Called Out of Darkness: a spiritual confession, by Anne Rice

In this memoir, Anne Rice depicts her personal history growing up as a Catholic in New Orleans, her break with that tradition upon becoming an adult, and her subsequent return to the Catholic faith at age 57. This was my first time reading Rice, an author of Gothic vampire fiction who became a writer of inspirational fiction after coming back to the church. The first half of the book is about the sights, sounds and smells of her childhood, and how stirring and beautiful so many of these things were. Rice remembers feasting her eyes on flowering trees and vines which adorned stately homes in her neighborhood, and of churches filled with color – with statues and soft lights and incense. Church ritual and pageantry were an integral part of her school and family life. Despite the tragic circumstance of her mother’s alcoholism, made starker by her father’s long absences due to work, what Rice wants to impress on us is how the Catholic church was not simply an element in her life, but gave a structure and coherency to everything else. Her break with the church came out of her rebellion against its strictures – strictures regarding sex, regarding what books to read. What brings her back is not a change in her thinking – she deliberately informs us that she had no information on the present Catholic teachings , and desired none – but just an overwhelming need, a need to return to the God she loved. The book is different than other autobiographies in that Rice does not dwell on painful events, neither family deaths nor her own near fatal illness. She passes over them, going back and forth in time, trying to elucidate her main point. She regrets certain of the Church’s present teachings, and hopes that they will pass out of favor, as the old index of “Forbidden books” came to the end of its usefulness in 1966. She fails to grasp, in my opinion, that the doctrine that spawned the strictures is still present in Catholicism –for example, in Catholic confessional guides which help you to examine everything for purity. But it’s enough for her to be back, and she vows that nothing will ever make her leave again, no matter what “scandal” or “quarrel” the Church suffers from in the future.