care of " my husband's ego, or inquired tactlessly and in the presence of others as to how Stan was
"taking all this." There were even people who came to Stan to request funds for various projects, laying out their demands to him, in front of me, as if I did not exist.
But this was not significant.
In the main, I ceased to be somebody's wife. I became the author Anne Rice, and generally when people spoke to me, they had something to say to me and it was about my work.
And that meant it was about my mind - this genderless and oversensuous mind.
I didn't realize this immediately. I've never realized anything immediately in my life. But in truth, my life had changed.
I was that person now in the eyes of the world that I had always been in my own eyes. Personhood had come at last. The goal of my life had been attained.
Another dramatic event transformed my life at this time and, very possibly, saved it. I gave birth to a healthy and beautiful son, Christopher, on March 11, 1978. Stan and I were elated. But within less than a year, we became painfully conscious of our heavy drinking, and the impact this was having on our care for our son. Neither of us wanted this priceless child to grow up in a household with two drunken parents.
On Memorial Day of 1979, we made a pact never to drink again, and though I violated the pact that summer, when I went home to New Orleans for the funeral of an uncle, I took my last drink the night before flying back to California.
If Christopher had not come to us at that time, it is very likely that heavy drinking would have killed Stan and me, or so diminished our existence and our capacity to work that we would have experienced a slow and ugly disintegration.
We'd confronted this possibility many a time. But our resolves to stop drinking had never been lasting. The love of Christopher, and our hopes and dreams for him, now provided the incentive we needed. Though we did not join any organization or 12-step program, we maintained sobriety from then on.
As I look back on it, I think that Christopher was aptly named, because he brought a saving grace into our lives that was all but miraculous. A child of exceptional gifts, he surprised us, challenged us, and educated us over the years in countless ways, as only a child can do, and he is now a highly successful novelist. He was and is a treasure. And he was as much a part of my life from then on as any success I derived from my writing.
We were a trio, Stan and Christopher and I, as our existence underwent remarkable changes.
I wrote twenty-one books before faith returned to me. And in almost all these books, creatures shut out of life, doomed to marginality or darkness, seek for lives of value, even when the world tells them they cannot have such lives. In all of these works, gender doesn't matter. What matters is the personality of the individual, and his or her desires. Historical settings are of huge importance, and they are used much like the speculative settings of science fiction writers, to establish a matrix in which ideas can be tested and explored, to establish a laboratory in which experiments in loving and suffering and persevering can be completed with success.
Of course the historical research for my books drew me into periods of history that I deeply loved; this was natural to me, to research eighteenth-century Venice, or Renaissance Florence. I was in full control of characters both masculine and feminine. I was both.
And the historical research for my novels became one of my greatest passions, and certainly the new source of education, as I had long left college behind.
I wrote by instinct.
I poured out the darkness and despair of an atheist struggling to establish bonds and hopes in a godless world where anything might, and could, happen, where happiness could be torn away from one in an instant, a world in which the condemned and the despised raised their voices in protest and song.
Over and over I wrote about outcasts - young people of color in pre - Civil War New Orleans who could not be fully part of white society; castrati opera singers in eighteenth-century Italy, who could not marry under the laws of the lands in which they became superstars adored by all;