You wouldn’t expect a show centered on undead, blood-drinking, immortal creatures of the night to be the perfect model for how to write personal narrative, but you’d certainly be pleasantly surprised to discover so when watching it with your roommate. When I saw AMC’s television adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, I was already familiar with the story of Louis, Lestat, and Claudia from the original novel and the 90s film adaptation. As a vampire-loving tween who grew into a vampire-loving adult, I adored the first iteration of The Vampire Chronicles, though I hadn’t continued with the book series, intimidated by its volume of titles. But when my roommate urged me to watch two seasons’ worth of vampiric melancholy with them, what surprised me the most wasn’t how the original queer subtext of Louis and Lestat’s relationship was now an unambiguous life partnership, or how deftly handled the racial reimaging of Louis and Claudia as Black was, but how accurately the show captured what it means to craft a story from memory and reckon with one’s past. Every episode, I’d quip something like, “I literally had this conversation in my MFA,” or “This is totally what it’s like to write nonfiction,” or “Yup, as a writer, can confirm.” I’m sure my roommate was thrilled to hear my unsolicited professional opinion.
In the novel and film, Louis recounts his life story as a vampire to a young journalist, referred to only as “the boy,” in the 70s in San Francisco, capturing decades worth of a tumultuous relationship with his maker, Lestat, and his surrogate daughter/sister/it’s complicated, Claudia, who is turned into a vampire as a child. In both iterations of the story, “the boy” does little to propel the narrative forward, functioning solely as audience surrogate, receiving Louis’ story as he delivers it, asking for clarification here and there, but mostly just urging him to keep going. Louis, for his part, knows his story beat for beat before even opening his mouth. He recalls his thoughts and memories perfectly, and what little he has reassessed after its happening is already fluidly woven into the narrative. Louis is not being interviewed to re-examine his life story—he is there only to recount the polished version of his tale that he had upon walking through the door.
I understand why the original novel and film are composed this way. Even when framed otherwise, it is still fiction, and the lack of personal inspection creates a tight narrative for the reader to follow. The truth is what is on the page, which is what Louis says, and that is the novel’s plot. At least, this is how it reads without the recontextualization of the series that sprang from Interview many years later, the original context into which it was published, as it was intended as a standalone.
However, AMC’s television adaptation of Interview with the Vampire takes its interview conceit much more seriously, raising questions of perspective, fact, and truth inherent to nonfiction as a form. The show slyly winks at its previous incarnations by framing that canonical ‘73 interview in San Franscio—the original narrative—as a previous failed interview between a much younger Daniel Molloy (the name given to “the boy” in later novels and the character’s name from the jump in the show) and Louis. The show’s titular interview instead takes place in 2022, the year the show first premiered. Over the course of its (at time of writing) two seasons, Daniel and Louis—interviewer and subject—constantly grapple with the deviations in each interview and how these changes alter Louis’ life story and who he is as a person.
“Why again? What’s changed?” Daniel asks Louis in 2022. Louis responds, “The world. Circumstances. Me. I’ve changed. And I, too, find the tapes lacking.” This is how AMC’s Interview with the Vampire begins its exploration of memory: with the change in perspective distance brings.
Louis is not being interviewed to re-examine his life story—he is there only to recount the polished version of his tale that he had upon walking through the door.
Any creative nonfiction writer will tell you that the key to writing a good memoir or personal essay is not having a unique story to tell—say, being a literal vampire—but the insight one can provide into that experience, insight that often becomes entwined only with hindsight. “Ironically, while creative nonfiction can be a tool of self-discovery, you must also have some distance from the self to write effectively,” say Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their seminal creative nonfiction craft book, Tell it Slant.
In all the versions of the ‘73 interview, Louis’ anger at Lestat permeates both Lestat’s characterization and Louis’ opinion of him. “‘[Lestat] was the sow’s ear out of which nothing fine could be made,’” as Louis states in both the novel and the show. However, in the show’s present, Louis softens his stance on Lestat, holding his former love for him side by side with his negative feelings. When Daniel grills Louis on this discrepancy, Louis responds by reading a section of Daniel’s memoir back to him in which Daniel admits to falsely remembering something. “‘This is the odyssey of recollection,’” Louis quotes from Daniel’s book before going on: “The tapes are an admitted performance. This is the premise of our interview. Half a century later, allow me my odyssey.”
In ‘73, Louis was too close to the story, too wrapped up in his feelings to accurately depict what transpired between him and Lestat, the love and comfort in addition to the pain and hurt. In flashbacks of the ‘73 interview, when Louis speaks, it’s not directed to Daniel but at the tape recorder, a visual indication that Louis wanted only the catharsis of speaking his narrative, not the emotional wrestling that comes with interpreting what he says. It was a false story, and now he is ready to explore the true one.
Daniel’s more assertive role in the interviewing process also shapes this new, truer story being told. Rather than being the (mostly) silent listener, he actually does his job, pushing Louis on the facts of events, excavating his feelings and perceptions, and making transparent Louis’ intent when he obfuscates. The process of having a journalist interview a subject would technically categorize the resultant writing as reportage; however, given Louis’ primacy as the protagonist in the show, I would say Daniel functions narratively more like a workshop reader or editor. He has access to the story and can shape it with advice and feedback, but he is not the narrative’s architect. The story the audience witnesses isn’t actually the book Daniel eventually publishes in-universe, but Louis in the process of actively parsing through his internal world, making the show hew much closer to the personal narrative writing process than that of reportage.
