Anne Rice

Anne Rice
Anne Rice in 2006
Occupation	Novelist, Author
Genre	Gothic, Horror, Erotica, Christian fiction, Mystery, Romance, Fantasy
Website
http://www.annerice.com

Anne Rice (born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien; October 4, 1941) is a best-selling Southern American Postmodernist author of metaphysical gothic fiction, Christian literature and erotica from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history. She was married to poet and painter Stan Rice for 41 years until his death from brain cancer in 2002.

Biography

Early Life

Rice was born the second of four daughters of Irish Catholic parents, Howard O'Brien and Katherine "Kay" Allen O'Brien, in New Orleans. Rice's father worked for the U.S. Postal Service and authored the book, The Impulsive Imp, which was published posthumously. Rice's older sister, the late Alice Borchardt, was a noted genre author. Her husband, Stan Rice was a highly regarded poet, and their son, Christopher Rice is a bestselling author.

Rice's early years were marked by coping with her mother's advancing alcoholism and poverty. She lived in the Irish Channel of New Orleans, which she describes as an Irish Catholic ghetto, in the rented home of her maternal grandmother, Alice Allen, known as "Mamma Allen," at 2301 St. Charles Avenue. Mamma Allen, a hard working, Irish Catholic woman, who worked as a domestic after she separated from her alcoholic husband, was an important early influence in Rice's life, keeping the family and household together while Rice's mother sank deeper into alcoholism. She died in 1949, but the O'Brien's remained in her home until 1956, when they moved to 2524 St. Charles Avenue, a former rectory, convent, and school owned by the parish, to be closer to the church and support for her mother's advanced alcoholism.

About her unusual given name, Rice said: "Well, my birth name is Howard Allen because apparently my mother thought it was a good idea to name me Howard. My father's name was Howard, she wanted to name me after Howard, and she thought it was a very interesting thing to do. She was a bit of a Bohemian, a bit of mad woman, a bit of a genius, and a great deal of a great teacher. And she had the idea that naming a woman Howard was going to give that woman an unusual advantage in the world." However, in Rice's official biography, Prism of the Night, her father claimed to be the source of her birth name: "Thinking back to the days when his own name had been associated with girls, and perhaps in an effort to give it away, Howard named the little girl Howard Allen Frances O'Brien." Rice became "Anne" on her first day of school, when a nun asked her what her name was. She told the nun "Anne," which she considered a pretty name. Her mother, who was with her, let it go without correcting her, knowing how self-conscious her daughter was of her real name. From that day on, everyone she knew addressed her as "Anne." Rice was confirmed in the Catholic Church when she was twelve years old and became Howard Allen Frances Alphonsus Liguori O'Brien, adding the names of a saint and of an aunt, who was a nun. "I was honored to have my aunt's name, but it was my burden and joy as a child to have strange names."

Rice spent most of her childhood and teenage years in New Orleans, which forms the background against which most of her stories take place. Rice's mother died of alcoholism when she was fourteen years old. Soon after her mother's death, Rice's father placed her and two sisters in St. Joseph's Academy. Rice described St. Joseph's as "something out of Jane Eyre . . . a dilapidated, awful, medieval type of place. I really hated it and wanted to leave. I felt betrayed by my father."

In November, 1957, her father married Dorothy Van Bever, a divorced Baptist, and, in 1958, when Rice was 16, he moved the family to north Texas, purchasing their first home in Richardson. Rice met her future husband, Stan Rice, in a journalism class while they were both students at Richardson High School.

San Francisco and Berkeley

Rice graduated from Richardson High School in 1959, completed her freshman year at Texas Woman's University in Denton and transferred to North Texas State College for her sophomore year, but dropped out when she ran out of money and could not find a job. She decided to move to San Francisco, and got permission from her friend, Dennis Percy, to stay with his family until she found work as an insurance claims processor. She persuaded her college roommate from Texas Woman's University, Ginny Mathis, to join her, and they found an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district. Mathis found a job at the same insurance company. Soon after, they began taking night courses at University of San Francisco, an all-male Jesuit school that allowed women to take night courses. Rice returned home for Easter vacation and rekindled her relationship with Stan Rice. After her return to San Francisco, Stan Rice came for a week-long visit when school was over in June. He returned to Texas, Rice moved back in with the Percy's, and Mathis left San Francisco in August to enroll in a nursing program in Oklahoma. Rice continued living with the Percys and working at the insurance company. She received a special delivery letter from Stan Rice asking her to marry him. They married on October 14, 1961, in Denton, soon after she turned 20 years old, and he was just weeks from his nineteenth birthday.

