Anne Rice: The Enigma
Shelves are stacked with her chronicles never waning, constantly becharming new generation of readers. You will see different age groups picking up her novels; and yes, they are under the spell of the her Olympian ability to make darkness appealing and frisson liberating. Her novels were turned into movies, and once, adapted to the stage. Anne Rice's imagination introduced many readers to new characters that has become household names.
She was christened Howard Allen O'Brien, but goes with the name of Anne. She married poet and painter Stan Rice who died of brain tumor. She bore 2 children, with her eldest dying of lukemia and claimed to be her inspiration of the vampire little girl Claudia in An Interview with a Vampire. Her real name she claims, "My birth name is Howard Allen because apparently my mother thought it was a good idea to name me Howard. My father's name was Howard, she wanted to name me after Howard, and she thought it was a very interesting thing to do.
She was a bit of a Bohemian, a bit of mad woman, a bit of a genius, and a great deal of a great teacher. And she had the idea that naming a woman Howard was going to give that woman an unusual advantage in the world." And she is that woman to date, who has made a great impact on literature. Fiction it maybe, her works has opened up a new genre that speaks so much about supernaturals and humanity.
Her novels are fused with history, philosophy and existentialism. The more you dwell in her fictitious world, readers feel the rupture of reality and fantasy. Her skillful writing has brought her readers to the past and even to the present. The way she plays with the words is a true work of a fiction writer, never afraid of exploring and taking a plunge into the another world-- we call fiction.
Her novels are surreal, dark and yet enigmatic perhaps this is because she gives life to characters that are familiar to people through myth and legend; and yet her imagination has led us to a new perspective of her characters.
Rice can make fiction seems real despite how much convention and reality claim that her novels are fictions. And yet we succumb to her fiction, even assuming that perhaps there is truth in the world she conjured. And there is, for in her writing though dark and questioning is the tale of a writer who has gone far in her imagination to share to her readers the wisdom of her griefs.
“As a writer I'm driven by grief. I think it's important that we as writers, find out what drives us. Not so much that we find out; what's important is that we give in. That we don't fight it. That we just say "Yes, we will go with this pain. Yes, we will endure this. Yes, we will explore this." We must try, in our work, to make a meaningful universe in the pages we write. We'll try to do that. We'll have that faith, we'll have that strength. Sometimes, it's so dark and so difficult when you have to grasp things, you have to look for signs, you have to look out the window and see a sign in the way the flowers are blooming on a tree...But to continue; as a writer you have to be open to the darkness. You have to be open to the sorrow. Whereas other people may scurry past and say I have to get on with my life, you can sit there and you can feel that sorrow pass over you. You can feel that great lamentation come out of you. You can say of your dead husband "Oh Stan, I loved you with my whole soul, I loved you." And in that spirit, you can write. You can write! Not perhaps the literal story of your husband and how you loved him and how he died, you go into the imagination and you create a story and that story is going to have whatever wisdom you have been allowed by God to acquire. And it's going to be good. And that keeps you going. That keeps you working. That keeps you open to all the signs that are going to come to you...”-- Anne Rice
Image Source: Wikipedia
