Anne Rice Birthday Today

Today, October 4, is the birthday of Anne Rice, born Howard Allen O'Brien in New Orleans (1941). Her parents were Irish Catholics, and also free spirits, and they thought it would be great fun to name their daughter after her father, whose name was Howard. But she hated it so much that she changed her name to Anne when she was in first grade.

Anne was one of four girls, and she said that they were all a little weird, grew up isolated and strange like the Brontë sisters. They created fantasy worlds and made up horror stories together, and they liked to wander through cemeteries for fun. And while they walked through the streets of New Orleans, past falling-down mansions, their mom would tell them stories of horrible things that had happened inside.

Even though Anne was fascinated by ghosts and violence, she was also a devout Catholic, so devout that she wanted to be a nun for a while. But when she was 14, her mother died from alcoholism, and her dad moved the family to Texas. Here Anne became a normal teenager, had friends, and edited her school's paper.

She gave up Catholicism, inspired by the defiance of 1960s counterculture. She went to college and ended up marrying her high school sweetheart.

They moved to Berkeley, Anne got her MFA in Creative Writing, and they had a daughter. But her daughter died of leukemia at the age of five, and Anne's life fell apart. The only things she could do to cope were to drink and write. She worked on a story she had been reworking for years, a story about vampires in New Orleans. She had most of the plot in place, but she said that the vampires themselves were like cartoon characters, that they looked and talked and thought like the most stereotypical vampires.

She had already decided that her main character, Louis, was haunted by the death of his brother, and suddenly Anne Rice was able to identify with Louis, and she channeled all her grief and rage and confusion into his character. She turned her manuscript into Interview with the Vampire (1976). The entire novel is an interview between a young reporter and Louis, who is a very reflective vampire.

Interview With The Vampire started out slowly, but it ended up a huge best-seller. Rice wrote more books about the same vampires, a series called The Vampire Chronicles. She also wrote stories about witches, and she even tried her hand at erotica.

Then, after her conversion back to Catholicism in 1998, she wrote a series of books about the life of Christ. Her books have sold almost 100 million copies.

This year she's been getting a lot of attention because she announced on her Facebook page last summer that after 12 years, she was leaving the Catholic Church and organized religion in general. Her newest novel, Of Love and Evil, is due out at the beginning of November, a novel about angels.