Currently thinking about how Anne Rice has expressed that Lestat is a reflection in many ways of the type of person she wished she could be and how she didn’t understand gender + didn’t entirely identify with womanhood, and how all of those feelings are a part of Gabrielle’s character, down to Gabrielle basically saying to Lestat that she loves him because she sees the type of man she can’t be reflected in him and I just…Im not the biggest fan of Anne Rice as a person, she was definitely very flawed (that may be an understatement), but I feel bad that she seemed to have had some unaddressed gender dysphoria, and never really got to explore her gender in a way that she found satisfactory. Based on how she’s spoken about it it seems like she didn’t consider exploring her gender identity to be a possibility. And honestly I find that really sad

Hi! What do you think about Anne saying on her fb in 2013 that she didn't like Gabrielle, that she was selfish, a bad human being and a bad vampire and that she treated Lestat badly? It's so strange

You mean this?

(I was wondering where this ask came from now and then saw this on Twitter 😅)

Well, I mean… Gabrielle shed her human life like a second skin (after a very short adaptive period).

There are a lot of reasons for her to do so and I do understand her(!), but it doesn’t exactly make her more easily approachable in her vampiric existence.

She does not care to answer Lestat’s calls for help, even though she could do so, something that Armand bitingly reflects on.

And there are parts in the later books where I really didn’t like her (for example her slapping Lestat, the absolute silence after very pointedly brought to awareness by the chapter ending speaks volumes there imho).

Gabrielle reflects an extreme in a way, and totally apart from all the reasons she is in-universe the way she is… Anne wrote her for a purpose, namely to be a mirror to Lestat, and reflect that what he cannot let go of despite everything. To show why Lestat was so deperately in need of companionship, why he clung so viciously to Louis’ (and his own humanity). That… does not mean she had to love writing her^^

And Gabrielle is there for all the major events, and she and Louis are later the ones Lestat turns to for council, so the importance of Gabrielle never left Anne - though she probably harshly disagreed as a mother.

Gabrielle is the reason Lestat had purpose, some encouragement, and any affection at all while he was young, why he actually could get to Paris - she is also the reason he has (or at least had) a distorted relationship to learning, knowledge and books, and she is part of the abandonment issues and she did not stop the abuse that happened when he was a child.

It’s complicated.

From my own experience I can say that being a parent changes your views on things over time. I do think that might have happened here as well, slowly, and I think the key here is the last sentence.

Anne published The Vampire Lestat in 1985, so when Christopher was 7… she probably drew more from her own life experiences while writing. 2013 though… she had gone through it all, brought her son fully up. And her view on some things must‘ve been vastly different then.