E-mail a friendAnne Rice
airdate April 7, 2008
When Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire, she had no idea it would change her life forever. After her daughter died of leukemia, Rice turned the short story into a novel, which became one of the best selling of all time and was released as a feature film. Her books have sold over 100 million copies worldwide and influenced the Goth youth subculture. In '05, the New Orleans native began writing fictional bios of Jesus. Her second book in this genre is Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana.
Anne Rice
Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Anne Rice back to this program. The perennial bestselling author is once again back on the "New York Times" best seller list with her latest book "Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana." This is the follow-up, of course, of the best seller "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt." Anne Rice, nice to have you here.
Anne Rice: I'm delighted to be here, thank you.
Tavis: We're honored to have you here. So you've done it once again.
Rice: Well, I've tried.
Tavis: Yeah, you tried, and you've delivered. The challenge going from one to two, book one to book two, is - there's going to be four of these total, I believe?
Rice: I think there'll be four.
Tavis: Probably four?
Rice: Right.
Tavis: The challenge of going from book one, "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," to "Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana," was, is?
Rice: Well, going to the adult Jesus, and trying to do the last year, maybe, in Nazareth before he's called to the Jordan, and trying to imagine what it was like for him, with that family, in that small town of Nazareth, a man who is not going to get married, is not going to have a wife and have children, and yet he's in a Jewish community that really expects that of him.
And it's been over 30 years since the angels sang to the shepherds and the magi came. And so I was thinking, how do I describe a probable world for him, what that was like? The family must have been thinking, they remember those miracles, they remember those stories, and here he's almost 30 - over 30, actually, and nothing has yet happened to show them why he's come and what he's to do.
And I wanted to get that, what that pressure might have been like, and that was the biggest challenge, finding that voice to talk in, to talk in the lord's voice and to be absolutely true to scripture. To present the Jesus I believe in, who is divine and human, who is, in fact, god, and who puts aside his omniscience to experience things with us in a human way.
Tavis: I want to talk more about the storyline in just a second that you were just leading me into. Let me backup one quick step, though. When you were last here for the first text, I recall - I don't know how I phrased the question but I recall being curious and asking you what you expected from the public.
So clearly, the book becomes a bestseller, "Christ Out of Egypt," the first book, but I'm curious as to whether or not you heard from people anything that directed your thinking in terms of how to advance the story, and particularly I'm concerned about what kind of critique you got from everyday people around the first book back to our conversation then, because trying to write a novel about the life of Jesus doesn't make everybody happy.
Rice: No. No, it doesn't, and I think if anything I wanted to establish right on the first page of this novel that this is the lord, this is Christ the lord. That he is divine and human and yet is putting aside that knowledge to experience things with us as a human, because I got a lot of questions on the first book. Well, if he's divine and human, how come he doesn't know things? Why is he learning?
And that's a big question. Did Jesus - was he born knowing absolutely everything, including how to speak, or did he learn things in the human way? And I was asked a lot of questions by email, and I got a lot of email that was very positive, people would say at first I was put off - you're the vampire lady and here you're writing about Jesus - but boy, I'm glad I read the book.
But they'd ask me questions. They'd say, "Well, how did you deal with that?" And so one of the things I did was go to scripture and look up the passages where I think Mark or Matthew tells us very specifically that the lord put aside that knowledge. Like Mark 5, for example, where the hemorrhaging woman touches his gown and he feels the power go out of him and yet he turns around and he says, "Who touched me?" And even the apostles say, "Lord, we're in a crowd."
Tavis: There's so many folk in here, everybody's touching you, yeah.
Rice: Right, why are you asking this question? And so I wanted to explain that we have that evidence in scripture. To go to Hebrews, he was tempted in every way, but he was sinless, and that was how I could find a way to write about him, that he put aside that knowledge. So in answer to your question, I established that like on page one.
Tavis: This book here, "Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana," not the most - I'll turn it sideways here - not the most dense text, and I raise that because I wonder how do you know when you have told this part of the story that you want to tell, when you haven't gone too far into the next phase, and when you look at the life of Jesus, there's so much more you could have written about. So how did you decide that this would be this second installment, does that make sense?
Rice: Oh, certainly. I think the book has its own shape. It opens up with him really asking how long, oh lord? When am I going to get the call? And everybody around him is putting pressure - get married, get married. Who says said you can't get married? The prophets married, why can't you marry? And by the end of the book, we know. He's been called, he's been baptized, he's been with Satan in the desert.
He's come back and he's begun his ministry with the wedding feast at Cana. So I felt that was the shape of the book; that was the answer to the question. Now we begin. And also it gave me an opportunity to describe somewhat what life was probably like in a village for him all those years. The bible doesn't tell us anything from age 12 to 30 about the lord, but we know what village life was like, and we can imagine the pressure he was under.
Tavis: How does his family treat him differently in this text as an adult, this novel as an adult, getting a better sense now of who he is, back to your point of his being human and divine and bringing miracles, etc., etc. How does his family engage him differently in this part of his life, in this novel, than they do in the first book, "Out of Egypt?"
Rice: Well in the first book, I think they were eager to protect him from the full story of Christmas, the full details of why they left Bethlehem. In this book here they are more impatient. Like why - what's going to happen with you? Here you are 30, you're not marrying, what's going to happen? And then, of course, John the Baptist comes and out of the wilderness, the cry from the wilderness.
