“I never watched horror movies as a little kid. Once my wife and I started dating, I found out that she had LOVED horror movies from pretty much the moment she saw her first one. After we moved moved in together, we often did all-day movie marathons. There was a cheap, crummy non-chain video store nearby, and you could get old movies for about a dollar. So we’d go through the horror section, her excitedly picking out classics that I’d been too chickenshit to watch growing up. In this way I went through The Omen (I and II), The Exorcist (I and II) and Hellraiser in a day.
Anyhow, after a while, I started to want to pick out movies, especially ones whose covers had traumatized me as a kid when I’d accidentally walk into the wrong section at the video store. But, for some reason, the cover for “Flowers in the Attic” had always struck me as confusingly un-scary and just odd. So one day I picked it up and told my wife, “We should rent this! It looks terrible! I like the surly lady!”
“No,” my wife said. “It’s soooo bad. The whole plot is basically incest.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Well, it’s not really in the movie. The movie just sucks.”
“Okay?”
“The books are better.”
I have still never read any V.C. Andrews books or seen the movie, but it was such a delicious thing to discover that my wife, who’d grown up in a very Christian household, had evidently spent her early teen years sneakily reading titillating, trashy books about brothers and sisters trapped in attics together. Which struck me as fine, really—-the literary and femininely verbal obverse of guys’ very visual need to stare at the Maidenform section of the Sears catalogue. It seemed like healthy curiosity, and my wife seemed unruffled about it. Very adult, even.”
*
“I was ten years old and my mom forbid me to read it, so I stole it off the library bookshelves and read it anyway.”
*
“At summer camp, our counselor would gather us all around her bunk bed after lights out and read it to us, like a bedtime story.”
*
“Every year in June, the entire town would hold Garage Sale Weekend. Garage Sale Weekend was Christmas and homecoming and a shopping trip all rolled into one gloriously sweaty weekend. My mom would let me leave the house alone and rollerblade through the neighborhood with my friends, buying whatever I could carry, which was fairly exciting since I was a very poor rollerblader. One year I got a practically-new Super Nintendo for me and a green foot bath for my mom. It was green on purpose, not green from old feet. It was the best. She never used it, which hurt my feelings slightly at the time but in retrospect was a very sound decision.
Anyhow, this year–I think it was between seventh and eighth grade–I was rummaging through the cartons of books out front of one house when I came across Flowers. It was the old one with the classic keyhole cover, and something about those pale kids’ terrified faces struck me. I’d barely even been able to finish Christopher Pike books, but something told me I was ready for something really scary.
It should be said at this point that I grew up in a fairly wholesome household and my working understanding of sex was vague at best. I made it about two-thirds of the way through the book, finding myself alternately fascinated and absolutely horrified, before I knocked on my parents’ door, thrust the book into my mother’s hands and said, ‘I don’t think I’m supposed to be reading this yet,’ and went back to being twelve for a while.
Ten years later, I was in my first real girlfriend’s bedroom and found an identical copy on her shelf. I was ready then.”
*
“I saw it on the shelf of a rental cabin on vacation with my family when I was nine. About five minutes into it, my mom saw what I was reading, grabbed it away, and said ‘That’s not for you.’”
*
“Okay, so, a friend tried to show me the movie at a sleepover in probably 1988, on VHS, and I got too scared and turned it off. I suspect I finally read the book in seventh grade because my English teacher was one of those Reading-is-Reading types who thought that reading Adult Books in seventh grade was enriching but had a library full of mass market paperbacks that had probably been hers. And then I know I read every single one of the Flowers in the Attic books in quick succession.
I’m not exactly sure where I got them–my parents let me buy pretty much whatever I wanted when it came to books. I suspect we’re closing in on 20 years since I read them? I remember arsenic donuts and tetanus from a rusty nail…I remember their getting whipped and the brother-fucking, and I don’t have siblings so it sort of didn’t seem like that big of a deal.”
*
“Walking home from school with another girl, who pulled a copy out of her backpack and whispered to me, ‘The brother and sister do it.’”
[Image via Flickr]
Tags: flowers in the attic, puberty, reader stories, reading, vc andrews day
I have no memory of the first time I read FitA. It’s like someone downloaded the whole story into my head at the appropriate moment.
(Oddly enough, this is the same experience I have for the Star Wars trilogy. I didn’t see it for a first time, it was just Always There.)
I don’t remember my first encounter with it, but I’m pretty sure it was something like, every girl in my 6th grade class had already read it and so I went looking for it at the library so I could be in on the conversation.
I think I mentioned in another thread that my 8th-grade English teacher had all the V.C. Andrews on her classroom shelf and heartily book-talk’d them to us. She also suggested we read Go Ask Alice, so…thanks for that, teach.
