's degree in English). In 1966, Anne gave birth
to Michele, nicknamed "Mouse." When she was four, Michele began to tire
easily. The diagnosis: leukemia. Michele died before her sixth birthday
in 1972.

How do you cope with the death of a child? Anne says she and Stan
became "heavy, heavy social drinkers," who drowned their grief in
alcohol. Anne began writing through her pain, expanding an earlier
short story she'd written about vampires.

Her questions about life poured into her novel. How do you go on living
when you are in despair, in darkness? What is the meaning of life? Is
there a God? Do good and evil exist?

"I had a terrible sense of impotence over not saving my child. I was
pouring out the pain of the loss of Michele and also the feelings of
despair of a person who does not have faith in God," remembers Rice.
"But I didn't know that this was what I was doing."

Her pain and questions became Interview with the Vampire, a dark book
about immortal outsiders who can kill or give eternal life through
blood. "A vampire is cast out in the darkness, but refuses to give up
on meaning," Rice says. "I was groping through the darkness."

When she read Rice's manuscript, Victoria Wilson, then a new editor at
Knopf, remembers "feeling my pulse quicken." "Anne was writing about
good and evil," she says, "being on the outside and what that
experience was like." Wilson bought the book, which enjoyed modest
success.

Rice's next book, The Queen of the Damned (1988), brought her
blockbuster status. Numerous books followed, many with themes from
Rice's past. "Even though you may not know you are writing from your
own life, you make certain choices," observes Wilson, now a vice
president and senior editor at Knopf. "You can see what the writer is
working out."

"I got my fears out in my books," Rice says.

In 1978, Anne and Stan gave birth to a son, Christopher. A year later,
the couple quit drinking. In 1988, the family moved to New Orleans.
Anne was now the toast of her hometown. She threw huge parties. Fans
stood outside the gates of her Greek Revival townhouse waiting for
autographs and pictures. Book sales soared. In a publicity stunt, Rice
dressed as a bride and posed in a casket.

Now affluent, Anne added to an extensive collection of dolls and began
new collections. Statues of the Catholic saints. Vestments. A library
of Catholic books. Her former assistant, Amy Troxler, believes that
Rice "still held a strong connection to her Catholic faith."

Reading Her Way Back to God
Public attention had its downside, and Rice admits she can be
withdrawn. To complete her novels, Rice had to escape into her room,
reading, thinking, writing, and meticulously researching.

In 1993, she says, she became interested in the first century and the
Jewish people. Rice recounts, "I remember thinking, 'This doesn't make
sense-how did the Jews survive? People don't survive these kinds of
things! Their cities [were] smashed. What really happened at the
beginning of Christianity?' "

She read obsessively: John A. T. Robinson, Augustine, D. A. Carson,
Jacob Neusner, Luke Timothy Johnson, Craig L. Blomberg. Slowly, the
historicity of the Resurrection became hard to deny. "Christianity
achieved what it did," she says, "because Jesus rose from the dead."

Rice had long conversations with Troxler, who had once studied to be a
nun. They read passages from the Bible to each other, as did Anne and
her sister Karen. Rice's questions intensified. "The Lord came looking
for me," she remembers. "Everywhere I turned, I found images of the
Lord and his love."

Rice spent a lot of time sitting cross-legged in her room, her back to
the bookcase, surrounded with books. Eventually, she says, "I read
myself right back into faith."

In 1998, she came to a crossroads. "I realized I didn't have to find
the answer to every question or know who was right on every issue. All
I had to do is to love and do my best. The rest he would help me work
out."

The tipping point for Rice was a longing to take Communion. Catholics
believe Christ is present in the sacraments-that they are his body
and his blood. Rice called Troxler, asking, "Will they take me back?"

Troxler assured her the answer was yes. Rice went to see a priest, to
whom she made her confession for two hours. She discussed her writing
in depth, her personal failings, and her hopes for a better life.
Although her husband Stan's atheism had not changed, he readily agreed
to be remarried in the Catholic church.

