Chapter Seventy-One
Anne Rice and Christopher Rice
Blood Bond
If you try to envision the family tree of mother-and-son bestsellers Anne and Christopher Rice, it might seem fitting to picture, say, a live oak—one of those great, gorgeous Southern behemoths they both grew up under in New Orleans, the same moss-draped giants that occasionally populate their novels.
But if you were to envision their lives as writers, they might seem to have come from different seeds entirely. Consider:
Anne’s initial subject matter: Vampires. Erotica. Christopher’s: Crime. Gritty mystery.
Her writing style: Elaborate, ornate, philosophical. His: Stark, unembellished, masculine.
Her first book: the iconic Interview with the Vampire, published when she was an unknown thirty-four-year-old. His: the best-selling A Density of Souls, published when he was a known twenty-two-year-old. Neither had an easy start, and their writing lives began—and evolved—quite differently.
Anne was born in New Orleans. (Her father, Howard O’Brien, also wrote some fiction.) Anne moved West, and along the way married the poet Stan Rice. Her defining moment as an author came when she was in the Ph.D. track at the University of California, Berkeley, and found herself alienated within the program and bored with an essay she was reading on Stendhal. “I thought, I really want to be a writer—not study other writers,” she recalls.
She switched to a master’s in creative writing. And then her life changed: The year she graduated, 1972, her five-year-old daughter died of leukemia. In an often-told story, Anne retreated to her writing. The eventual result: Interview with the Vampire. She met her agent at the Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference, and the book sold and was later released in 1976.
Christopher was born two years later. He attended Brown University and the Tisch School of the Arts but left to take a crack at screenwriting. He “joined the family business,” as Anne says, when he wrote A Density of Souls. He showed it to his father, who said the book would change his life. Stan was right—Anne sent it to her agent, and it launched Christopher’s writing career.
Christopher is often branded “the son of Anne Rice,” but that hasn’t stopped him from writing critically-lauded books. He’s also often pegged simply as a “gay writer” (despite the fact that some of his protagonists have been both straight and female), but that hasn’t stopped him from achieving mainstream success. All of his subsequent thrillers—The Snow Garden, Light Before Day (which Lee Child deemed a “book of the year”), Blind Fall, and The Moonlit Earth—went on to become hits. He had four bestsellers by the age of thirty.
As for Anne, she moved home in the 1980s and became a legend of New Orleans, and over the years she followed Interview with eleven more vampire novels, the Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy, pseudonymously-penned erotica (the Sleeping Beauty Trilogy), and other books. To date, she has sold more than 100 million copies of her work. (Along the way she even helped her sister, the late Alice Borchardt, launch her own historical fiction/paranormal writing career.)
In the late 1990s, Anne made a much-publicized return to the Roman Catholic Church and said she’d dedicate all of her future writing output to God. She released two novels in her Christ the Lord series in 2005 and 2008, but had an equally much-publicized withdraw from the church in 2010.
Regardless of her beliefs, Anne’s impact on modern fiction—especially when it comes to the supernatural genre—is deep and undeniable. Following the death of her husband, she left New Orleans in 2005, partly to be closer to Christopher. The two now each reside in California. Writer’s Digest met up with them in New York at ThrillerFest 2013, where Anne was accepting the award of ThrillerMaster—the International Thriller Writer’s lifetime achievement honor.
In person, as on the page, Anne and Christopher might seem as different as they come.
But on that family tree, on that live oak, all the branches trace back to the same massive, unshakable base, that deep-seated root system that includes Howard, Stan, Alice, all of them. They’re writers. They’re family.
And Anne’s and Christopher’s branches have, after all, finally intertwined: For the first time, mother and son are sharing a release date. In October 2013, Anne returned with a new supernatural novel—The Wolves of Midwinter, the sequel to her 2012 werewolf bestseller The Wolf Gift—and Christopher released his first, The Heavens Rise.
On the following pages, they discuss what led them to this intersection—and the importance of following your own path in the writing world.
Christopher, you’ve previously said you would never touch the supernatural, and Anne, you’ve said you would never go back to it. [Laughter.] What changed?
Anne: Well, that’s really kind of a long story. I did at one point say I would never go back to the despairing, dark supernatural novels that I [wrote], and I don’t know that I ever will. I think any supernatural novels that I write now will not be dark and despairing. And I don’t think The Wolf Gift and The Wolves of Midwinter are dark and despairing. They’re much more upbeat; it’s a different tone, so I like to believe I’m being faithful to what I said, and I’m doing something new. And you can see from the responses that some people don’t care for The Wolf Gift and my new hero, Reuben, because they want the more dark, troubled, despairing heroes that I wrote about in the past. But I’m loving [the series].
