This is not the best book in the world, but I read it in seventh grade and it left such an impression on me. If I'd read this book at any other time in my life, I probably wouldn't be so attached to it. If I'd read it earlier, I probably wouldn't have really understood it. If I'd read it later, I might have appreciated it but maybe not quite to the extent that I do. It's so introspective and really opened my twelve-year-old mind up to different perspectives on life and mortality and humanity.

an actual essay for college apps:

Spoiler

When I was younger, I was an avid reader. I would breeze through two or three books every day, trapped inside the confines of a cage built by overprotective parents. Books were like a drug, something so mind-numbing yet addicting. I’m quite forgiving when it comes to books, though I certainly know the difference between a good book and a great book. To me, a great book is a book that has connected with me and pushed me beyond my boundaries, forced me to think about myself and my life in a way I’m hesitant to do on my own. To me, that book is Interview with the Vampire.

I was twelve years old, browsing ebooks on OverDrive because I’d already finished the ten physical books from that month’s library trip, when I came across it. I’d never heard of it, I’d never heard of Anne Rice, I’d never even been much into the horror genre. For whatever reason, I borrowed it, opened it up on my tablet, and was instantly slapped in the face by the walls of text: sentences so long they were paragraphs and paragraphs so long they were pages, vocabulary beyond my seventh-grade mind, dripping in description of every architectural feature. The pace was astronomically slow. It was the most challenging book I’d ever read, and I loved it.

It was difficult at first, having to reread paragraphs two or three times just to get what was going on, but in doing so, I became suddenly, acutely aware of not just the words meant but how they could mean so much. I fell in love with words while reading this book. And it also gave me an existential crisis. If I'd read this book at any other time in my life, I probably wouldn't be so attached to it. If I'd read it earlier, I probably wouldn't have really understood it. If I'd read it later, I might have appreciated it, but maybe not quite to the extent that I do.

Interview with the Vampire is an exploration of life and death, grief and loss, and what it means to be human. Throughout the book, the titular vampire, Louis, grapples with the loss of his humanity as he tries to navigate his new undead life as a vampire while his maker, Lestat, refuses to share his secrets of being a vampire, trapping them in a lonely sort of marriage, later made into a family with the addition of a child vampire, Claudia.

This book must have altered my brain chemistry, because it has had such a profound effect on how I view life that I almost consider reading it a formative event. It made me completely change how I thought about life, because I actually thought about it for the first time. My life was not endless as a vampire’s, and yet I found myself going through it just like Louis, numbing myself with books and feeling a quiet sort of resentment towards those who trapped me in the confines of a house with windows locked out of paranoia. To Louis, his “family” was both a comfort and the source of his misery. Lestat and Claudia were the only ones who understood him, being vampires themselves, yet it was this very family that isolated him and kept him from realizing just how much more there was to life outside.

Louis’s solace is Claudia, who matures despite being trapped in the body of a child until her death. She was forever cursed to be perceived as a child despite her mature mind, even by Lestat and Louis, who knew her true age. I had, in a way, an opposite experience to Claudia. As a child, I was “mature for my age.” In reality, I was obedient out of a conditioned fear of punishment or not being loved, not being cared for. Neither Claudia nor I were seen for who we truly were.

I’d Googled the book at some point, so I knew that Claudia would die and that her death was in part Anne Rice’s way of coping with the death of her own young daughter. And still, her death broke me. At twelve years old, I was the loneliest I’d ever been in my life. My grandfather had died earlier that year, leaving me in a haze of numbness. I’d never been close to him, but his death hung over the whole family and trapped us in a silent dance as we skirted around the topic. Claudia’s death was a tragedy, but inevitable. Inevitable like how all death is.

I’d had a falling out with my friends, leaving me to eat lunch alone and stare at my phone devoid of notifications. Louis’s musings about life resonated with me in a way that was almost uncomfortable. His loneliness was existential, far beyond mine, but it helped put into words what I didn’t know I was feeling. Lestat was right there, someone for Louis to reach out and talk to, to connect through their shared vampirism. Yet, Lestat refused to foster this connection until Louis stopped trying. And I understood that. I knew what it was like to have someone there, but so utterly disconnected that they couldn’t possibly be a source of comfort. Louis was left to search for his purpose on his own, to make some meaning out of this new life deprived of anything he thought he’d had before. Knowing my purpose at twelve sounds almost ridiculous to me now, and yet I can remember the pressure of my parents asking me at that age what I wanted to be, what I was going to do with my life, what meaning I was going to give it.

Something that has always stuck with me is Louis’s last sunrise, only described in a single paragraph. Louis tells the interviewer that he doesn’t exactly miss it, as there are many other things. Yet, he has remembered it after centuries. And I’ve remembered it after years. Such an intimate description of a moment that happens every day, that I so often now miss with my head down doing my homework, has long been a reminder to slow down and think of the moment. Almost every moment in this book is like Louis’s recollection of the sunrise: somewhat underwhelming in its description, yet somehow still so powerful. The book doesn’t rely on a rush or thrill to keep the reader engaged. Perhaps, to others, it is the mere morbid fascination of a man who is, but wants nothing more than not to be, a monster. But to me it is my connection to the characters, my hope that he will prevail to prove that I can, too. That I can be more than what I was made to be.

Though I know now that Rice retconned Interview with the Vampire to make Lestat the antihero in the rest of The Vampire Chronicles, the original ending is still the one that means the most to me. Louis, having escaped Lestat, finds him again and goes to visit him after many years. Lestat is withered and broken, but Louis doesn’t find this satisfactory. In fact, he even sheds a tear as Lestat begs him to stay. Maybe it’s a tear for Lestat, the man who was his constant source of misery, his manipulative master. But I think it’s for himself, for who he could have been, would have been were he not a vampire, were he made by someone less hurt and broken himself. It’s just a tear, and then he moves on.

There is one line in this scene with Lestat that I must have missed on the first reading. As Louis leaves, he realizes that he’s taking with him a baby who was in the house with Lestat. I’d barely noticed it the first time, but now, I cried reading it. I understood what it meant. I didn’t know what I was doing too when I lay in bed at night thinking about who I used to be, the little girl who was a blank slate. If I could I would have taken her with me. I would have wanted to try again with her, because I knew what she would have wanted, and I knew what she needed.

Interview with the Vampire has long been a book of comfort to me. Through all the changes I’ve been through, somehow this book seems to change with me. Every time I read it again I catch something else I might have missed earlier, or have an epiphany about something I had never considered so deeply. This book has transcended time, not only to me but to the generations of readers before me. The first part of healing is identifying the problem, and this book helped me do that. But, unlike a vampire, I don’t have forever. I can’t stew in my own misery for seventy years. I’ve had so long to think about it already. I’ll shed a tear, and then move on.