Flowers In The Attic
Flowers In The Attic
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V. C. Andrews on Flowers In The Attic
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
A secret held for forty yearsThe premise was borrowed, not invented. Andrews’ cousin Pat told Andrew Neiderman, for his 2022 biography, that a young doctor Andrews met during a teenage surgery at the University of Virginia Medical Center had confided that he and his sisters had been hidden inside a Charlottesville mansion for years to protect a family inheritance. Andrews carried that seed for roughly four decades before she sat down to write. By the time she wrote her 1978 pitch letter to agent Anita Diamant, the pressure to tell it had become something she described as almost involuntary.
All the while I was writing other tales… one kept bearing hard on my mind, begging to be told.
The pitch letter closed with a declaration that cut against the usual commercial framing of a debut novel. After a carefully constructed plot summary, Andrews dropped the standard novelist’s distance entirely.
I call my novel, which is not truly fiction… FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC.
The ellipsis is hers. She was not claiming documentary truth so much as insisting that the emotional reality of confinement inside the book was real, sourced from somewhere she knew personally.
When asked in a 1985 interview with critic Douglas E. Winter what the book had cost her to write, she did not talk about research or craft. She located the answer in Cathy Dollanganger, the novel’s teenage narrator who spends years locked in her grandmother’s attic while her mother pursues a new fortune.
When I wrote Flowers in the Attic, all of Cathy’s feelings about being in prison were my feelings. So that, when I read them now, I cry.
Readers who found the attic and its horrors too extreme to be imagined regularly wrote to Andrews insisting the novel must be memoir. She pushed back on that conflation, and the distinction she drew reveals something about where the real pressure in the book actually came from: not abuse she had suffered, but an ordinary childhood that felt like an injury of a different kind.
A lot of people think I was tortured, but my parents didn’t do anything. They didn’t beat me. They didn’t whip me. They didn’t lock me away. I didn’t even go hungry. And I had a lot of pretty clothes.
How she wrote it
Standing up, ten hours at a stretchThe physical conditions under which Andrews wrote the novel were extreme enough that her sister-in-law Joan documented them years later. Andrews’ spine was largely fused from a condition that had developed in her teens and worsened through failed surgeries; sitting for long periods was impossible. Joan’s account, preserved in Neiderman’s biography, gives the clearest picture of what the daily work actually looked like.
Her early novels were written standing up at a chest-high desk using a typewriter. She would be at that desk sometimes 10 to 12 hours writing. She once showed me the soles of her shoes where they were worn through and the bones were protruding on the bottom of her feet.
Neiderman, who became Andrews’ ghostwriter after her death in 1986 and knew her working methods in detail, described one particular physical arrangement she maintained while writing. He reported it in a YouTube interview later catalogued by Fanhattan Sf.
[paraphrased from audio] While writing, Andrews kept a mirror positioned in front of her, so she was “looking at herself, looking into herself essentially, literally looking into herself.”
For the incestuous relationship between the two oldest Dollanganger children, Cathy and Chris, Andrews faced a gap she could not fill from memory. Her mother had prevented her from dating as a young woman, and she had no adult experience of romantic or sexual intimacy. According to Neiderman, she solved the problem practically: before writing those scenes, she interviewed her adult niece, asking her to explain what physical and emotional intimacy felt like. What the novel’s most controversial passages cost in craft terms was a research process far more personal than a library visit. Andrews described the kind of horror she was after in a way that explains why the domestic and the erotic were inseparable from the gothic in her imagination.
I loved the fairy tales. But there is an element of horror in fairy tales, so that when I would go through the woods, I was always looking for something — a witch, an ogre, something scary — and it was never there, and that was a little bit disappointing. I didn’t want a real horror, like a rapist or a murderer, but I wanted a fairy-tale horror.
The personal thread
The wheelchair she refused to be defined byAndrews worked to keep her disability separate from the public story of her fiction, and the effort was not passive. After a 1980 People magazine profile that ran a photograph of her in her wheelchair without her permission, she wrote to a relative in terms that made her position unmistakable.
I hated the photo of me in the chair! I refuse to allow pictures of me sitting in that thing — but they sneaked in one, and I couldn’t tell when the photographer was shooting the entire time she was here — about six hours… From now on I am demanding editorial and pictorial control or NO interview!
The anger was not simply about vanity. Andrews objected to a specific narrative that journalists built around her body: the spectacle of a disabled woman producing dark fiction. In personal correspondence cited in Neiderman’s biography, she named the caricature directly.
Some sort of paralyzed creature struggling to type out her fantasies.
She went further, describing her depiction in coverage as “The Humpback of the church of bestsellers, a creature dressed in beautiful clothes to distract the viewer from seeing the abnormalities.” The press wanted her disability to be the explanation for the darkness in her work. She refused that equation.
The same pattern appeared when coverage described her mobility in terms she considered both inaccurate and belittling. She was specific about the error in a 1985 interview with Douglas E. Winter, and the precision of her complaint shows how carefully she monitored the distance between her actual body and the body journalists described.
A newspaper once said that I was ‘paralysed’. It made me really angry, because I am not paralysed. They think that if you are in a wheelchair, you are paralysed, or else you would be up on your feet. And I do walk; but since they don’t see me walk, they don’t think I can.
What she wants us to sit with
The shade before the sunlightAndrews gave her clearest account of what she believed fiction was for in a Contemporary Authors interview, framing it as a principle rather than a description of Flowers in the Attic specifically. The statement doubles as the novel’s structural logic: the attic is not the destination but the condition the characters must pass through.
There is no beauty without ugliness, and no enjoyment without suffering; we have to have the shade in order to see the light, and that is all I do in a story, put my characters in the shade — and try before the ending, to have them in the sunlight…. My novels are based on dreams, and situations taken from my own life, in which I change the pattern so that what might have happened actually does happen — and therein lies the tale.
librariantolibrarian.wordpress.com, “Shreddings of the Heart: Who Was V. C. Andrews? | Librarian to Librarian”The novel’s most contested relationship is not between the children and the grandmother who locks them away, but between the children and their mother Corrine, who lets it happen. Andrews dedicated the book to her own mother, Lillian, who controlled most of her daily life and, according to Neiderman, never read it. When a Washington Post journalist pressed Andrews in 1981 on what that relationship meant, she answered in five words.
Mothers wear two faces like most people.