The Rice's moved back to San Francisco in 1962, experiencing the birth of the Hippie Revolution first hand as they lived in the soon to be fabled Haight-Ashbury district, Berkeley, and later the Castro District. "I'm a totally conservative person," she later told The New York Times (November 7, 1988). "In the middle of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, I was typing away while everybody was dropping acid and smoking grass. I was known as my own square." Rice attended San Francisco State University and obtained a B.A. in Political Science in 1964 and an M.A. in Creative Writing in 1972. Rice interrupted her graduate studies at SFSU to become a Ph.D. candidate at Berkeley, but became disenchanted with the emphasis on literary criticism and the language requirements. She returned to San Francisco State in 1970 to finish her master's degree in Creative Writing. Stan Rice became an instructor at San Francisco State shortly after receiving his M.A. in Creative Writing from SFSU, and later chaired the Creative Writing department before retiring in 1988. Rice's daughter Michele, nicknamed "Mouse", was born on September 21, 1966. In 1970, while Rice was in the graduate program, her daughter was diagnosed with acute granuleucytic leukemia. Rice had a prophetic dream, months before her daughter became ill, that her daughter was dying from "something wrong with her blood." On August 5, 1972, Rice's daughter died of leukemia at Stanford Children's Hospital in Palo Alto.

In 1973, while she was still grieving the loss of her daughter, Rice took a previously written short story and turned it into her first bestselling novel, Interview with the Vampire. Many believe that Rice created the child vampire, Claudia, in the novel to help her overcome the loss of her daughter. After completing the novel and following many rejections of it, Rice developed Obsessive–compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). Rice was obsessed with germs, thinking that she contaminated everything she touched, engaged in frequent and obsessive hand washing and obsessively checked locks on windows and doors. Of this period, Rice says, "What you see when you're in this state is every single flaw in our hygiene and you can't control it and you go crazy."

In August, 1974, after a year of therapy for her OCPD, Rice attended a writer's conference at Squaw Valley, conducted by Ray Nelson, where she met her literary agent, Phyllis Seidel. In October 1974, Seidel sold Interview with the Vampire to Alfred A. Knopf for a $12,000 advance of the hardcover rights. Most new authors were receiving $2000 advances. Interview with the Vampire was published in May, 1976. In 1977, the Rice's traveled in Europe and Egypt for the first time.

Rice's son Christopher was born in Berkeley, California in 1978 and is a best selling author. In the summer of 1979, Rice, an admitted alcoholic, and her husband, Stan Rice, quit drinking so their son would not have the life that she had as a child.

Following Interview with the Vampire, while living in California, Rice wrote two historical novels, Feast of All Saints and Cry to Heaven, along with three erotic novels under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure (The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment, and Beauty's Release) and two more under the pseudonym of Anne Rampling (Exit to Eden and Belinda). Rice then returned to the vampire metaphor with her best selling novels The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned.

New Orleans

Anne Rice residence, 1239 First St., New Orleans. Inspiration for Mayfair Manor, home of the Mayfair Witches

In July, 1988, following the success of The Vampire Lestat and with Queen of the Damned about to be published, the Rice's purchased a second home in New Orleans. Stan Rice took a leave of absence from his teaching, and the Rice's moved to New Orleans. Within months, they decided to make it their permanent home. In New Orleans, Rice felt whole again and wrote The Witching Hour as an expression of her joy of coming home. In New Orleans, Rice continued her popular Vampire Chronicles series, which now includes over a dozen novels, three novels in the Lives of the Mayfair Witches series, and Violin, a tale of a ghostly haunting.

Return to Roman Catholicism

Rice returned to the Catholic Church in 1998 after decades of describing herself as an "atheist." On December 14, 1998, Rice went into a coma, nearly dying, and was diagnosed with Diabetes mellitus type 1. Rice is a brittle diabetic and insulin-dependent. In 2003, following the recommendation of her husband and shortly after his death, Rice underwent gastric bypass surgery and shed 103 pounds.