Go Ask Alice was definitely required, class reading for some of the English classes in my school. But not the ones I was in (the honors classes) which I thought was strange. Same for Anthem and 1984 and a couple others, so I stole them from friends in those classes and read them anyway.
I read Go Ask Alice secretly in our school library. I have NO IDEA why it was in our school library.
It was in mine too, I’m pretty sure. I read it more than once. I wasn’t surprised when it turned out to be fiction, but did anyone else read It Happened To Nancy? That one is ALSO fiction apparently, which weirdly broke my heart when I found out a couple years ago.
I didn’t read that, but my cat’s name is Nancy, and now I want to know what happened to her.
She dies of AIDS, after being raped by a guy she meets at a Garth Brooks concert.
So be careful about introducing her to country music – feline AIDS is the number one killer of domestic cats. (*Debbie Downer Sad Horn Noise*)
I did fieldwork in a high school library a few years ago and was surprised to find it had Go Ask Alice on the shelves. By then I figured since it had been thoroughly debunked, a lot of libraries wouldn’t keep it around, but it is an interesting book still. Pretty quintessential example of groovy 70s anti-drug literature.
Now I wonder if the editor/author (who did It Happened to Nancy too, right?) did any books about, say, Satanic cults in the 80s.
My first encounter with it was LAST NIGHT because somehow I missed out on this as a child and I wanted to be able to appreciate V.C. Andrews Day to the fullest. It was creepy as fuck, guys, and I am 26. Whaaaaat.
“At summer camp, our counselor would gather us all around her bunk bed after lights out and read it to us, like a bedtime story.”
This is hysterical. I love those inappropriate-in-retrospect moments, the absurd hovering under the surface of normal life.
FINE
I’ll start reading it
Right, dug out my unfinished copy. I will read it and I WILL FINISH IT NO MATTER HOW THE AWKWARD DIALOGUE MAKES ME CRINGE
God, I’d forgotten about the arsenic doughnut until just now. Also, good for the 12-year-old who handed the book back. I wish I’d had such foresight, because I definitely would have not had such scary dreams.
THE TWELVE YEAR OLD WAS ME
the twelve year old was me
Hahah. Poor Mallory. I read it in high school after a friend encouraged me. She always recommended great books. I made it about half way, and was bored. I was disappointed by the incest. I need a bit more to fill my need. Although it did start me on a path of shipping incestuous relationships. Thanks, VC.
It’s not on Kindle; my heart is broken. There’s one for a penny on Amazon UK- worth Super Express Delivery? I think it might be.
I was at a slumber party (haaaaaa) this weekend, and we were all talking about FitA. The one girl who hadn’t read it found an ebook copy by goggling “download Flowers in the Attic book”. I don’t know how you feel about that, but it is what it is.
Reading these stories makes me sad that I am no longer able to ask my mom what was going through her head when she finally allowed me to read Flowers. Better yet, I’d love to know why she herself was so transfixed, having grown up in a very catholic household. My mom was probably one of her biggest fans and owned every single paperback. I still remember they were kept tucked away in her closet in a big, overflowing paper bag.
I was an avid reader and in way too much of a hurry to grow up, so I had been asking for years if I could read these books she seemed to enjoy so much on our summer camping trips; the ones I would excitedly point out when the newest one would pop up in the Zellers paperback aisle, the books I even spent my meager allowance on (on more than one occasion) as a birthday or Christmas gift. I have no idea how old I was when I was finally allowed to read Flowers, though I’m fairly certain it was too young. I wasn’t far in before I finally understood why she had said no for so long, and even more confused that she had finally said yes. By the end, I was appalled and horrified, but absolutely hooked and grateful all the same.
Thanks, momma.
Okay, I’m starting to feel like the wimp of all time. A neighbour a year older than I was gave me this when I was 12. Toasters, it freaked me out so much. I think it was my first encounter with evil. In books or in life. I felt so dirty after I read this and I couldn’t un-read it. This is the best series idea ever.
If I see my niece with this, ever, I will probably rip it out of her hands and stomp on it. Uh, maybe she won’t be as sheltered as I was. Huh – without the internet, this was the worst thing I had access to in a white suburb in Canada in 1987. And it blew my tiny mind. I was so outraged. A mother! Putting her kids in an ATTIC! And the evil grandma! Oh man, I don’t know how I survived.
Flowers didn’t make me feel that way, but there was a book I read in my twenties (!!!) that did, because it was supposedly true, or based on a true story, I forget what it was called but it was an autobiographical novel where the main characters father sexually abused her basically her whole life and the mother knew and… ugghhhh I wanted it to get better for her so I kept reading but it never really did? And I definitely wish I could unread it. The next time I started reading something like that (this time a man who as a child was sexually abused by grandmother AND mother, also purportedly true) I put it down about a chapter in, because I knew I couldn’t handle it.
