#michael riley

I think the novels are about a refusal to be doomed. They’re about assuming the guilt for killing, assuming the guilt for having all kinds of advantages that human beings don’t have, and bearing that guilt, and refusing to behave as if one is doomed. Lestat insists on moving through life like a good man. That’s the dilemma that’s discussed over and over again when he says, “I refuse to be bad at being bad. Because this is what I have to do, I have to be good at it.” I see it as related to all of us. I’ve used this example a lot in the last few years because it’s really true. As we sit here, people are starving, they are dying of disease, they are suffering such injustices that somebody could come down from another planet and ask, “How can you sit here, how can you sit at this glass table, wearing these clothes, with food and drink all around you in this house, when thousands at this moment are truly starving?” Yet we choose to do this. We choose to do this because we choose to live our lives in spite of the injustices we really don’t feel we can rectify. We don’t want to lose our lives to try to save a village in India. We don’t want to lose the fruits of a lifetime trying to save one impossible situation in South America that will continue after we’re dead. We do make that choice. I often think of that when I’m writing from Lestat’s point of view. He makes the choice to move through the world and take the sacrifices of human life that are necessary for him, and he doesn’t kid himself about it. But basically what he’s striving for, I think, is the consolation and comfort and the freedom of a wholesome, good guy. He has a determination, an absolute refusal to give up. That’s his argument with Louis: “I’m not going to just beat my chest and act like a penitent. I can’t live like that. Everything you say may be true, that we’re bad guys, we’re damned, this is Hell, this is a nightmare, but I can’t keep that in mind all the time. There’s just too much music to be listened to, there are too many places to go.” That’s kind of the way I feel about life itself. Now, that may be the philosophy of someone who feels stricken with guilt from a Catholic childhood. Just to live and enjoy a moment, free of guilt, becomes a big struggle for a person like me.

Being Erica Turns 10