In the early 1980s, a small group of my mother’s readers attended one of her book signings in costume. It was the first time this had ever happened. The event was a sedate gathering in a small, warmly lit San Francisco bookstore. Outside, the surrounding concrete landscape of imposing civic buildings was seemingly a world away from lush, oak-filled New Orleans, the hometown Anne had rendered as a living, breathing character in the few novels she’d published by then, a place to which her name would later become inextricably linked.
The book being casually celebrated that night was a spectacular doorstop of a novel with impressionistic angels on the cover. “Cry to Heaven,” it was called, and it explored the lives of castrato opera singers in 18th-century Italy. Wine and cheese were served. No line formed at the signing table. A slow drip of artist friends and my father’s colleagues from San Francisco State University stopped by — nothing like the glittering seven-hour marathons that would come a few years later, where exhausted managers would keep their giant stores open well past closing time to accommodate the snaking line of bejeweled Goths eager to get the latest Vampire Chronicle signed.
Without warning, in walked a trio of handsome young men in 18th-century waistcoats, their thick ponytails tied off with ribbon. I was young, but I recognized their costumes. They were characters from my mother’s literary debut, published shortly before I was born. A book that haunted our lives like a pesky ghost — a critically reviled flop called “Interview With the Vampire.”
If that description seems harsh, rest assured it was my mother’s own assessment of the initial reception to “Interview,” which she shared on Facebook decades later. That night, as she posed for pictures with her handsome admirers, the atmosphere inside the store turned electric. Anne blushed. Her laughter took on a white-hot, unguarded quality. The first proud foot soldiers of a growing fandom had marched inside the rarefied air of a gussied-up literary party to which the guests had mostly been drawn by my father’s local celebrity as a poet.
Until then, Anne Rice had been viewed as a transgressive, not-quite popular author of lusty historical fiction who had been roundly scorned by critics after daring to write a vampire’s account of his long, immortal life with serious and probing literary consideration. The famous historical novelist James Michener had praised its audacity, but initial plaudits were few. These were the days when comparing a work of fiction to a comic book could erase its literary merit to most readers, and that’s exactly what The New York Times did to my mother’s first novel. Most of the unsold copies were pulped at the warehouse, a moment my mother would bitterly recall to the end of her life. Today, those who call “Interview With the Vampire” an “instant best seller” are carrying on a fiction as enduring as the novel itself.
But books can follow a twisty and unpredictable path to success. In the years after its disappointing publication, groups of marginalized readers gradually discovered “Interview With the Vampire.” By 1982, their collective passion was not only spreading, it was strong enough to inspire cosplay. That foggy San Francisco night was the first time it became clear to all of us that my mother’s debut was being transformed from a flop into a cult classic. The costumed men were proof — elegant caricatures of Louis and Lestat, stepping out of the wet gray evening in their silky garb.
A few days later, my family gathered around the kitchen table of our Edwardian home in the Castro District, studying the photos of my mother and her admirers with excited wonder. Yes, the men were striking. But the pictures felt hot to the touch for a different reason. They were evidence that Anne’s once-dismissed debut was gaining a second life, particularly among the dispossessed and outsiders — the queer, although the term was still very much a slur in those days.
Only recently did I remember how another character from “Interview” stepped out of the fog that evening, but in a more subtle and indirect way.
A trusted aunt had been my babysitter for the evening. She guided me through the store, introducing me to my parents’ old friends who were there — the poets, professors, sculptors and painters who’d filled their raucous parties in the Berkeley Hills before my birth. We came to one friend particularly known for his loose lips and love of alcohol. With a wild-eyed grin he chucked my chubby cheek. “He looks like Mouse!” he cried.
Suddenly my aunt was pushing me through a forest of grown-ups as he repeated the strange words in our wake.
I looked like a mouse? No sense in getting my feelings hurt, my aunt explained. Like so many of my parents’ friends, the guy was eccentric. The moment passed.
A few years later, it returned with clarity.
One day at my highly progressive elementary school, my classmates and I were learning how to make family trees. After one kid cracked a joke about how to include dead relatives, my teacher upbraided him for being insensitive. “After all,” she said, “Christopher had a sister who died.”
“I most certainly did not,” I answered with the prim officiousness of a precocious boy raised at the adults’ table by two liberal writers. I repeated the words with an insistence that brought my classmates to hysterics. “I most certainly did not.”
I wasn’t angry. My teacher was confused, that was all. But the wilting gravity in her expression told me I was wrong. In a moment, my entire world changed.
Mouse, as it turned out, had been my parents’ nickname for Michele, the daughter they’d lost shortly before I was born, a girl I still refer to as my sister with some struggle given I will never know for myself what her voice sounded like. Her enormous brown eyes earned her the nickname. For her first four years on earth, she was a radiant, doll-like little girl. Then one afternoon she walked into the kitchen and said, “Mommy, I’m too tired to play,” prompting my mother to gaze down at her with deepening dread. What 4-year-old is too tired to play?
Michele’s losing battle with leukemia cast my parents in the dark saga that gave birth to “Interview With the Vampire.” And so in a way, Claudia, the child vampire frozen in her youth who completes the tragic trio at the novel’s center, made an appearance at that San Francisco book signing as well, even if she didn’t come in costume.
Why did they keep the secret from me? Simply put, they’d lost one child to a blood-borne illness and been granted another beset by anxiety. They didn’t want to unleash the tragedy of what they’d endured on a son who could already hysterically imagine his bed was circled by sharks. But once I knew, they reacted with stunning generosity and candor. All the doors to their hidden past opened.
