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have tried to be a nun as I had once dreamed of doing. I loved everything about this film. I loved the shots of the convent with its broad corridors and high doors. I loved the soft, dig-nified grace of Sister Luke as she accepted the penance of wearing the ornate habit of her order. I loved that she cared above all about being a good person with her entire heart. I loved even perhaps that she failed, failed as I had failed. She'd left the convent. I'd left God.

I should point out that this film is genderless. The story could easily have been about a monk. In being about a religious person, it transcends gender obsessions and concerns completely, and that is no doubt the reason that it spoke so purely to me about faith, about the love of God, and about the kind of life that is possible when one offers everything to God.

In 1974, I actually read the book on which the film was based. I found that the film had been true to the book. And Sister Luke's story was my way of visiting my old church, my magnificent and timeless church, and being there, in sorrow, for a little while. The story was set in World War II. That was long before the great church council of Vatican II which supposedly changed my church, and so I felt a special refuge in the film. It was the way things had been, and perhaps were not, for anyone, anymore.

In 1998, I actually didn't know how things were in the Catholic Church. I had no idea at all.

Now for ten years, I'd been living in New Orleans. Stan and Christopher and I had come there to live in 1988. And one most significant development in those years had been the complete acceptance of us by our huge extended Catholic family, including the revered Murphy cousins whom I mentioned early in this book.

In 1988, my father had been still living, and he'd come to join me in New Orleans, and there amid huge family parties he had connected me with his surviving brothers and sisters, and aunts and uncles, and all the cousins he so cherished and loved. This was my father's last great gift to me - that he brought me into contact with this "lost" family. And my father's happiness at this time was also a gift.

To my amazement, these churchgoing people completely embraced Stan and Christopher and me. They didn't question my disconnection from Catholicism. They said nothing about the transgressive books I'd written. They simply welcomed us into their homes and into their arms.

This was as shocking as it was wonderful. The Catholics of my time had been bound to shun people who left the faith. Indeed one reason I stayed clear of all Catholics for three decades was that I expected to be rejected and shunned.

In my childhood, one couldn't enter a non-Catholic church. If a cousin married "out of the church," not only must one shun the ceremony, one had to shun the cousin forever after. An entire branch of our family had been lost to us in the 1950s because they became Protestants. So, returning to New Orleans, I more or less expected to be shunned.

But the world of my Catholic cousins in New Orleans was a loving world. And these were indeed people who went to Mass and Communion on Sunday, who participated in their church, who visibly and actively supported it. These were the ones who had stayed.

This acceptance puzzled me and interested me. How could they be Catholics and put their arms around a woman who wrote Interview with the Vampire? How could they come into my home so cheerfully when they knew Stan and I were not married "in the church"? Surely they knew Christopher was being brought up with no religious affiliation. True, he went to Trinity Episcopal School, but that was because Trinity was a fine school.

I never asked them these questions. I felt an overwhelming love for them, and my return to New Orleans became a return to their acceptance as much as a return to the church buildings and the venerable houses I so loved.

As I met more and more churchgoing friends, I was intrigued by the way they managed to live in the world as Catholics. Again, I asked no questions. I simply observed.

No harsh mental break had ever forced itself upon these people. They had found a way to live faithfully