NONFICTION

Anne Rice's two novels about Jesus Christ were a radical departure from her dark tales of vampires. Critics were impressed by the change, and now in a memoir, "Called out of Darkness," Rice recalls in rich, evocative prose how in 2002 she bid farewell to Lestat and began her life as a writer consecrated to Christ.

Like many memoirs of faith lost and regained, Rice's describes a journey back to the past of belief after a long detour into renunciation and loss. She begins with her childhood in New Orleans, where her close Irish-Catholic family lived.

There, she evokes a world of daily Masses in various churches, the festivals of the church and the splendor of Christmas: "I remember the utter sweetness of the statues, the sublime scent of the greens, and other glittering decorative elements, all of this uplifting my spirits and filling me with a pure happiness that I associated with the entire season." Her mother, an alcoholic, died in the summer that Rice was a rising sophomore in high school. Two years later, her father remarried, and they moved to Texas. While Rice was in college there, her faith began to waver. For Rice, the loss of faith, though slow in coming, was absolute once it occurred. At college, she fell in love with Stan Rice, a nonbeliever whom she would marry. And wishing to lead the life of an artist -- "the church had become anti-art and anti-mind,''-- she left the church for 38 years.

Brought up to believe the non-Catholic world was a sinkhole of depravity, Rice found to the contrary "articulate people who made complex and refined distinctions about how to be a good person."

Drifting through the secular world of the 1960s, she married; lost a daughter to leukemia and began writing novels. But beginning in the 1990s, she increasingly felt "Christ haunted" and experienced moments of revelation while visiting places such as Brazil and Rome.

Rice movingly records the miracles in 1998 that brought her back, acknowledging how in the moment of "surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from Him -- I simply let them go."

Her surrender was neither easy nor unreflective, but Rice's "story of one path to God" resonates with faith, and love of both God and man. This is a distinguished contribution to the literature of faith.
Judith Chettle is a Richmond-based book reviewer and writer.