Born on this day in New Orleans as Howard Allen O’Brien (1941–2021), Anne Rice grew from a Catholic-school daydreamer—sometimes called “weird” by classmates—into a writer whose gothic worlds felt achingly human. With luminous imagination and unflinching honesty, she invited us to consider faith, death, desire, and the tender places grief leaves behind.

She wrote her breakthrough Interview with the Vampire (1976) in a grief-hazed sprint after the loss of her daughter, Michele, to leukemia. In remembrance, she created Claudia, the eternally young child at the heart of a family forged in shadow—raised by Lestat and Louis—and gave readers a story where darkness held room for delight and love.

“Writers write about what obsesses them… I go where the pain is,” she said. Through crises and renewals, creative, spiritual, and physical, Rice kept returning to the page, letting her characters wrestle with goodness and evil, possibility and consequence.

Too extreme for the mainstream? Perhaps. But in Anne Rice’s worlds, the magic of eccentricity becomes a doorway: into compassion for outsiders, into courage to speak one’s truth, into the beautiful oddness of being alive.