In 2004, Rice nearly died again from an intestinal blockage or bowel obstruction, a common complication of gastric bypass surgery. In 2005, Newsweek reported, "[Rice] came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at 18." Her return did not come with a full embrace of the Church's stances on social issues; Rice remains a vocal supporter of equality for gay men and lesbians (including marriage rights), as well as abortion rights and birth control. Rice has written extensively on these matters. In October, 2005, while promoting her book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, she announced in Newsweek that she would now use her life and talent of writing to glorify her belief in God, but did not renounce her earlier works.

In the Author's Note from Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Rice states:

I had experienced an old fashioned, strict Roman Catholic childhood in the 1940s and 1950s… 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 on good and evil—these things were imprinted on my soul forever…

I left this church at age 18... I wanted to know what was happening, why so many seemingly good people didn’t believe in any organized religion yet cared passionately about their behavior and value of their lives… I broke with the church violently and totally... I wrote many novels that without my being aware of it reflected my quest for meaning in a world without God."

In her memoir Called Out of Darkness, Rice also states:

In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from [God] for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I’d been, all of my life, missing the entire point. No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him. The reason? It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened; He knew the disposition of every single soul. He wasn’t going to let anything happen by accident! Nobody was going to go to Hell by mistake."

Rice calls Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, published in 2005, the beginning of a series chronicling the life of Jesus. The second volume, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, was published in March 2008. The third book [christ the lord: kingdom of heaven] in the series has been postponed.

Leaving New Orleans

On January 18, 2004, Rice announced her plans to leave New Orleans to her fans on her website. She cited living alone since the death of her husband and her son moving to California as the reasons for her move. On January 30, 2004, Rice put the largest of her three homes up for sale and moved to a gated community in Kenner, Louisiana. Rice lived in the Garden District of New Orleans, also the home of multi-millionaire Rosemary and Stephen Ellis, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and Delta Burke. "Simplifying my life, not owning so much, that's the chief goal", said Rice. "I'll no longer be a citizen of New Orleans in the true sense." She sold her New York City condominium on January 20, 2005. In 2005, after completing Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Rice left New Orleans. She left prior to the events of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. None of her former New Orleans properties were flooded. However, she remains a vocal advocate for the city and related relief projects.

California Desert

After leaving New Orleans, Rice settled first in La Jolla, CA. Rice remained in La Jolla less than a year, stating in January, 2006 that the weather was too cold. However, in November, 2005, she described the weather in La Jolla as "like heaven." Rice purchased a six bedroom home in Rancho Mirage, California on 12/29/2005, allowing her to be closer to her son, who lives in Los Angeles. In Rancho Mirage, Rice wrote Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, Angel Time and Of Love and Evil (the first two books in her Songs of the Seraphim series), and her memoir Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.

Renunciation of organized religion

On July 29, 2010, Rice publicly renounced her dedication to her Roman Catholic faith, while remaining committed to Christ, on her Facebook page:

"For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else."

A few hours later she added the following:

“In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”

She reaffirmed her faith in Christ with a stance of non-adherence to organized Christianity an hour or so later:

"My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become."

Subsequently, in an interview, Rice further clarified her statements:

My commitment to Christ remains at the heart and center of my life. Transformation in Him is radical and ongoing. That I feel now that I am called to be an outsider for Him, to step away from the words, "Christian" and "Christianity" is something that my conscience demands of me. I feel that my faith in Him demands this of me. I know of no other way to express how I must remove myself from those things which seek to separate me from Him.

A media frenzy ensued with newspaper reporters, Internet bloggers, radio and t.v. commentators and news reporters around the world commenting about and interviewing Rice. In an August 7, 2010 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Rice elaborated on her view regarding being a member of a Christian church: "I feel much more morally comfortable walking away from organized religion. I respect that there are all kinds of denominations and all kinds of churches, but it's the entire controversy, the entire conversation that I need to walk away from right now." In response to the question, "[H]ow do you follow Christ without a church?" Rice replied: "I think the basic ritual is simply prayer. It's talking to God, putting things in the hands of God, trusting that you're living in God's world and praying for God's guidance. And being absolutely faithful to the core principles of Jesus' teachings. I loved it.