Also, another thing happened. Werewolves were always off limits to me because my sister had written about them—Alice Borchardt—she’d written three different novels with werewolves, and we lost Alice in 2007, and about two years ago a friend, Jeff Eastin, the TV producer who does White Collar and Graceland, he actually suggested to me that I do a werewolf book. And for the first time I thought, Well, maybe I can do it; we’ve lost Alice, we have her books, and we’ll always have them, but she’s not working in that field anymore. She had never asked me, by the way, not to write about them—it was all in my brain that I wouldn’t. So I started thinking about it, and I started seeing a completely new approach to the material, and that’s why I went back. And frankly, I just wanted to go back. I mean, I love writing about the supernatural. Even when I was writing my books about Jesus Christ, they were really about the supernatural.
Christopher: I said for the first few years that I didn’t want to do anything supernatural, and then I began to come up with ideas for supernatural books and was actively discouraged from pursuing them by people in publishing. There was really a belief that I needed to assert myself as something more distinct from [my mother], and [as] a mystery and thriller writer. And I got sick of being told “No,” really, is what happened. The inception of The Heavens Rise had to do with this character Niquette Delongpre, who I knew was missing, who I knew cast this shadow over everyone who had loved her and cared about her, and I couldn’t figure out in a real-world setting: What was it about her that had led her to go? I mean, was she a drug addict? I’d written so many stories about drug addicts at that point, I was just tired of it. And then it clicked: She’s got a gift. She’s got a supernatural ability that she doesn’t want to reveal to the world around her, and so she’s living in shadows and isolation. And the story began to catch fire. It was related to character for me, more than anything else. But I think all of the supernatural ideas that I’m interested in pursuing are pretty down here on earth. They’re pretty muddy, if you get the term. The focus is definitely on the human characters contending with the intrusion of a supernatural force into their ordinary world.
If you had to pinpoint one key that differentiates good supernatural writing from bad supernatural writing, what would it be?
Anne: One has to write about the details pertaining to the supernatural as precisely and realistically as one writes about the details about ordinary life. The ordinary and the extraordinary have to be written with the same attention to detail. That’s what makes good supernatural writing. You can’t suddenly change your writing to something airy and lofty-sounding when you confront the vampire or the witch or so forth; you have to describe that person just as meticulously and scrupulously so that the whole thing has the feeling of reality. Because that’s the way I see it and feel it—as reality. But when I approach other people’s writing and I see a sudden shift, you know, it’s like a gauzy filter has gone over the camera lens because the supernatural character’s on the stage. It’s not convincing.
Christopher: They say a similar thing about action scenes in thrillers that aren’t supernatural—that you have to be as literal and as descriptive as you would be of anything else in the book, and that the temptation is to make the language florid and over the top in those moments. Your commitment is to display, you know, to bring the reader in. I think that’s an important element, too. It’s absolute commitment, is what I think she just described. Absolute commitment.
Anne: That’s it, yeah—absolute commitment. The supernatural is as real to me as anything else in the novel.
Looking at your bodies of work, you’ve both moved around to different genres. Do you think it’s good for a writer to play in different genre sandboxes?
Christopher: Well, your publisher never wants you to play in different sandboxes. That’s the thing: They have a track for you that they think they’ve figured out in advance. And there are great stories of writers—like Ken Follett, being told Pillars of the Earth was a terrible idea, and he should never do it, and then he goes and he does it and it’s a great idea. I think you could tell the same story about [Anne’s] first Christ the Lord book—
Anne: Oh yeah, yeah. But one thing about [my publisher Alfred A.] Knopf, is they’ve always prided themselves on publishing distinguished voices, and they would never say, “Don’t do what you want to do.” It might enter into business negotiations with an agent—she might say, “There will be more money on the table if you agree to do another vampire novel,” or something like that—but I mean, that’s the agent’s job, to talk like that. … You know, it was wonderful when I reached the point where they didn’t ask me for any pages. Because they’d never see it. I mean, you can give them the best idea in the world, [and they say], “Well, I don’t know, where are you gonna go with that?” When Interview with the Vampire was just a manuscript, I took it to a couple of writers’ groups where friends invited me just to sit in, and they read a chunk of it. And I remember them saying, “Well, I don’t know where you can go with this idea for three hundred pages—how are you going to ever sustain this?”
Christopher: At some point you have to say, “I’m the writer, it’s my job to figure out where I’m going to go with it,” you know? [Laughter.]
