Description
It took a few years for Anne Rice and her family to realize that, after a shaky start, her 1976 debut novel “Interview with the Vampire” was striking a chord.
But it makes sense that it happened in San Francisco, a city she had called home for years — when several young, elegant men waltzed into one of her book signings.
As her son, the author Christopher Rice, told KQED, the men were decked in 18th-century waistcoats, their long hair tied off in a ribbon. They were, in short, dressed as the main characters of Rice’s said shaky debut novel: Lestat de Lioncourt and Louis de Pointe du Lac.
“Interview with the Vampire” marks its 50th anniversary this year, and Christopher details this very anecdote in his afterword to a new semicentennial reissue of the novel by Penguin Random House. (His behind-the-scenes nugget that didn’t make the final print edition: how Rice and his aunt “just went bananas over how attractive these guys were.”)
Despite the fact that the story’s pivotal framing device — the titular interview between Louis and a young journalist — takes place in a San Francisco Victorian on Divisadero Street, New Orleans has understandably pulled rank as the “home” of “Interview with the Vampire.” Not only is the Louisiana city a recurring setting in the books, but it’s also where Rice herself was born and raised and where, after finally finding her success as a writer, she lived in a gorgeous historic home for over a decade.
The Victorian home on 503 Divisadero Street, where Rice set the titular interview. Rice said in 2011 that she came across the house — which is now painted a deep, dark blue — when her professor husband was being interviewed for a radio show nearby.
Read for more details at kqed.org/news
✍️: Nisa Khan
📹: Vivian Morales
🎬: Darren Tu