The rise of AI slop & the endless waves of books that feel written to spec by people who are terrified of their own audiences has given me a new appreciation for Anne Rice. It's not even that she didn't give a fuck; she cared passionately and was famously, publicly hurt by the reception of at least one of her novels, but she never let that distract her from her mission of writing whatever the fuck she wanted. No one could write Anne Rice's books except Anne Rice. They are singularly, entirely hers and while I won't pretend she was a perfect person or it's wrong for readers to be offended or uninterested in spending their one and only life on earth reading something that offends them, I also think her work is valuable and humane and also often hilarious and it's not a crime to have a muse you adore.

there's an old anne rice interview circulating on twitter rn that i remember reading ages ago where she makes a pretty salient point about how submissive men who have bdsm fantasies etc will go to a sex worker and basically order the ala carte version of their fantasy to be performed in real life but women don't really have that same option and certainly not at the same point of availability so they read her horny books instead. and honestly that argument has been in the back of my mind every time people get on their high horses about the popularity of booktok romantasy novels or heated rivalry or whatever the "women are horny and we're upset about that" cultural property du jour is ever since. women, especially straight women, have so few outlets for their sexual desires, especially if they have a partner who doesn't share them, and i will never understand why "someone ELSE'S private sexual fantasy makes me uncomfortable and therefore they should not be allowed to engage with it, even if i am in no way being affected by it or even aware of it at all" is such a popular party line among allegedly progressive young people.