Making All Things New
Even before she returned to faith, Rice had pondered writing a novel
about Jesus. In 2002, she determined to do it. "I was in church,
talking to the Lord, saying, 'I want everything I do to be for you,' "
Rice remembers. "Then it hit me: 'It will be for you. All of it. Every
word.' "

So Rice turned her research skills-honed from decades of writing
historically based novels-to the New Testament. Rice decided to do
something truly radical: treat the New Testament accounts as history.
"Anyone can write a book about an off-the-wall Jesus, a magician.
That's easy," Rice says. "But if we really believe the angel came to
Mary, that there were shepherds, what was it like?

"It was more and more exciting to think about."

Coming at the subject fresh, Rice was shocked by the bias in some
quarters.

"I wasn't prepared for the cynicism or bias against Jesus in biblical
scholarship," Rice says. "I didn't know about the rancor in scholastic
circles. People have built entire careers on tearing the gospel to
pieces. I wasn't prepared for the degree of acid and vitriol ...
credentialed scholars from universities saying there was no Virgin
Birth or [Christ] never walked on water.

"I've studied a lot of history. Sound historians don't make statements
like this. But some New Testament scholars do."

As she researched the New Testament, Rice was particularly impressed by
N. T. Wright, the prolific bishop of Durham and the author of The
Resurrection of the Son of God.

"I was blown away by the fact that he accommodated all the skeptics and
did it with generosity," Rice says. "He referenced their books and
arguments and answered in his own brilliant, patient way and still
maintained that Jesus rose from the dead. I had dreamed of this sort of
scholarship."

But just as she began work on her new novel, Stan, her husband of 41
years, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He died in four months.
Writing about the life of Christ through Stan's illness and death
sustained her, Rice says.

She now had an open-ended contract with Knopf to write anything she
wanted, but she kept her topic a secret. Then, in 2004, Rice finally
showed some early pages of Christ the Lord to Wilson, who admits she
was "slightly apprehensive." However, when Wilson, who describes
herself as culturally Jewish, began reading, "Right away, I was amazed
at how she got me to a sense of time and place." "I loved the way she
dealt with the Jewishness of her character," Wilson says. "She was very
deliberate about that."

Christ the Lord tells the story of Jesus through first-person
narrative, drawing on the Bible, the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of
Thomas, and Catholic doctrine. Jesus is part of a large, warm extended
family (in the novel, Joseph was previously married and widowed, so
Rice's Jesus has half-siblings). The family is returning to Nazareth
after living in Egypt.

As with so many of Rice's gothic-novel characters, Jesus is human, yet
immortal, and an outsider with authority over life and death. Knopf has
ordered a massive first printing of 325,000 for the novel and booked
numerous media appearances. Rice plans to extend the series to three or
four books and make the Christ who has captivated her "real" to
readers.

Speaking about her spiritual journey from darkness to light, Rice
muses, "Milton talks about the 'fortunate fall.' The fall is so
fortunate because when we come back it is so wonderful ... the mystery
of it."

It's a big change for Rice-for some, too big to be believed. Rice
says she's hurt by critics on the internet: "Vicious attacks by those
who don't read my work ... who are as angry about Christianity as they
are about me."

Rice's own website, www.annerice.com, is a platform for everything from
impassioned updates on the needs of post-hurricane New Orleans to
Democratic politics and her views on controversial issues (her son,
Christopher, also a novelist, is homosexual, and Anne is "an advocate
for Christian and Jewish gays and their right to worship and to take
the sacraments").

To Christians who disagree with her views, Rice says, "Christians have
been arguing with each other for 2,000 years. ... What I hope for is
that we can love one another, no matter how much we disagree; that we
can embrace one another, no matter how tough the arguing becomes. ...
If we love, we can overcome much of what divides us as people."

About her previous subjects, Rice says, "I would never go back, not
even if they say, 'You will be financially ruined; you've got to write
another vampire book.' I would say no. I have no choice. I would be a
fool for all eternity to turn my back on God like that."

At the same time, Rice doesn't repudiate her earlier works, saying the
books are a record of her journey. Readers tell her some of her early
books pointed them back to faith, gave them courage, or helped them
through grief. This book, Rice says, is for everyone. Rice says, "My
attitude is, 'Let me put this in your hands-please. Just take a look
at it. This is about Jesus. It's for you.' "

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/012/11.50.html

Interview with a Penitent


How Anne Rice moved from fascination with vampires to renewed faith in
Christ.