by Anne Rice
First published 2008
Anne Rice opens her spiritual memoir in childhood New Orleans, where she once imagined herself taking religious vows. The young girl who contemplated convent life grew into a woman wrestling with fundamental questions about God and the Catholic Church. These struggles pulled her away from faith entirely, leading to decades where she declared herself an atheist. Rice examines the doubts and philosophical concerns that drove her from religion, exploring how intellectual questioning can create distance from belief. In the late 1990s, something shifted. She found herself drawn back to the faith she had abandoned, recognizing a deep longing to offer everything to God, including her considerable gifts as a writer. Rice chronicles this return with the same attention to detail she brings to her fiction, mapping the internal landscape of someone rediscovering belief after years of rejection.
Genres: autobiography, religion, biography-memoir, christianity, catholic
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, redemption
Setting: New Orleans
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
245 pages · Paperback · Alfred A. Knopf