Anne: I don’t think we should discuss ideas. I think we should just write, and then go in with the book and say, “Here’s the book.” Now, sometimes you have to say something. But I wouldn’t listen to what they say back—because they’re not prophets. … Agents particularly are really not in the business of being prophetic. They know what has worked, and that’s it.
Christopher: Right. With The Heavens Rise, I went off and wrote it on my own, in large part because I had heard this. And it was the best course of action because I know along the way they would have said critical things that would have thrown me off my game.
Anne: You’ve got to protect your voice and your vision from everybody, really. Even the best-intentioned editors. And I mean, I love my editor; I’ve been with Vicky Wilson for over thirty-five years. She’s wonderful, and her remarks on the finished manuscript are always terrific. But I don’t go to her to discuss a germinating idea.
Christopher: You learn, as I think she’s describing, the ways in which different types of people in the business respond to writing. There’s a way that agents respond. … Then there’s a way that other writers respond, which is they’ll just tell you how they would have written it themselves. And if they’re a romance writer, their opinion of your horror novel isn’t going to be that helpful. But it’s not that you don’t necessarily engage those people, it’s just [that] you learn the filter by which you’re going to assess their feedback.
Anne, critics and readers have focused heavily on your religious shift and your shifts in subject matter. Do you think that’s something they should care about?
Anne: I think it’s caused a lot of confusion for my audience. I wish that I had never discussed my personal beliefs. I didn’t actually plan to; I went out with Christ the Lord in the marketplace and I found that the questions were inevitable—they were unavoidable. “Do you believe in him yourself?” And I ended up answering them, and with pleasure. But it was a mistake. Because really it’s nobody’s business what you believe. The book should stand on its own. …
In terms of craft advice, it’s constantly said that writers should write every day. Anne, I’ve read that you don’t.
Anne: I don’t think there’s any rule. I don’t write sometimes for months. Of course, I write e-mails every day. I write in my diary every day. I may not touch the manuscript at all, or anything pertaining to it. And I was discouraged very early in my college years by people who told me I wasn’t a real writer because I didn’t write every day. Things like that should not be said. And anybody who says anything to you like that, you have to ignore them. You know, there are no rules. Whether [or not] I hit the keyboard, I’m writing in my head. I’m working on my books all the time. I write best in short, intense periods. A period, say, of three or four months—very intense work. And then I draw back and I read, and I do other things. Again, I don’t think there’s any rule to any of this. It’s the greatest profession because you do it all in your own way.
Christopher: I think [writing every day is] a very limited piece of advice. I’m working on different things. I have an Internet radio show [“The Dinner Party Show”] that has forty-five minutes of scripted content, so when I go into the studio to record it, am I not writing? If you have a mono-focus on getting a specific novel out, or getting novel after novel after novel out, that’s fine, but what we consider writing—and I think if you really interrogate writers about this, what they consider writing, or part of their workday—is pretty inclusive. And it should be. You know, making yourself a slave to a daily word count is a bad thing, in my opinion. And I think you should be flexible with yourself because if you set the bar too high, you’ll have an experience like she described, feeling like, Well, I [didn’t] make it, I shouldn’t even try if I’m not going to hit these benchmarks.
Anne: People have been telling me ever since I can remember that I’m not a real writer. Sophomore in college, the teacher said the fact that I wrote on a typewriter meant that I wasn’t a real writer. [Laughter.] She said, “Real writers actually write with pen in hand.” [Laughter.] I’ve been told all my life that I was not a writer! I just marvel at it.
Christopher: So was James Lee Burke. James Lee Burke was told that his grammar was simply too bad.
At this stage in each of your careers, what do you find to be the hardest aspect of the craft?
Christopher: The isolation and the loneliness.
Anne: The voice. It’s really hard for me. I can see the whole novel and don’t know if I have to go in in first person or third person. That’s the biggest problem for me, is the beginning—getting into the story. I can see the whole thing. The whole shape, all the characters, what they’re doing, and I can’t seem to find a way to break in. And I rewrite the opening pages over and over and over again. It’s like OCD—it’s like hand washing. And finally I get so frustrated that I go and pick up something like The Godfather by Mario Puzo, which is great storytelling, but just any way he wants to do it. I mean, he may introduce Luca Brasi here, and never get to physically describing him until fifty pages later, to never get to telling who he really is until one hundred pages after that. And that clears up my OCD. Okay, just plunge—just start. Just go.
And so how do you know when you have it right? Is it just a feeling?
Anne: I force myself, finally. I just despair and say, “Okay”—
Christopher: But do you ever know? I never know. I just know when I haven’t stopped.
Anne: I know when it starts rolling, when I’ve got two or three hundred pages in, and it’s really rolling, and I know then that I’m not going to quit. But the first hundred pages are the hardest to complete without quitting.