The crude drawings that hung on the walls of my father’s home office? They weren’t the work of a former neighbor’s child, as he’d once told me. My every question about Michele was answered with bracing, unguarded truth. What her voice sounded like, what foods she loved. (I don’t know how the child of a professor and a struggling writer managed to taste escargot, but it was one of her favorites.) The only barrier to my quest for information was my own hesitation to hear the quake of grief enter my mother’s voice or watch a wet sheen appear in my father’s eyes.
For years, I continued this halting interview of my parents about their defining tragedy, and for years my parents responded to every query with gentleness and honesty. If the interview had a climax, it came almost a decade after it began, when the three of us sat at a table outside a New Orleans restaurant. My mother’s success had allowed us to move there in 1988 when I was 10. Three years later I had worked up the nerve to ask the question that had plagued me from the beginning. “What happened the day she died?”
We’d visited many other parts of their journey by then.
I knew about the letters from leading cancer centers that said my sister’s case was hopeless. I knew that, at the doctor’s recommendation, my parents never gave Michele her exact diagnosis or prognosis, just the constant, gentle refrain that she was ill and needed care. I even knew about the blood bag that burst next to her hospital bed the night before she died, and the last words she’d said to my father when he’d promised they would clean it up. “For me, your baby,” she’d said softly.
But I didn’t know about that awful, final day.
And so they told me. They told me about the alarm that went off when her heartbeat dropped below a certain rate. They told me about the doctor who exhausted himself performing CPR before he said sadly, “We’re kidding ourselves here.” They told me about the light kiss goodbye my father gave her on the lips, only to be startled by the soft give of lifelessness that greeted it. And together, at a table on a leafy, sun-drenched New Orleans avenue, the three of us cried. We cried for Mouse. But I, in no small part, cried for my parents as well.
I didn’t know it then, but I could have found the answers I was looking for in their work as well. As an adult I would discover my father had enshrined every awful beat of my sister’s last night into a single, searing poem called “Incanto.”
Anne in her blue robe astonished, after two years, still, at the last moment, ASTONISHED.
My mother’s work was less overt. Memoir was not Anne’s passion. She adopted it as a form for the fictional accounts of her immortals, but she prided herself on transcending what she called the pedestrian details of experience. After I became a published author, she sometimes praised those aspects of my work in ways that came off as unintentionally condescending. “I could never write a book about going to high school,” she once told me with a proud smile. I’m still not sure whether she was more pleased about my having done just that, or about her own determination to refuse.
If “Interview With the Vampire” bears any trace of my sister’s illness, with its nightmarish hospital stays, brutal treatments and financial devastation (my parents were so broke by the end, Michele was buried without a headstone), they have been transposed by metaphor into elements as gilded as they are bloody.
Except for one.
The idea that Michele was behind the child vampire Claudia seems bracingly obvious to anyone who reads the book with Anne’s biography in mind. But the implication offended my mother for years.
Eventually, the scales fell from her eyes. Perspective allowed her to see what others had suggested: a beautiful golden-haired girl who can never physically age, and a psyche that undergoes the perpetual sophistication of immortality while trapped inside the infuriating confines of a child’s body. If these are not intentionally a metaphor for Michele herself, they were at least crafted by a mother’s grief, fueled by her desire to keep her daughter alive and growing even without a mature body in which to place her.
It’s also apparent that my mother’s loss blew open the wide expanse of her title character’s centuries of perspective on the world: his crushing guilt, his rage at death, his sometimes crippling despair over the predatory cycles that define earthly existence. Louis de Pointe du Lac struggles with profound questions about the human condition after a vampire’s bite converts him, condemning him to take life to survive. Anne too confronted rage and anguish and doubt after watching the most precious and vulnerable thing in her life waste away as she stood by helplessly — “astonished,” as my father wrote.
In 2021, my mother died of complications from a stroke at the age of 80. By then, she had published 37 novels and her success had turned her into a household name. The honor of caring for her estate passed to me and her dear friend Eric Shaw Quinn through our production company, Dinner Partners, which Anne helped us start. (She was the first guest on our first podcast episode.) Covid didn’t take Anne, but pandemic restrictions prevented us from having a large public service. Still, her passionate fans wanted a collective way to mourn. Over the next four years, Eric and I worked tirelessly to produce a celebration that would blend theater and an anthology of original documentary films to tell her story.
But what was the story of Anne?
There were the obvious threads that countless journalists had followed before. That she transformed the vampire novel by writing from the vampire’s perspective. That her portrait of two men attempting to raise a child together in a dark and hostile world that demands secrecy about their true nature was a groundbreaking representation of queerness. That the 1994 film adaptation of “Interview With the Vampire,” for which Anne wrote the screenplay, remains a horror classic, a time capsule from a bygone era in which lavish studio films tackled dark, sophisticated themes and were rewarded for it at the box office.
We would include those, for sure. But were any of them really the story of Anne herself? Of course, we knew Michele’s death would be the dark centerpiece. But Anne’s fans weren’t planning to travel to New Orleans and fill the Orpheum Theater because she’d lost a daughter. It was her response to that loss that would draw them from all over the world. Days before our event, as I struggled to find a central thesis for the speech I planned, it was Eric who offered one with simple clarity. “Your mother turned the worst thing that ever happened to her into the best thing that ever happened to her.”
That was it. The dominant theme of Anne’s life was not just her greatest loss, but how she endured it.
If the subsequent novels in the Vampire Chronicles tell the story of how Anne survived terrible loss, “Interview With the Vampire” gives us a story that captures the spiritual and psychological fundamentals of what she survived. Out of the agony of my sister’s death, she spun a world of love and rage, of family, blood and savage beauty, that had us all dancing until midnight in costumes ranging from the flowing silk to naked abandon, a feat only a remarkable few achieve during their lifetimes.
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