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• Ms. Rice's official site
• Article by Ms. Rice
• Article on Ms. Rice
• About Christ the Lord

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Tavis: It is a wonderful pleasure to have best-selling author, Anne Rice, here tonight. The New Orleans native has penned over twenty-five books, including the popular Vampire Chronicles. Next year, a new Broadway musical based on the vampire series will debut featuring music by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Her latest book is, once again, a New York Times best-seller, perennial best-seller she is. This one's called "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt". Anne Rice, nice to have you on the program.

Anne Rice: Thank you, thank you.

Tavis: Honor to meet you.

Rice: It's great to be here.

Tavis: Let me start with that New Orleans thing, if I might, since you were born and raised and that is your hometown. In your books in the past, you have written books that were based in New Orleans and people go to New Orleans and have gone there for years and go to sites that you write about in the books. So what's this experience been like for you?

Rice: Oh, it's been a nightmare. Katrina and Rita have just been absolutely unbelievable and the people there are suffering so much. They're suffering right now almost like people in the aftermath of a war. They're struggling to rebuild and there are shortages in materials, shortages of workers. Insurance checks are very slow. FEMA checks are very slow. And people are living in incredible conditions, but they're going on. They're rebuilding. They love that city. They don't want to live anyplace else and they're going to rebuild right there, no matter what happens.

Tavis: You wrote a couple of Op Eds, opinion pieces, after Hurricane Katrina hit. One of them I recall you were none too happy with the way the people were maltreating your native --

Rice: -- Well, I thought their response was terribly slow and it still is slow. It's slow now and I wrote that right after the storm. People still don't have insurance checks. Nobody was prepared for this storm, nobody. Not local officials, not national officials, not insurance companies, nobody. I mean, this was such a catastrophe.

All over the south, people are suffering from this. Their families are displaced. Whole neighborhoods have gone. Kids had to go to school in different cities. They had to be taken into schools in Florida, for example, out of Mississippi. All kinds of things have happened. I don't think right now we have a grasp of how bad it is for the people there. It's dropped out of the headlines, but it's still the headlines to them. It's their way of life.

Tavis: How bothered were you and how upset were you by the fact that we weren't ready for a catastrophe that many have argued legitimately that we should have been ready for?

Rice: I don't know that anybody could have been prepared for the kind of flooding that happened in New Orleans. I mean, those of us who lived there, we thought the levees would hold. I mean, it wasn't common knowledge that the levees were in any way impaired or that they were going to break. Nobody was prepared for that.

I mean, when I moved there, I mean, I knew there were certain problems with New Orleans, but I don't think the person in the street had any grasp of what was involved. Those levees apparently were faulty and they broke and this catastrophic flood happened. I don't think anybody can be prepared for something like that. It really was an act of nature, the storm itself, you know.

Tavis: And I've learned, I've read, that you actually moved out this way about six months before the hurricane -- you were in New Orleans. Up until six months before the hurricane hit, you moved out to California.

Rice: That's right. I moved out to California and settled in southern California near San Diego and just got my husband's paintings out maybe about two weeks before the storm hit. You know, he died in 2002. He left three hundred canvases. He was a wonderful painter and we're going to open a gallery for him in Texas. We just got them out and it was sort of -- well, we sighed a big sigh of relief.

Tavis: "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt", a novel, which I'm hearing already you hope to become one of, what, four, five or six-part series?

Rice: I think it's going to be four books all totaled of the life of Christ.

Tavis: Four books total?

Rice: Yeah.

Tavis: Tell me about the first one.

Rice: Well, the first one starts when Jesus is seven years old. The family is in Egypt where they fled because of Herod the Great persecuting the child and it's about time for them to go home. Herod has just died and the holy family is going to go back now and they're going to go to Nazareth and they undertake a long journey. They go back to Judea, they go to the temple for the High Holy Day and there are riots in the temple. There's all kinds of unrest because of Herod's death and Herod Archelaus taking over. Eventually, the Romans come in from Syria to put down the banditry and the rebellion that's going on in the land. They sort of pass all the way through that, but they finally get back to Nazareth and they settle there.

It's really the story of Jesus asking questions about what happened in Bethlehem. Why did we go to Egypt in the first place? Why aren't we going back to Bethlehem? If that's where I was born, why are we going back to Nazareth? For me, as a believer, Jesus is God and he had complete knowledge of everything that went on. But I think scripture tells us that he didn't call on that knowledge all the time, that he came down here to be with us, to have an experience with us, and that he often let himself find out things in the human way. This is sort of about the human side of Jesus as a child finding out things in the human way.