By the time I was 18 I was living in a small resort town in the Canadian Rockies and one of my friends had disclosed horrific details of her abuse at the hands of her father. I wonder if my reading that made me more able to understand? I couldn’t stop reading FiTA, even though at 12 I knew it was “trash.”
Now I’m super curious to know what the book is.
I don’t think I”ve ever read the Flowers in the Attic books, but I have read a lot of her other books, becuase like, every time I went to the school library in high school I would read one. Like, every time. The only one I remember is the one with the girl who is half black, and she has a quasi incestusous relationship with her stepbrother or half brother or something, and she goes to live with her rich white grandma. I don’t know which series that is.
That’s the one I started with! My mom was reading it or something and I picked it up because the cover/title were interesting. Was it called “Rain” I think? And the whole series had weather-related titles?
After that, I went to the two 4-part series, Orphans and the other one, because my mom had the book club all-in-one versions, including the 5th book that always had the 4 girls come together on some horrible adventure. They were good starter books, perhaps, and got me to read FitA eventually. I had to dig all the V.C. Andrews books out of my mom’s box – I have no idea what she thought about me reading them, but we did trade some of the more recent ones when I got them from the library!)
(Also, I think this is an amusing marker of my mom’s & my ages – she was 20 in 1982, so right there at the age to have been reading FitA when it was new, and I was reading them at 13/14 in 1997, 1998.)
I don’t remember my first encounter with the book or when I found out there was incest, but I remember watching part of the movie on TV as a kid and being SO UPSET by the scene where the grandmother breaks the ballerina music box to punish the kids. Like, that one scene was burned into my brain for years afterward.
I don't remember my first encounter with the book or when I found out there was incest, but I remember watching part of the movie on TV as a kid and being SO UPSET by the scene where the grandmother breaks the ballerina music box to punish the kids. Like, that one scene was burned into my brain for years afterward.
Camp Dunmore, 1988, 10 years old. Found a mildewed copy in the social hall or something. Tore through the rest of the series and my mom, bless her heart, even BOUGHT me the prequel as a surprise gift because she knew I “liked those books.”
She had no idea what they were about, obvs.
I discovered the whole FiTA series on the bookshelf at home the summer before grade 6. I devoured it, and my mom took me to used book stores and I picked up all the Casteel books and My Sweet Audrina (which I think is brilliant). I used to tell my neighbour all the salacious plot points when she would help me with my paper route — probably the only reason she helped me, especially since she was DEFINITELY not allowed to read That Kind of Book.
In grade 6, we had a weekly reading diary to fill out. Title, author, number of pages read, brief sentence giving a plot summary. I was reading the Casteel series and re-reading the Dollanganger series for probably the third time that year (plus a lot of Stephen King) and my teacher pulled me aside one day and asked, “Does your mom know you are reading these books?” “Yes!” I answered, “She bought them for me!” It ended that discussion.
I don’t remember how old I was, but I definitely remember being in the bathtub reading when I came across the first brother/sister sex scene. It still makes my head feel funny just remembering.
My best friend lent me her copy, and intimated that it was trashy but impossible to put down. I read it and recall being mostly horrified and repulsed. It was kinky, but not my kind of kinky, and I wasn’t sure what it said about me that she thought I would like it. I was probably eleven or twelve at the time. I didn’t really know how to deal with explicit content in books people lent me – I had the exact same reaction to the Illuminatus trilogy a few years later (although I think I was so put off by some oral sex description that I didn’t actually finish the book). Funny because I was all about smut by myself on the internet, but I couldn’t process it when it was in a book I might have to discuss with a friend afterwards.
Weirdly I don’t think Flowers has EVER come up in any real-life conversation I’ve had in 28 years of being alive, other than the conversation I had with my friend before she lent it to me.
Hahah. Poor Mallory. I read it in high school after a friend encouraged me. She always recommended great books. I made it about half way, and was bored. I was disappointed by the incest. I need a bit more to fill my need. Although it did start me on a path of shipping incestuous relationships. Thanks, VC.
Now I'm super curious to know what the book is.
I saw it on TV when I was very young and I wasn’t sure what was happening. But even then a feeling stayed within me that something wasn’t very right. The next time it came on TV, I was much older and understood parts that I didn’t before. It took me two more times to really get to the bottom of what was making me feel so unsure…it was that this film was one of those things that you could hold no conversations about. So just to feel less awkward about it, I showed it to a friend in fast-forward.
Still no conversations, until now.