In the show, Louis is no longer a dispenser of uncontestable fact, but a man with a singular personal perspective. He gets certain details wrong or can’t remember something that happened over 50 years ago with perfect clarity, and Daniel explores these gaps in recollection with him. Was it really raining the night Louis met a human lover in the bayou? Was Lestat really spying on the two, or did the mud from his shoes come from somewhere else in the wet city? There’s ambiguity here, not a perfectly accurate transcription of events, but an honest one nevertheless, because it is true to the best of Louis’ (in)human ability.
This is further reflected in the opening sequence of the show, which parallels the location where the present-day interview takes place—Dubai—with whatever past location is the focal point of the episode—New Orleans, war-torn Romania, Paris, or San Francisco. Notably, the location of the past is presented upside down, indicating that Louis’ remembrance of the events that transpired there is skewed, distorted by time and his own perspective. As Mary Karr writes in The Art of Memoir, “The trick to fashioning a deeper, truer voice involves understanding how you might misperceive as you go along; thus looking at things more than one way. The goal of a voice is to speak not with objective truth but with subjective curiosity.” And curiosity is something Louis brings to this interview in spades.
All of this is true, but what really cements the accuracy of the personal narrative writing process in Interview with the Vampire is not the emotional distance Louis now possesses, nor his fallibility actually being acknowledged and incorporated into the text, but the fact that Louis fundamentally changes by telling his story. As the personal nonfiction writer Melissa Febos says of this transformation of self via writing: “On the page, I undergo a change of heart, I return to the past and make something new from it, I forgive myself and am freed from old harms, I return to love and am blessed with more than enough to give away.” This, to me, is the most important catalyzing factor of successful personal narrative writing: It is transformative not just for the reader, but for the writer who pens it, and the text captures that resultant transformation.
Over the course of the interview, Louis’ understanding of Claudia and Lestat changes, and so too does his understanding of himself as shaped by them. He remembers that Claudia had the capacity to dream, and this assures him that she possessed a soul untainted by her vampire nature, and that by extension, he, too, must have a soul. “Pieces coming back,” Louis says upon this realization. “Hours. Nights. Objects, surfacing in water. […] Thank you[, Daniel]…. I want this. To remember.” On this final line, a single bloody tear rolls down his cheek. Louis is no longer simply divulging composed facts, but letting the memories he retrieves alter the person he is in the story.
What really cements the accuracy of the personal narrative writing process… [is] the fact that Louis fundamentally changes by telling his story.
Late in the show’s second season, when Louis recounts Lestat’s version of how Claudia was turned, Louis (and by proxy, the audience) realizes that Lestat’s perspective is actually closer to the objective truth than Louis’. Louis always believed Lestat was principally responsible for turning Claudia, but in reality, it was Louis who pushed for her turning. Lestat warned Louis that turning a child was a bad idea for obvious reasons and forbidden in vampire society, but Louis promised to stay with Lestat forever if he turned her, placing Lestat in an emotionally compromising position. “You should go with Lestat’s version, for the book, I think,” Louis tells Daniel.
The process of Louis changing his perspective literally changes the events of his story. Louis does not revise the past, but acknowledges it in a more nuanced light with emotional insight and consideration for how others viewed events. Having reflected on the details of his past, he now takes accountability for his own actions and reckons with their consequences. This is what it means to seek truth.
Louis has now completely reconfigured himself within his past, and this subsequently alters himself in the present, for who are we now if not the accumulation of all our previous experiences? It is no coincidence that it is only once the interview is complete that Louis is empowered to change his present-day circumstances by breaking up with his controlling vampire companion, Armand. Now that Louis has crafted a full narrative of his life to this point, he can take a more active role—an authorial role—in dictating its next chapter. By turning the original gimmicky frame narrative of the interview into the culmination of Louis’ character arc, the show crafts the most satisfying narrative of any version of Interview with the Vampire. In telling his story, Louis is reborn yet again.
In the final episode, Louis and Lestat reunite. For the first time in the course of fifteen episodes, Lestat is presented in an unmediated lens. No longer is he filtered through Louis’ memories, but framed neutrally in the now. Face to face with his maker after so many years, Louis does something he is capable of doing only after having embarked on his odyssey of recollection: He thanks Lestat for turning him into a vampire. “I came to thank you. For the gift you offered me. The gift I denied. For the nights in front of me where I might learn to live honestly.”
The first step in Louis’ journey to live honestly was not a confrontation with his former lover, but a confrontation with himself, and in doing so, he found self-reconciliation. This is the power that writers of memoir and personal essay should strive for when penning—or should I say, interviewing for—personal narrative. Now, we wait to see what those honest nights look like in the next season.
—Ana Hein is an essayist, editor, and critic. Her work has been featured in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, AFM, Digging Press Journal, Mothership, Compulsive Reader, and Videodame, among other publications. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University. Currently, she lives in Poughkeepsie, New York. You can find her at anaheinwrites.com.
