

What would it be like if you could get a vampire to tell you what his experiences were, like an interview with the vampire?'" I was just sitting at the typewriter, and I thought, 'Well, let me give this a try. "It was just something I tried one night. I felt like a lost person, a person in the dark, a person who was trying to find meaning in life, trying to find context. "The vampire was the perfect metaphor for the way I felt. The subject matter of her debut novel, "Interview With the Vampire," from 1973, came while mourning the death of her six-year-old daughter, Michelle, from leukemia. I think the two were very intimately connected for me."

She left Catholicism as a youngster when she could not reconcile the forbidding of books: "I stopped believing in my church, and then I stopped believing in God. She asked me to say the Rosary with her." In 2006 Rice told "Sunday Morning" that, back in the 1950s, alcoholism was considered a disease: "The one time she talked to me about it, she described it that way, as a craving in the blood. (She would choose the name Anne for herself as a child.) Her mother died from complications of alcoholism when Anne was a teenager. The Associated Press contributed to this gallery.Īuthor Anne Rice (October 4, 1941-December 11, 2021) was born into a strict Catholic family, and was given her father's name: Howard Allen O'Brien.

| Philip Gould/Corbis via Getty ImagesĪ look back at the esteemed personalities who left us this year, who'd touched us with their innovation, creativity and humanity.īy senior producer David Morgan.
