25 Things You Didn’t Know About Interview With The Vampire
4. It’s Absolutely Understandable, Part 2: The Novel Was Also A Record Of Loss
That obsession wasn’t just a creative one, but a deeply personal one. She recalls having what she describes as a prophetic dream about the death of her five-year-old daughter:
I dreamed my daughter, Michelle, was dying—that there was something wrong with her blood. It was horrifying. Several months afterward, she was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia.
When Michelle passed away in 1972, Rice threw herself into her work, devastated by grief and loss. The story moved on from simply describing the state of living in darkness to becoming a thesis on loss, alienation and guilt.
Casting herself as Louis and immortalising her lost little girl by creating the ingenue vampire girl Claudia, Interview With The Vampire became the story of a woman trying to come to terms with that most horrific of events: a parent having to bury their child.