This cousin that they all know and love but haven't heard of for years suddenly appears and the call comes and they go to the Jordan and they see the transformation in him. And then he comes back out of the desert, transformed, and they get the answer to all their questions. But I think what I was trying to get in those first few pages was his loneliness and their impatience - inevitable impatience.
Even people who knew that the angels had sung, people forget. We see that all through the bible, how the apostles would forget. He'd work a miracle and then they'd be worried about the storm.
Tavis: I wanted to go there, so I'm glad you went there. Talk to me about what you spent a good part talking about, again, in the first part of the book - Jesus' loneliness. Talk to me about his loneliness.
Rice: Well, the gospels make it clear he didn't marry. "The da Vinci Code" is just absurd. It's a fantasy that he married Mary Magdalene and they had children and they went traipsing around and so forth. And I thought, what was that like? In those days if a Jewish man didn't marry and have children he was considered practically a murderer.
You were supposed to really reproduce; you were supposed to do that. And I thought, he must have suffered terrible loneliness. Now here he is experiencing everything so that we can approach him better, he really is, again, to get back to Hebrews, that wonderful line "We have a high priest who is not unsympathetic to us, but one that we can approach because he's been tempted in every way."
So I thought, of course he's lonely, they're impatient, how does he handle it? How do I try, how do I pray, meditate, read scripture and try to get the voice of someone who is just filled with love for even people who are just downright insulting to him, like his older brother James, who just never gives up criticizing, and people in the town who make remarks like "When are you going to get married, what's wrong with you?"
And I was trying to get that. A friend said very early to me when I was first working on these books, she's a religion teacher in New Orleans, and she said to me, "Think of how lonely he must have been," and I never forgot those words. Because I thought yes, he must have been lonely.
Tavis: Let me ask you the flip side of the question I asked a moment, ago, Anne, which is I asked you a moment ago how his family dealt with him differently in this text. To your point of his loneliness now, he knows who he is, but in this loneliness how does he deal differently with his family at this stage in his life?
Rice: Well, I think he has to be patient, but there is a scene in the book, as I'm sure you know, where he says to his brother, to the whole family, finally, he says, "I am not going to marry." And he takes out the gift of the magi, the gold, and he says, "I'll provide a wedding for this kinswoman, Avigail," whom he's trying to protect. And he says, "This is my ransom. I will not marry, don't ask me again."
And I wanted to show a righteous statement on his part. The whole goal of these novels is to make a probable reality that people can really get into who never thought about Jesus, maybe, or never believed he was god or never really thought of the human side of Jesus. And so these are fictional scenes, we don't know that he said this, we don't know that they argued, but the whole idea was can I bring him to life? Can I create just the best realistic novel about him and still be absolutely true to the bible?
Tavis: That's got to be - you say that with such - that flows off your lips with such ease, but that cannot be an easy - that's like walking a tightrope. You want to fictionalize the character but you want to be true to the biblical text.
Rice: That's absolutely true, and there were nights - I wrote the whole thing at night, just to have no distractions. I'd get up after everybody went to bed and there were nights when I would literally get down on my knees and I would cry. And I would say, "Lord, give me the courage to go with you into the desert. Give me the courage to walk in your footsteps. Just let me try to write a scene that's true to what you maybe would have felt out there with Satan."
And it was frightening, but it's a great challenge. All my life I've been a writer. I've written 27 novels, many of them are bestsellers. To take whatever I've learned from that about story, about setting, about history, about character and put that in the service of the lord was the greatest challenge I've ever had. I never expected life to be this wonderful for me at this age.
Tavis: To your point now - I don't have enough time for the question I'd like to ask, maybe not for the question I am going to ask. What I'd like to ask is what Anne Rice has learned all those 27 novels. But I'm specifically curious, Anne, as to what you are learning. What are you learning in the process of writing these books?
Rice: That is a wonderful question; because I think when I started this I didn't understand it was going to drive me to a deeper and deeper understanding of what Christ wants of me. Not just as a writer, but what he really want of me as a person. What does it mean to say you're a Christian? What does it mean to say you're consecrated to Christ?
Tavis: Are you hearing him speak to you on that question?
Rice: I feel that what I'm learning from him is that love is the core, and it's not superficial and it's not simplistic and it's not feel-good religion. It's the toughest challenge you can face. You really have to love your neighbors, your enemies, and your fellow Christians, and sometimes it's the hardest thing in the world. And the more I get into these books, the deeper I get into trying to understand that and practice that daily, in thought, word, and deed.
Tavis: It is, to your point - I'm out of time here, but I'm just getting started; I'm out of time. It is the most difficult thing to do, and yet after all the study, after all the trying to excavate it, you come back to this notion of L-O-V-E. Isn't that fascinating?
Rice: That is so true. That is so true. And he says it in the Sermon on the Mount; he gives us the blueprint for the kingdom of Heaven. "I say to you, love your enemies." And that's what I keep going back to, and that informs everything I'm trying to do.
Tavis: I say all the time, love wins. Love wins, and Anne Rice underscores why in this text. It's a brilliant piece of work, as was the first one, as I'm sure the next two will be as well. It's called "Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana." A novel by perennial bestselling author, Anne Rice, who I'm always honored to see. Nice to see you.
Rice: Oh, it was great to be here, thank you.
Tavis: Pleasure's all mine.
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