Tavis: I believe -- I want to preface this next question because I don't want you to think I'm asking out of any certain or particular naiveté. I believe that the bible is the most powerful book ever written. I believe that the stories in the bible are the most fascinating stories.

Rice: Absolutely.

Tavis: It is the most fascinating, empowering book I have ever read and still love to read it all the time obviously. That said, what makes Anne Rice want to write a four-part novel about Christ the Lord?

Rice: I think that we as Christians are obligated to tell the story of Jesus over and over again. We're obligated to tell that story, to live that story, to enter into that story and proclaim that story. For a writer like me, this is an opportunity to write a modern novel with suspense, a plot, reality, you know, the illusion of reality, and to put the Lord in that novel and try to make him real to people maybe who never thought about him or who simply are not reading the bible. Maybe they have no access to any kind of religious feeling in their lives. I want to say to enter into this novel and you'll believe in him in this novel.

Tavis: I don't know that this is a word, but can a writer even of Anne Rice's stature perhaps get into some trouble trying to "novelize" Jesus?

Rice: Well, I think all Christian artists run some risk. You know, if you paint a picture of Jesus, if you do a stained glass window with Jesus in it. Anything you do, you're going to run some risk because somebody's going to come along and say, "That's not the Lord the way I see it" or "How could you do that? How could you paint that image?" But we do that because we want to use our talents, what we have, our skills to make him real. That's our obligation. I mean, Mel Gibson did it when he made the movie, "The Passion". Zeffirelli did it with the great mini-series, "Jesus of Nazareth". I want to do it with this novel.

Tavis: They both got in trouble, though (laughter).

Rice: Oh, did they (laughter)?

Tavis: Of course, in Gibson's case, he made a whole lot of money (laughter), but he got in trouble too, though.

Rice: But millions came out to see that movie and they loved it and it brought them closer to the Lord and that's what Christian art has to try to do over and over again. It has to try to bring people closer.

Tavis: How do you deal with -- and maybe it doesn't matter to you and, if it doesn't, please tell me -- but how do you deal with people who have appreciated your work and say, "Anne, don't go preaching to me now. That's not what I expect from Anne Rice."

Rice: Try the novel. It's not preaching. It's truly a novel. It's reality at that time, an illusion of reality. This is day-to-day on the road with the holy family. This is the holy family talking to each other about breakfast, lunch and dinner, about carpentry work that has to be done in Ciporas, about living in Nazareth, about going to school, about reading the bible, about praying. It's an attempt to say, okay, we believe this, right? We believe that this is the Son of God. This is the Son of the Virgin Mary.

Okay, well, if we really believe it, well, how do we think it went day after day? How do we think it went moment by moment? Jesus came in time. He came in time to a particular place. He was there and he was there for over thirty-three years. Well, what was it like day-to-day? You know, we say we believe it. Do we believe it? Let's try to imagine how it actually worked out. What's it like when your family knows that shepherds came in at your birth who saw angels? What is that like? What do your aunts and uncles say to you? What does your brother James say to you? How does that feel?

Tavis: I'm going to try the novel and I admit I haven't had a chance to delve into this as deeply as I want to as yet, but I will because I'm fascinated by it. So this question comes out of -- again, this does come out of a certain naiveté because I don't know the answer to this yet because I've not read the book as yet -- but how do you navigate what would appear for me at least to be a high-wire act of not making Jesus too common as you novelize him?

When you write a novel about something, the whole point to your earlier statement is to make us feel this, to make us believe. You want us to be in the story at the dinner table with Jesus and Mary and Joseph, with his family, but isn't there a danger in making him too common, too ordinary, when you put him in the context of a novel?

Rice: That was the challenge. The challenge was how to walk that line, how to talk about the Son of God and God reverently and make it the Jesus of the Four Gospels without error, you know, if at all possible. I tried very, very hard not to have an error. This is the Jesus of the Gospels and I tried to convey the special quality of that child. This child deliberately not accessing that knowledge, experiencing everything with human beings, you know, being tempted just like anybody else that's sinless, experiencing some fears, some confusion.

I mean, Jesus gave us this great thing, his human life on earth, to lead us in the very things, suffering, fear, confusion, things like that that God really doesn't experience as far we know, but Jesus experienced them as a human being, the human side of his nature. That was the whole exploration. Yes, it was challenging and it was difficult and it may not work for every reader, but I hope I've achieved something of what I set out to achieve.