Literary style

Rice is best known for writing in the gothic genre of literature. However, unlike her inspiration, Charles Dickens, her focus is not on social commentary, but on metaphysical explorations of reality and being, using the metaphors of vampires, witches, ghosts, angels, divine beings and even fairy tale characters. Like Dickens, Rice elaborately paints the settings for her books as "characters," most notably New Orleans. Rice writes in the postmodernist tradition, moving beyond race, gender, and sexuality, to explore the essential truths of existence. While critics of Rice's writing style have described her work as purple prose, florid, and very dark, her works have gained academic acceptance and are now being taught in high schools, college and university literature and philosophy courses, and are the subject of graduate thesis papers. Her popular success has spawned a proliferation of the vampire genre, but not within the literary and philosophical traditions in which she writes.

Amazon.com reviews

On Amazon.com, Rice has written reviews on some of her favorite artists, recordings, books and films. On September 6, 2004, Rice posted a reply to a number of negative reviews that had appeared on Amazon.com regarding Blood Canticle, entitled "From the Author to the Some of the Negative Voices Here." This post was considered by some members of the writing community to be bitter, angry and aggressive. Many previous reviews had criticized the quality of writing in Blood Canticle as lazy or shoddy; when Rice replied by writing an article, the incident became fodder for weblogs and Internet sites. Following this incident, whether at the author's request or at Amazon's own volition, the comment and several others were later removed. Rice's own discussion on the incident is available on her website

Adaptations

Film

In 1994, Neil Jordan directed a motion picture adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, from Rice's own screenplay. The movie starred Tom Cruise as Lestat, Brad Pitt as the guilt-ridden Louis and was a breakout role for young Kirsten Dunst as the deceitful child vampire Claudia.

A second film adaptation, Queen of the Damned, was released in February 2002. Starring Stuart Townsend as the vampire Lestat and singer Aaliyah as Akasha, Queen of the Vampires, the movie combined incidents from the second and third books in the series: The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. Produced on a budget of $35 million, the film only recouped $30 million at the domestic(US) box office.

A 1994 film titled Exit to Eden, based loosely on the book Rice published as Anne Rampling, starred Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd. The work was transformed from a love story into a police comedy, possibly due to the explicit S&M themes of the book. The film was a box-office failure, and Rice publicly dissociated herself from it.

A film version of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt was planned but later cancelled.

Television

In 1997, Rice wrote a television pilot entitled Rag and Bone starring Dean Cain and Robert Patrick, which featured many of the common themes of her work.

The Feast of All Saints was made into a miniseries in 2001 by director Peter Medak.

Plans to adapt Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy into a twelve-hour miniseries to be aired on NBC were dropped after a change of studio head and subsequent loss of interest in the project.

Theatre

In 1997, a ballet adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, premiered in Prague.

On April 25, 2006, the musical Lestat, based on Rice's Vampire Chronicles books, opened at the Palace Theatre on Broadway after having its world premiere in San Francisco, California in December 2005. With music by Elton John and lyrics by Bernie Taupin, it was the inaugural production of the newly established Warner Brothers Theatre Ventures. Despite Rice's own overwhelming approval and praise, the show received mostly poor reviews by critics and disappointing attendance. Lestat closed a month later on May 28, 2006, after just 33 previews and 39 regular performances.

Comics

Anne Rice's books have been adapted over the years into comics. Below is a list of known adaptations and issue runs; along with publisher and year.

• Anne Rice's The Mummy or Ramses the Damned #1-12 by Millennium Comics (1990)
• Anne Rice's Interview with the vampire #1-12 by Innovation Comics (1992)
• Anne Rice's Queen of the Damned #1-11 (#12 was never published) by Innovation Comics (1991)
• Anne Rice's The Tale of the Body Thief #1-4 (#'s 5-12 were never published) by Sicilian Dragon (1999)
• Anne Rice's The Vampire Companion #1-3 by Innovation Comics (1991)
• Anne Rice's The Master of Rampling Gate (one shot) by Innovation Comics (1991)
• Anne Rice's Vampire Lestat #1-14 by Innovation Comics (1990)
• Anne Rice's The Witching Hour #1-5 by Millennium Publishing (1992)

Fan fiction

Rice has an adamant stance against fan fiction based on her work, releasing a statement on April 7, 2000, that prohibited all such efforts. This caused the removal of thousands of fanfics from fan websites.

Music

Cradle of Filth briefly includes Lestat in the song "Libertina Grimm" as "Count Lestat", and also in their original album The Principle of Evil Made Flesh in the song "Eve the Art of Witchcraft" where they mention the Savage Garden.

