"Your ruining your life." She would tell me. "It's a downward spiral, on a path of destruction." And I would just stand there listening, with a secret smile as she quoted NIN, the band that was helping to corrupt my mind. "And that woman, she's crazy! It's a cult that fan club you belong to." And what could I say to that? It was typical of someone to dub something a cult when they didn’t understand it. I mean I was happy... and I tried to tell her that, but her only response was "If you think your happy, you've got more problems than I thought." Yeah... then she thought... but what about me? What about what I thought? "How can you identify with a vampire? It's not right... maybe if the characters were real, but it's just a damn story."
That's where she lost me. My mother went on to say things like, she wasn't my family anymore, but they were. She accused me of thinking that N'olreans was my home and not Ohio... but what did she expect. They moved when I graduated... I hate Ohio, so I have to find somewhere else to dream about to maintain my sanity.
However my mother lost me when she couldn't understand my world, couldn't understand the symbolism. Anne Rice's Vampires are a world outside of this one... a parallel universe. If you walk up to the window and look in you see yourself. You don't realize it at first because you see them and their flaws and problems. Lestat, my dark prince, and his struggle to find his place in the world. Made into a vampire against his will... ripped from mortality as he tried to find his place in it. The immortal rebel, who wasn't a rebel at all but only a man who wasn't afraid to be who he was, and I envy him for that. Armand, a tender teenager who only wanted to be loved, but when he was given the ultimate gift his maker was taken from his life. Could he ever love again? Be himself again? Or would he hide behind his dark facade to protect himself? He longs to be like Lestat, but like me he realizes that no matter how hard you try, others will always matter to an extent. Louis the most tormented of all, he lost his brother, his only friend... and just when he was at his worst, Lestat gave him the dark gift... a present that should have helped, but it only hindered his desperate life. He couldn't grasp who he was and that it was OK. He spent eternity looking for answers, when there were none. He couldn't just be and accept that. And Claudia... the eternal child, but only on the outside. Inside she was a woman trapped for all eternity under her doll like curls, and she could never escape.
You bond with the characters because like them, your not sure who *you* are. Your struggling to find the right friends and your place in society, while the Vampires are too. In your mind you give the characters advice... you think that it's not so bad, and that maybe being a social outcast is OK... and then one day you realize that you can take the same advice. That maybe it's OK to be different, that maybe the world doesn't matter as long as your happy with who you are. And maybe the world is just wrong, because who's to say which norms are right if any? Your standing on the other side of a window looking in on your own life now, and it's a whole new story. But mom didn't see that, and I couldn't listen anymore. I was finally happy with who I was, and I wasn’t going to change because she didn’t like it. Mom's little girl was growing up, just like Claudia did... and like Louis, she was going to have to deal with it. For once I can't let mom run my life, because for once mom was wrong...