Anne Rice’s first work of nonfiction—a powerful and haunting memoir that explores her continuing spiritual transformation.



Anne Rice was raised in New Orleans as the devout child in a deeply religious Irish Catholic family. Here, she describes how, as she grew up, she lost her belief in God, but not her desire for a meaningful life. She used her novels—beginning with Interview with a Vampire—to wrestle with otherworldly themes while in her own life, she experienced both loss (the death of her daughter and, later, her beloved husband, Stan Rice) and joys (the birth of her son, Christopher). And she writes about how, finally, after years of questioning, she experienced the intense conversion and re-embracing of her faith that lie behind her most recent novels about the life of Christ.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
** From Publishers Weekly
When Anne Rice stopped crafting stories about vampires and began writing about Jesus, many of her fans were shocked. This autobiographical spiritual memoir provides an account of how the author rediscovered and fully embraced her Catholic faith after decades as a self-proclaimed atheist. Rice begins with her childhood in New Orleans, when she seriously considered entering a convent. As she grows into a young adult she delves into concerns about faith, God and the Catholic Church that lead her away from religion. The author finally reclaims her Catholic faith in the late 1990s, describing it as a movement toward total surrender to God. She writes beautifully about how through clouds of doubt and pain she finds clarity, realizing how much she loved God and desired to surrender her being, including her writing talent, to God. Covering such a large sequence of time and life events is not easy, and some of the author's transitions are a bit jarring. Fans of Rice's earlier works will enjoy discovering more about her life and fascinating journey of faith. *(Oct. 7) *

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From Booklist
Rice gave faithful fans fits when she concluded her lengthy vampire saga with series hero Lestat searching for sainthood and followed up with carefully orthodox biographical novels about Jesus. Now she eloquently explains the life change that shaped those books: her return to Catholicism. First, however, she limns the early-life faith she hoped to resume and the long exile from it that began, so typically, in college and continued until late middle age. She expansively recalls the cohesion and beauty that regular mass attendance, Catholic schooling, and community observance of the panoply of Christian festivals bestowed on her New Orleans childhood and adolescence. Much more tersely but no less consequentially, she asserts the satisfaction of her thoroughly faithful 41-year marriage to the poet Stan Rice (1942–2002). About her long period of unbelief, she is even briefer, though she retrospectively interprets her vampires and witches as sad unbelievers still desperately striving for transcendence and grace, as she was. Coming home to New Orleans in 1989 preceded coming home to the church in 1996, and full realization of revived faith came with the decision to write for God. As plainly written as a Quaker spiritual journal, Rice’s confession of faith will impress many who wouldn’t think of reading vampire romances—and possibly many who read little else. --Ray Olson ( )

This book was quite different from what I had expected. It is the personal faith journey of the author most famously known for being the author of "Interview with the Vampire"

Anne Rice's journey from Atheism to Catholicism I expected to be focused on her struggles as an Atheist, but actually it focuses mostly on her childhood growing up in a pre-Vatican II Catholic Church.

Rice never seems to be what I would classify as a hard-core atheist, even if she herself did. I would only classify "Evangelical Atheists" not someone who took her vacations to visit churches and holy sites.

I was hoping for some data that would help me witness to my atheist friends, and I don't think any of that here is going to do so. The only ting I think that may be most helpful for me on this is "pray" and that it was much easier to come back to the church at the point in her life that she did, AFTER all of lives important moments (marriage, kids, etc.) so she didn't have to deal with the Churches hard teachings on sexuality, birth-control, etc.

There was a bunch of fairly interesting information about living in pre-vatican Catholicism.

It was certainly better than the previous Fiction writing that I had read by Rice (Out of Egypt) and it may be very interesting for fans of her more famous works (the Vampire Diaries series) ( )

Yep, thats what growing up RC in the 50s was like. ( )

I know Rice was trying to give the reader a feel for the Catholic church and her community as she was growing up, but I found those first chapters very dry and uninspiring. I did find some thought provoking ideas later in the book ( )

In this autobiography, Rice describes her upbringing in the Catholic religion, her subsequent renunciation and final reconciliation. What struck me in this book, is that Rice has always been profoundly religious, mystical even, but cannot envision faith outside of organized religion. She is an extremely sensorial being, responding to the stimuli of the church: paintings, music, colour and smells are all part of the religious experience. These are what makes her fiction so appealing - this constant call to the senses. She moves in the world very intuitively and seeks the guidance of a god to explain it - it's an appealing, albeit not very rational, way of explaining life and its experiences. I'm not sure this book is very convincing for non-believers, however, because Rice feels rather than thinks her surroundings. ( )