Luanne Rice Talks About LIGHT OF THE MOON

Click here to view the video of Luanne Rice discussing LIGHT OF THE MOON at an appearance hosted by the Sacramento Bee Book Club.

Some landscapes seem to come from dreams, and that's how I felt when I first saw the Camargue. It was almost too beautiful to believe it could exist on earth: endless salt-silvered marshes, serpentine creeks, herds of mysterious white horses. I visited there on a pilgrimage to an ancient church in a seaside town. My reasons for going were deep and personal, and the first thing that struck me, heading into the village, was the amazing light.

Saintes Maries-de-la-Mer, a town in Provence, is known for its devotion to a saint who began life as a slave girl. It's located on the Golfe du Lion, a wide bay of the Mediterranean, at the edge of one of the largest salt marshes in the world. The sunlight is intense—there's so much water, and the sun hits the surface and bounces off every wall, every stone, filling the air, the effect making me feel surrounded by light.

This was symbolic to me, in many ways. When I was young, and my family was going through my father's long illness, something happened and the world went dark. I was twenty-one. I'd dropped out of college two years earlier—a combination of wanting to write and being unable to concentrate on anything academic while my father was so sick. This didn't go over well—my parents had sacrificed a lot for their daughters' educations, and they thought I was throwing everything away.

It's an unbearable situation, losing your father at any age. But I was at a particularly vulnerable time of life—early twenties, trying to figure out who I was as I left childhood behind, as I took leave of conventional education to become a writer. I wanted my father to guide me and approve of me, and I was about to lose him.

Not only that, my father and I had had a complicated relationship—painful, far from smooth, full of conflicts. If life had been kind, I could have grown up and he could have grown old, and we could have come to a place of peace. Instead, he began to die, and I began to go crazy. Things culminated one night just before Christmas. In the parking lot of a fish house near the beach, he yelled at me. I began to run away, and, for the first time in his life, he struck out at me. I fell and hit my head. When I came to, I was colorblind.

The world was gray. It wasn't onyx or silver or pearl or oyster or pewter; it was just gray. The color was harsh, flat, ungenerous, unsubtle Battleship gray; as if the incipient sorrow of his death, the unresolvability of our trouble, the knowing that soon he wouldn't be in the world, as if those facts—insupportable for me to believe or accept, for as deep our differences, so was the love and adoration I'd always felt for him—made colors themselves impossible.

I had a condition, and no one knew quite what it was. I had x-rays and tests. I had someone to "talk to." There's no clear explanation of what happened to me. Even then, in my early twenties, with a lifetime of poetry and Irish Catholicism to draw on, I had the feeling my colorblindness was more a sickness in my soul than an injury to my brain.

It didn't last long. Several months was all. Over Christmas, my mother gave my sisters and me cable-knit Shetland sweaters. Mine was salmon pink, but I didn't know that until March, when I started seeing colors again. As suddenly as the world went gray, that quickly did the brilliance of colors return. One morning I woke up, and the sky was blue. I cried because until that moment I hadn't realized the extent of how terrible it had really been, the fear I'd felt that I might never see blue again.

I've wanted to write about that for a long time. In LIGHT OF THE MOON, I write about love and loss and parents and children. I write about people who've been wounded falling in love, helping each other to the other side. I was able to explore trauma's effect on a person's body and spirit—and did much research into ways the body is a map for every experience. I have a character who's lost the ability to see colors, and I was able to explore the event that caused it from both her and her parent's perspective; in doing so, I felt I understood something more about my father.

My father never knew that I became a writer, never knew that my dropping out of college wasn't a total disaster. I never got to ask him the questions I needed to ask, to try to understand the secrets he always kept, that in many ways shaped my life. I have to visit him on the pages of my novels, in the stories I'm inspired to write, to try to make sense of it all. I'm always driven by love—even, or especially, the difficult loves that can hurt so much.

My pilgrimage to the Camargue had to do with my father, with what happened between us. Some of is still too personal to write about, but I will say this: on that trip I felt a connection with his spirit, and I felt sure that we would have forgiven each other if he'd lived. In fact, I felt we already had.

The brilliant, scalding light bouncing off the sea shimmered each day I was there. But it was the moonlight that made me feel healed and transformed. I'd visited the church, the black wood statue of St. Sarah, made my petitions. That night, walking along the sea, I saw the moon rise out of the water. It rose into the sky, pouring deep blue light down on the sand. I heard hoof beats, turned to see a herd of white horses galloping along the tide line.

The moonlight had turned the horses blue.