Product Description

Anne Rice has written twenty-eight novels - magnificent tales of other worldly beings, novels set centuries ago and in contemporary times, that explore the realms of good and evil, love and alienation, pageantry and ritual: each a reflection of her own moral journey. Now, in her powerful, haunting memoir - her first work of non-fiction - she writes about her own life as a Catholic. She begins with her New Orleans childhood, in the 1940s and 1950s, where in a vivid world of the senses, of ritual and devotion, her faith was formed. In adolescence, in the shadow of her mother's drinking and slow death, and against a backdrop of Haight-Ashbury and radical Berkeley in the late 1960s, she slowly lost her belief in God but still felt that life had to be conscientious and meaningful.She married her highschool sweetheart and wrote "Interview with the Vampire", a lament for her lost faith. It was the tragic death of her young daughter which turned her into a writer; and the birth of her son, Christopher, that saved her from taking the same road as her mother. Rice describes a Damascene moment in Rio de Janeiro, and how, after thirty-eight years as an atheist, she turned back to Christ, not in blind faith but in a profound transcendental surrender made with open eyes to an all-knowing God, encompassing knowledge, beauty and science. Hers is a faith which has survived even in the face of her husband's subsequent death from cancer, and the divisive nature of contemporary religious debate. This is a spiritual confession that is a celebration; that moves towards a full commitment to Christ, rooted in the words of the Gospel of Matthew: 'Love your enemies'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46784 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Review
'fair-minded and thoughtful...Rice has not quite given up on shock' --Times Literary Supplement

The Financial Times
`Rice's book will satisfy readers' curiosity about her path to authorship and the impulse behind some of her best-known works'

About the Author
Anne Rice is the author of many internationally bestselling books, most recently Christ the Lord Road to Cana, the second volume in her life of Christ. She came to international fame for 'The Vampire Chronicles', which include Interview with the Vampire (filmed by Neil Jordan, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt), The Tale of the Body Thief and the latest volume Blood Canticle. Her other fiction includes the shorter vampire novels, Pandora and Vittorio the Vampire, as well as The Witching Hour, Lasher, The Mummy, The Feast of All Saints and Cry to Heaven. She was born in New Orleans, where she lived for many years, and now lives in Rancho Mirage, California.

Customer Reviews

Cream of Rice.
Anne Rice, the prolific and world renowned author of twenty-eight titles including the sprawling 'The Vampire Chronicles' series of novels including the highly acclaimed 'Interview With A Vampire'. A novel that expressed the authors lament for her lost faith.
Rice here in this volume presents her 'spiritual autobiography'. A journey that moves from an enchanted cotton-wool world of devout childhood Catholicism in New Orleans through to the cynicism of thirty-eight years of the radical athiesm of her adult years. An atheism triggered and fed by both personal tragedy and the radical socio-cultural changes of the nineteen-sixties; of Haight-Ashbury, 'The summer of love' and 'Liberal' Berkeley- "Atheism was reality, and one could not turn away from that reality..". To the "Christ haunted" period of the nineteen-nineties a period of study, reasoning and experience through which her loss of faith in "the absurd" and "nothingness" fell away and cumulated in the Damascene experience in Rio de Janeiro; "The moment was beyond any rational description", which brought her back to a vital faith in the living Christ and Roman Catholicism ("I wasn't really 'born again' in Christ,so much as I was home again and safe in Christ..") . A faith which has inspired a new series of novels, a fictionalised account of the life of Jesus called: 'Christ the Lord'.And more importantly, a new way of being in the world that can only be brought about by the realisation of God-conciousness. This, Anne Rice's account of that attainement is graceful, beautifully written and profoundly moving. Highly recommended.

I don't want to believe..
I find it sad how Anne Rice's work has gone from genius to mundane - well written still, but hugely dull, and I was saddened that she has rediscovered her invisible friend, and embraced a religion whose beliefs consign her own son to hell. I can only think that Stan's death affected her so profoundly that, like many bereaved, the only comfort they have is in some mythical reunion with the departed (though not - eventually - with the talented Christopher Rice I assume); but her own mythology was inifinitely more interesting.
I will love her for all her work to Blood and Gold; they more than compensate for her later output.
A real shame.

excellent insight
Absolutely critical insight into Rice's spiritual evolution through lifelong struggles with the big questions whilst dealing with deep personal tragedy. She has lived through intense personal pain yet has navigated her own pathway, much of it expressed through her fictional world. It is surely a natural progression for her to undertake a biographical series on Christ, and I eagerly await where her mind will take her next in the new found energy her imagination has.