This is a spiritual memoir by the author of many novels on vampires, sexuality and pagan themes; Anne Rice. Rice begins by recounting her devout Catholic upbringing in New Orleans where as a child she had considered becoming a sister cloistered within a convent. The author is descriptive of her childhood life in New Orleans and the Catholic upbringing she had. She shares her fascination of various saints she was drawn too. She was a Catholic up until the time she went off to California to attend college.
The author then seems to lose detail and gives a brief glimpse of her loss of faith and turning to the atheism she proclaimed for decades. There is not explanation of what jolted her to not only question her faith, but to turn her back on Christ. Though she reference a key turning point was a comment from a single person which I found as a simple excuses to not explore the real reasons she ran into the darkness. But then again she was attending the great liberal colleges of today, the San Francisco State College and University of California Berkeley, where peer pressure most have been great especially during the 1960's..
As the memoir quickly moves beyond this part of her life, thirty-eight years, she starts what I believe is the reason she wrote this book. To share her path back to the light, faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ. With the words of a well versed novelist she shares of her desire to travel and how where ever she went she always sought out Catholic churches to visit and how they moved her. The imagery that brought back the memories of her childhood faith that would drive her to seek what was missing in her life, the Word. She shares openly her hard road back to her faith and the one true Apostolic Church of Christ where she renews her faith and rejoin the body of Christ in the Roman Catholic Church.
As Mrs. Rice open her private life and struggles with faith to the world I see it as another step she feels she must take on the right path to developing her true faith. And if by chance it aids others to not only understand the transformation she is going through but perhaps even think for themselves and read or re-read the Gospels she would have accomplished her unspoken goal.
It does not matter if you agree with the author, for this is her memoir and struggle with her personal faith. The book reads as an honest self examination that she needed to see in the written word in order to aid her in her quest to reclaim her christian faith. I pray that this writing has helped her in her spiritual growth and that it may help others in theirs. And as she found a renewed faith in God where she learned that Christ commands us to love one another.