Guitarist Steve Vai states in liner notes for his 2002 album, The Elusive Light and Sound, volume 1, that his song "Loveblood" was inspired by the film and the fact that he wished he was an actor so he could play the role.

Alternative rock band Concrete Blonde's song "Bloodletting (the Vampire Song)", the title track from the Bloodletting CD, is based on Rice's The Vampire Lestat.

Sting released a song on the album The Dream of the Blue Turtles entitled "Moon Over Bourbon Street", after reading Interview with the Vampire.

The Australian pop band Savage Garden found their name in The Vampire Lestat, in which Lestat describes the world as "the savage garden."

Swedish heavy metal band Tad Morose recorded a song entitled "Servant of the Bones" about the book of the same name on their 2000 album Undead.

The metalcore band Atreyu declares in the song "The Crimson", "I'm an Anne Rice novel come to life."

Punk/goth band The Damned recorded a song called "The Dog" about the child vampire Claudia from Interview with the Vampire on their 1982 album Strawberries.

The Italian band Theatres des Vampires is named after a location featured in several books of The Vampire Chronicles. Their 1999 album is called The Vampire Chronicles.

Malice Mizer, a Japanese Visual Kei rock band, uses the phrase "Drink from me and live forever" in their song "Transylvania." "Drink from me and live forever" is a phrase from the first book Interview With the Vampire.

Mexican band Santa Sabina dedicates a song to Rice's vampire character Louis: "Una canción para Louis."

Psytrance project Talamasca was named after the secret society in both the Vampire chronicles and the Mayfair Witches series. This is a solo project by the French musician Cedric Dassulle, who also calls himself DJ Lestat.

Japanese visual kei metal band Versailles first album, Noble, is subtitled "Vampires Chronicle." Furthermore, the sixth song is entitled "After Cloudia", insinuating a relationship with Claudia from the series. The lead singer, Kamijo has stated he models himself after Rice's character, Lestat de Lioncourt.

American rock singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks mentions Anne Rice in her 2011 song, "New Orleans," from the album "In Your Dreams." The song, detailing Nick's wish to travel back to New Orleans and experience the many marvels of the city and Mardi Gras, says alternately "I want to brush by Anne Rice" and "I want to brush by the vampires".

Bibliography

The Vampire Chronicles

• Interview with the Vampire (1976)
• The Vampire Lestat (1985)
• The Queen of the Damned (1988)
• The Tale of the Body Thief (1992)
• Memnoch the Devil (1995)
• The Vampire Armand (1998)
• Merrick (2000)
• Blood and Gold (2001)
• Blackwood Farm (2002)
• Blood Canticle (2003)

New Tales of the Vampires

• Pandora (1998)
• Vittorio the Vampire (1999)

The Lives of the Mayfair Witches

• The Witching Hour (1990)
• Lasher (1993)
• Taltos (1994)

Vampire/Mayfair crossover

In these novels the Mayfair Witches become part of the Vampire Chronicles world.

• Merrick (2000)
• Blackwood Farm (2002)
• Blood Canticle (2003)

The Life of Christ

• Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2005)
• Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (2008)
• Christ the Lord: The Kingdom of Heaven (date not announced)

Songs of the Seraphim

• Angel Time (October 2009)
• Of Love and Evil (November 30, 2010)

Miscellaneous novels

• The Feast of All Saints (1979)
• Cry to Heaven (1982)
• The Mummy (1989)
• Servant of the Bones (1996)
• Violin (1997)
• Born for Atlantis (novel) (2012)

Short fiction

• October 4, 1948 (1965)
• Nicholas and Jean (first ch. 1966)
• The Master of Rampling Gate (Vampire Short Story) (1982)

Non-fiction

• Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession (2008) (autobiographical)

Under the pseudonym Anne Rampling

• Exit to Eden (1985)
• Belinda (1986)

Under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure

• The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)
• Beauty's Punishment (1984)
• Beauty's Release (1985)

Biographies

• Prism of the Night by Katherine Ramsland. New York, Dutton, Penguin Group, 1991 ISBN 0-525-93370-0

See also

• List of bestselling novels in the United States
• List of best-selling fiction authors

External links

• Anne Rice's official website
• Anne Rice's spiritual journey site
• Works by Anne Rice at Open Library