Tavis: I've been dying to ask you this one question which is, in studying your past, your life, I read that you started out as a believer.

Rice: That's right.

Tavis: For a period became an atheist or agnostic, whichever you --

Rice: -- thought I did.

Tavis: Thought you did, okay. I want to explore this. So you thought you became an atheist or agnostic on some level and you were once again a believer.

Rice: That's right.

Tavis: Can you tell me what that journey was like? I'm trying to figure out how one believes, doesn't believe, and experiences something that allows one -- in this case, Anne Rice -- to believe again. What happened?

Rice: Well, I lost my faith when I was about eighteen. I had been brought up a very strict Catholic in a very sheltered Catholic environment. I was away on a college campus and I wanted to know about the modern world. This was 1960. And my upbringing had been very, very strict, very strict. I mean, reading certain books would have been a mortal sin. I really couldn't reconcile everything I was seeing out there in the modern world, the secular world, with what I'd been taught as a Catholic. I wanted to bust out. I wanted to learn.

It was much more an intellectual falling away than it was any kind of behavior involved. I mean, I was a pretty conservative person when it came to behavior. But I wanted to read all those books that I saw in the campus bookstore, you know, all these different philosophers, and they were all outside the church. Those were forbidden people, you know. So I lost my faith. My faith was apparently too brittle. I don't really know, but I lost it and I became convinced, like many people become convinced, that we don't know if there's any God and we're not facing reality if we don't admit that.

So I began to live as an agnostic. I thought that was the realistic way to live, the practical way to live, the smart way to live. I thought that people who had religion had illusions that they were dependent on. I wanted to be stronger than that. I still went on being a moral person. I wanted to live a meaningful life, a good life, but I thought the whole responsibility was on me. There was no God to help me.

Now after about thirty-eight years of that, what I had developed into was a novelist who chronicled the grief for that lost religion. I mean, "Interview with the Vampire", "The Vampire Lestat", all those books, the vampire is a hero who's lost. He's condemned to the darkness, can't get to the light of God and he struggles. Those books are like chronicles of pain and searching and that was me. That was me going through all this, never giving up on the idea that there was something redemptive. There was going to be art, there was going to be music. Beauty itself was going to redeem us, but I was going to find it.

I searched everywhere. I went to Israel in the 1990's. I went to Rio de Janeiro and climbed Corcovado Mountain and stood at the foot of that great big stone Jesus with his arms out over the harbor. I was looking for God all the time, you know, searching. And the books reflect this. They reflect this journey.

Finally, what happened is I realized I wanted to go back, that I believed in God. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to go back to the alter in my own church, the banquet table. I wanted to be included again. I thought, put aside all your theological questions and your sociological questions and your history of religion questions. Put it aside, turn to God and say, "Please help me." Just help me solve all this. I want to come back to you because I know you're there", and that's what happened.

Tavis: Finally, I could do this for two hours if I had a two-hour program and I do not, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on one's perspective, I guess (laughter). That said, let me ask you right quick, a little birdie tells me that you don't like it when people say of this work that this is a radical departure from your previous work with the Vampire Chronicles. You don't like that?

Rice: Well, I felt that there were religious themes in those books too, but they're books where the heroes can't find God. I found what the heroes were looking for. I found that. This is not a radical departure in that sense. The subject matter is how do we live? What do we do? Where is God? But it is a radical departure in that this is about Jesus Christ.

What's really radical about this book is that not only is this the Jesus of the Gospels, the Jesus of the bible, but he's in a completely realistic setting that's been thoroughly researched. Usually it's the skeptics who do all the research on the first century. Not all the time, but most of the historical research has been done by them. But I'm trying to put him with that research so that anything I say about the politics of the time is correct, anything I say about the geography, the buildings, the houses, family life, I tried to get that perfectly correct according to the latest research we have.

Tavis: Well, during the holiday season, we're going to be off for a couple of weeks and you'll be seeing reruns of the best of this show over the course of this year. During that period, bam, I'm going to be reading Anne Rice. Won't you join me? The new book is "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt", the new novel by the perennial New York Times best-selling writer, Anne Rice. Ms. Rice, nice to have you here.

Rice: Thank you very much.

Tavis: Up next, we continue our "Road to Health" series. Stay with us.