from writing about vampires
to writing about Christ
an interview with Anne Rice
by Elizabeth Solsburg

Anne Rice is best known for her series of novels about the vampire, Lestat. In her new book, Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt, she makes a radical departure from that genre. Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt is the first-person fictional account of Jesus’ childhood at the time the Holy Family returned to Nazareth from Egypt.

FAITH: What prompted you to write this book? It’s quite a switch from your other novels.
Anne Rice: It was the result of a slow process of returning to faith and a building obsession with the subject matter of Jesus and his life. I reached a point when I didn’t want to do anything else but that. I was totally on fire to do it – I felt conviction and tremendous commitment and excitement. I believe that everything I have done up until this point was a preparation for it. I was writing about the supernatural and writing in the first person voice, exploring the position of a person who is a supernatural hero and yet an outcast – and suddenly I realized I was poised at the beginning of the biggest adventure of my life – it was to write about Jesus himself. I said to myself, “If you believe in him, and you say you do, what was it like for him?”

FAITH: It was a fascinating perspective to take. I know you read Ray Brown’s books in preparation; what other research did you do?
Anne Rice: I did read Raymond Brown’s work and it was very impressive. I also read John Meier and many others – Meier and Brown are great Catholic scholars. I started research in the 1990s when a lot of books began to appear about the historical Jesus. I would pick them up and bring them home. If there was any one beginning, it was probably a book on the Dead Sea Scrolls. I picked it off a book shelf and began to read it. I became very intrigued by the controversy described in the book.

But what really interested me was the life of Jesus and what really happened. I got down to work on it and nothing else in 2002. I began researching this book before I was finished with the last of the vampire chronicles.

I had to pull together all the physical research – Nazareth, the geography, what the Temple really looked like. I wanted to make my research totally solid. I’ve never written a novel where I had to stop so often to check something.

FAITH: Although you obviously took creative license, you seemed to make every effort to be faithful to church teaching in the book.
Anne Rice: I tried very hard to do that. There was one place I deviated by having James be the stepchild of Mary and not a cousin. St. Jerome and others had argued about this during the church’s early years. What really decided me was Giotto’s painting in Assisi, The Flight to Egypt. It depicts a little boy with Mary, Joseph and Jesus who is leading the donkey. Immediately I thought, “James.” That painting made a huge impression on me.

FAITH: I know that you returned to the church yourself. Can you tell me what prompted you to leave?
Anne Rice: It was really about faith. I lost my faith when I was about 18. I had started college at Texas Women’s University and I simply lost my faith. It was before Vatican II and I wanted to know what the modern world was; I was tremendously curious and wanted to read the existential philosophers. But I came from a rigid Catholic background where those books were really forbidden. I believed I couldn’t pick them up without committing a mortal sin and I simply didn’t have the flexibility to understand all of it. I was living in a world that was not a Catholic world – I really didn’t even know any other Catholics. Another Catholic at another university somewhere might have been able to get through, but my loss of faith was total.

FAITH: And then what brought you back?
Anne Rice: It was gradual. My husband and I had moved back to New Orleans. I felt an overwhelming desire to return. But every time it would get really strong in me, I would think, “Wait a minute. What do you believe about this? And what do you believe about that? And how can you go back to the church that says things you don’t believe in your heart of hearts?” Gradually, I came to realize that I didn’t need to solve all those problems. I wasn’t Thomas Aquinas. There is a way of doing things that is more like Francis of Assisi where you just say, “Yes. Let me come to the banquet table. Please. And I’ll do my best on everything else.” I mean, nobody was even asking me for answers to all those questions. They weren’t even relevant to my life. What was relevant was to return to church and return to Communion. And that’s what drew me back to church more than anything else – this overwhelming desire to go to Communion. I really believed that Jesus was on the altar – when I started believing that, I don’t know, but I believed it. And the belief grew stronger and stronger and I felt the compulsion to return. It was like a great gift had been given to me – I was suddenly in a world filled with redemptive grace.

FAITH: As you wrote this book, did you feel you came to know Jesus better?
Anne Rice: Oh, absolutely. I’m very aware that the Jesus in my book is a fictional Jesus. But I felt that my sense of talking to him all day, every day, sort of the way St. Augustine does in his Confessions, really was a religious experience.

FAITH: What do you hope readers will get from your book?
Anne Rice: That experience of believing, at least for the time they’re reading the book and perhaps afterward. When people come to me and say, “I was there,” that’s what I want.

I tried to take the latest research and couple it with the Jesus of faith. There are a lot of novels about Jesus out there but they always have a particular type of Jesus who deviates from the Jesus of faith. They want to argue that Jesus didn’t found Christianity or he wasn’t the Son of God. They’re almost all anti-Christian. This novel doesn’t have that agenda – it’s saying, “This is the Jesus you believe in.”

FAITH: What’s next?
Anne Rice: More of the story.

FAITH: Are you going to continue in first person?
Anne Rice: I’m going to continue his story. I’m not sure I’m going to do the teen years – they may be handled as a flashback. I’m definitely going to stick with first person – Jesus telling what he was feeling as it happens, all the way through the Ascension.