What’s the biggest lesson of the craft that you’ve learned from each other?
Anne: I’ve been inspired from the beginning by Christopher’s ability to use the third person—to write in the third person and to write from the point of view of many different characters. I’m always trying to learn that because I always fall back on one point of view. It’s almost compulsive. And even in a book like The Witching Hour I only had a few points of view that I was working with, and then it would have to be for the whole chapter. But Christopher, that freedom to just range, and the characters’ reactions on both sides of a conversation, I really find that inspiring. …
And also, Christopher has a really great ability to write about what’s happening to him immediately. With me there was always quite a delay; several years had to pass before I could write about something, and there was always a symbolic remove—I might set the story in the eighteenth century. But he had this ability to just write about New Orleans, write about the high school he went to, write about college, write about the town, and I’m trying to learn from that.
Christopher: It’s her commitment and her fearlessness. It really is. It’s her absolute commitment that’s constantly, constantly inspiring, and her lack of cynicism in everything that she writes. And her ability to love her characters, which a lot of writers don’t have—it’s very easy to hate our own characters, and to punish them and to set them up to fail and all of that. And [her] incorporation of scholarship into an intricately constructed supernatural world.
All of the things that everyone else loves her for are the things that have inspired me as a writer. Obviously I know her as a mother as well, but the things that are extraordinary about her work are encouraging to me. And they’re encouraging to me even as I don’t seek to emulate her. They’re like counterbalances on what my instincts are. Like, don’t go for the cheap laugh line in this scene, go for the emotional core of what’s happening with these two people, even if they aren’t human. I think that’s incredibly inspiring. There’s the content side of it and then there’s the work ethic side of it. Even though she says things like she “hasn’t written for months,” her work ethic is incredible. She’s constantly engaged in a kind of study that feeds everything that she’s ever written. And there was always a sense that—well, I’ll put it this way: The number one piece of advice she gave me was, Write the book you want to read. And if you’re not writing the book you want to read—
Anne: Something’s wrong.
Christopher: Something’s wrong. Like, what’s your agenda, pal? Are you trying to win an award because you think it’ll make you look cool? And the reason her story overall is so inspiring is because it’s similar to so many other success stories, where everybody said, “What were you thinking?” I mean, when she went into writers’ workshops in the Bay Area in the 1970s and wanted to write about vampires, they thought she was crackers. And yet here she is, having reinvented this entire genre, with a whole issue of Entertainment Weekly full of contemporary vampire writers saying it’s all because of her—
Anne: They aren’t all saying that.
Christopher: They did. They totally did. It was like the Anne Rice issue. And yet, everybody along the way told her that it was a foolish endeavor. And I think that’s what’s inspiring. It gets back to that William Goldman line about the film industry: Nobody knows anything about what’s going to work. Nobody does. And so the only choices you have are to commit fully to what you love and what you are passionate about, and to that book that you want to read.
Christopher, what would you like to accomplish in your career before all is said and done?
Christopher: Well, I love the movie industry and I would still like to work in the movie industry, and I have some things that are developing on that front. … So there’s always that. But I’m not going to throw all my chips [in any] hat and wait fifteen years for something to get made. I feel very situated in the supernatural genre now. I have a lot of different stories I want to tell. I feel like a new doorway has opened. I feel like I did a lot of different things over the course of three really true detective mysteries, and I’m not saying I’ll never write a mystery again, but I think this is the beginning of something for me that excites me.
Anne, what do you want your legacy to be?
Anne: Oh, boy. All of the books I’ve written, I guess. You know, all of it. I go book by book, and I hope my best books are ahead of me. I want to keep going; I want to do a lot of different things. I think I’ve done as much erotica as I want to do, and I do want at some point to do a Christ the Lord book, the third one, to sort of finish the trilogy. But I think it’s going to be very difficult to do that, and it may be a very long time before I try it, and it may not happen. But, I’m just as excited about the next book as I ever was. I want to keep trying things and doing things. I want to write a lot more about ghosts.
Would you ever do more installments of your classic vampire series?
Anne: I wouldn’t say no to anything. …
Is there anything either of you would like to add about the craft or the writing life overall?
Anne: Protect your voice and your vision. Protect it—and if going on the Internet and reading Internet reviews is bad for you, don’t do it. [Laughter.] It’s awfully rough right now. It’s a jungle out there.
Do what gets you to write, and not what blocks you. And no matter where you are in your career, whether you’re published, unpublished, or just starting out, walk through the world as a writer. That’s who you are, and that’s what you want to be, and don’t take any guff off anybody.