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In 1988 I was in my 25th year of chilly exile in Northern California, where my husband Stan was a professor at San Francisco State. By then I'd published nine novels besides Interview with the Vampire, but we still couldn't afford for Stan to quit his job and to move back to New Orleans.

Out West, I felt like a loner and an outcast--a feeling that began when my mother died when I was 14 and when, shortly afterward, I was ripped from my home in New Orleans because my father was transferred to Richardson, Texas. That sense of alienation intensified over the years as I moved to California to work my way through college and then stayed on. At first I loved the freedom and radical spirit of the place. But as the years passed, I became bitter about not going home. I really didn't fit in with my liberal friends. In California, people's lifestyles are acquired--their taste, their decor, their behavior--but in New Orleans, where people stay with their families, they inherit their lifestyles. All those years, I was writing about New Orleans and obsessively longing for it, but I couldn't get there for more than a few days a year.

Then in 1989, as we were just trying out living half the time in New Orleans, half in San Francisco, my book Queen of the Damned hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. It was a staggering moment. I had never dreamed that my eccentric fiction would have such mainstream appeal. But it meant that we could stay in New Orleans for good. That book, that moment, that decision, changed my life forever. I cannot even imagine my life if I'd stayed in California.

They say you can't go home again. But I did. Bit by bit over these past 12 years, I have reclaimed what had seemed to me irretrievably lost--my home, my family, my religion and, perhaps most of all, my connection with my mother. My mother was very much a New Orleans lady, a lover of the city, a devout Catholic and an archetypal storyteller. As soon as we moved back, I felt surrounded by her love.

I felt my earliest memories pop up--like making bouquets with her and my sister from flowers we'd pull off bushes on the way to church to leave on the marble communion rail. When my mother died, her coffin was in that chapel. In 1996 the Redemptorist Fathers were desanctifying and selling the building, and I was able to buy it and preserve it--and I also bought our old house on St. Charles Avenue. Whatever people may say, I do believe you can buy back your past.

That chapel was the landscape of my childhood, but it was also the landscape of heartbreak because my mother had been a secret Southern-belle alcoholic, and she died from drink. When I came back, I had to face that--and I did, when I wrote Violin in 1996, my most autobiographical book. It's a wonder I came out of writing it alive. It put me in touch with sorrow and fear, but mostly love.

In 1998 I came back to the Catholic Church, which I abandoned three years after my mother died. I didn't believe in God or Jesus Christ then. But in New Orleans, close to my roots and my mother, I gradually realized that I did believe, that I wanted to go back to communion, to be a member again. So I did partake of the banquet. In that year, because we had not been married with the Catholic sacrament, Stan and I were remarried in my parish church. It was one of the happiest days of my life.

My writing changed after my return, becoming richer, denser, more textured. My detractors would sneer that I had more adjectives, but I felt that here I became a true Southern writer. My new book, Blood and Gold, is one of my few set elsewhere--in Florence, Venice and Rome, the only cities I love as much as New Orleans, partly because they have those same gorgeous textures and colors. And like us New Orleanians, the Italians adore their mothers. Out West, people think that if you call your mother every week, you need a psychiatrist. Down here, nobody is a bit ashamed of calling every day. In New Orleans, I found my mother again, and she's with me all the time.