In remembrance

dispatch 12

Dec 15, 2021

Hi friends.

This last snoozeletter of the year was meant to be a post on time and how we sometimes get exactly what we ask for but in a completely unexpected (and sometimes, unwelcome) way. Instead, it’s a tribute to one of my creative influences, the late author Anne Rice who died this past Saturday.

It’s strange, writing about a woman I did not know in any tangible way, but whose work and life affected me deeply. And as always, there is a vulnerability to sharing the things that we love, and a fear of judgment that I wish I did not feel. But if there is one thing I hope to leave behind this year, it’s the ways that we curate who we are for other people. In the year to come, may we have the courage to unapologetically love what we love, just because we love it. Not because it says something about us that we would like said. Like Anne, may we have the courage to live into the exact truth of who we are.

A photo of the late author Anne Rice, looking to her right. Her hair is in a gray bob and she is wearing a black turtleneck and gold necklaces. She's smiling slightly. — Image pulled from this site.

In remembrance

I found out today that Anne Rice has died. Every life is made up of cultural touchpoints. Those references and influences, the sum of which make us who we are. Within this vast archive of each of us are cornerstones, the people whose work is so foundational in the shaping of your world that you don’t remember who you were before them.

I first discovered Anne Rice in the corner of a Borders bookstore sometime in the very early 2000s. Sitting on one of those round, rolling step stools that punctuate all chain bookstores, a stack of books in my lap, I fell into her world without warning, and for the next decade and beyond I returned to it often. My parents never paid much attention to what I was reading, as long as I was reading, and in that I know I was lucky. I don’t know who I would be now if I had been in a household that kept her books from me until I was of appropriate age. I can’t recall just how I picked up Interview with a Vampire, or why it appealed to me. I hadn’t seen the movie, had never heard of Anne Rice at all. But kids that age yearn to be understood, and I felt that on some level, this woman and I understood something about each other. It didn’t matter that we had never met.

She wrote with a lushness that was unafraid of its own excess, refusing to shrink in shame from a glorious reveling in her own obsessions. It was pure intoxication, each scene shot through with a hum of danger and a heady eroticism that didn’t need to be explicit to be felt. Reading her work was like hurtling towards a brick wall, the marvel of your own speed eclipsing all fear of impact. Over the years I’ve read nearly everything she ever wrote, but like so many of her fans, I love the vampires best.

Maybe because they found me at a time when my own hurts threatened to engulf me for the first time. I was sexually assaulted at age twelve and because of this, I felt constrained by my age and experience, too young to be able to protect myself and too old to be graced by the ignorance that had let me live unafraid. But in her books children did not die, but were reborn with the strength to avenge their fury. They were untouchable, free from fear. With each turned page, she offered me a bit of that for myself.

Her characters defied gender and relationship norms in a way that made intuitive sense to me, that uncovered and gave kinship to the fault lines of my early queerness. Anne did not hide in the safety of androgyny as a trend or aesthetic but gave each character a clarity and a fluid sense of joyful play in their own self-actualization that was a gift to many young queers trying to figure out just who we could be. Her writing gave me a reference for things that I could not yet name. When I think of the clearest distillation of the ways I still feel moving through the world, it is Lestat, the vain and frock-coated brat prince of New Orleans, his heart a wound bleeding through the centuries. Something that was in him, was also in me. In these worlds, I saw my own intensity of feeling, not as a weakness but as a strength. I imagined who I could become with that much freedom.

And because sex was off the table for her vampires, I came to view eroticism through her works in a way that felt safe and generative in the years beyond that first assault. She gave me maps to desire and longing that I had not known existed. And she never compromised on beauty. I understood that to her, beauty was a very necessary element, a validation of my own meek aesthetic understanding of the world and of art.

She wrote characters that were heavily flawed, unlikeable, or purely wrong. But she grounded them in a history and humanity that complicated my early views of what it meant to forgive and what it meant to live amidst complexity. When I was 15, I read her book Belinda, about a sixteen-year-old girl who falls in love with and marries an artist in his forties. In those years, when I felt so on the edge of an unacknowledged adulthood, that book, in all of its problematic glory, taught me about the landscape of survival. It showed me a realistic portrayal of my teenage sexuality and my constant search for a savior that didn’t exist. It named the way that it can feel like aligning with a man will bring safety, when it is really just an attempt to minimize the ways you’re willing to be hurt by the world. The book reflected my desperate grasp at a belief in my own agency, and the ways I had been taught to view growing up. Throughout the story, there is a backdrop of the older artist’s paintings, canvas after canvas of little girls alone in crumbling houses, of eyes in the dark, the tension of living in that fear, the way that that fear is consumed and commodified. I haven’t seen the power and terror of being a teenage girl so effectively harnessed by anyone else.

And then there is New Orleans, which I saw first through Anne’s eyes, through the eyes of someone who knew and loved it first. It was inevitable that I fell in love with it too. Long before I would ever see the city myself, it pulled at me like a forgotten home. Like something threaded deep into the heart of me, part of me without cause. I’ve never left New Orleans without tears in my eyes. The very last time I left, when I was engaged but knew in my bones that I should not get married, I wrote this on the plane, “I’ve been thinking of the things that we reclaim. The things that we write off as no longer ours, what we let go of to save ourselves from heartbreak. The stories that we make into shields. I’ve been thinking of New Orleans.” In the years that followed, I’d write myself into new lives via my fiction, an escapism that always found its great love in the city itself.

Still, all these years later, I love that city in ways that you’re supposed to reserve for other people. In ways that are complicated, volatile, sometimes too messy to understand. I love all of its faces, the million memories it will always hold, all of the things that I carry because of it. The sounds, the way it smells in the morning before the heat has fully set in when it feels like you can hold it in your hand, keep it still if you just try hard enough. How it feels to drink coffee at 4am in some small, all-night cafe and feel really and truly alive. Corners where I could have taken a turn into a whole different life. All of the love for a city that was too big for anyone to hold, the lifelong obsession with it. All of it stemmed from Anne.

I am devastated by this loss, but of course, I cannot change it. Instead, I offer in remembrance, this tribute to a writer who shaped me; as a human, as a queer person, as a writer. To the woman who first held up a funhouse mirror to my Catholic guilt and challenged me to embrace the low pulse of the sinister that colors how I still see the world. To the mother of my own darkness, a creative maker, a muse amongst muses. To a person whose influence has been so dependable that I never knew what it was to miss her until she was gone. To Anne, forever and always, in this world and whatever lies beyond, “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

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