As a child, Rice said, "I felt the love of God. I wanted to be a priest. When I found out that being a girl meant I couldn't be, I was so disappointed. I didn't understand why."
When Rice went away to Texas Woman's University in 1959, she found that the church's rigid doctrine was at odds with the growing complexities of her new life. "My background was so sheltered it didn't seem to sit with the modern world," Rice said. "I felt I had to deal with my faith and reconcile it with the world around me. My childhood was very sex-obsessed and repressed. I felt when I accepted a world without God, I accepted reality, and stopped believing in illusion."
Rice also viewed church dictates on sin to be harsher to women, though "I have never taken misogyny personally," she added briskly. "Most people hate women, including women. There are reasons: Fear of women, of the power to give birth."
Instead, she became fascinated with the existentialists, reading Sartre and Camus. She met Stan Rice, a poet, artist and atheist, and they married in 1961.
Rice's husband, who was on his way to becoming an acclaimed poet, enrolled at San Francisco State University, where he would eventually chair the creative writing department. They moved to the Haight-Ashbury, but when their apartment filled with hippies, "I was the square. All around me people were taking acid. I had no intention of ever taking it."
Still, "It was a fascinating time to be alive," she said. "All of these people rejecting secular materialism. They did not believe in greed and vanity. Even taking drugs, they were destroying their ego. A lot of Christ imagery cropped up."
Then the Rices were dealt a mortal blow: Their daughter, Michele, born in 1966, died of leukemia at 5. Stunned with grief, Rice sat down and began to write. Five hazy weeks later, she says, she finished a first draft of "Interview With the Vampire."
"I think that book perfectly reflected the grief I felt about my daughter and the Catholic Church," Rice said. "I wrote an incredibly strange novel about a vampire seeking God, trying to find out if he was a child of God or a child of Satan. I was seeking answers. It's a strange novel because it's so nihilistic, yet it's filled with potentially redemptive issues.
"You can save yourself with art to some extent. With art, you can cull all your answers into a magnificent synthesis."
