![]() ![]() ![]() At the time, she was a relative literary unknown, a wheelchair-bound writer from Virginia, cared for by her mother while living with the chronic pain of rheumatoid arthritis. In fact, it's worthy to note that although originally published for an adult mass market, the teen interest was so strong that the books were later explicitly remarketed as Young Adult (YA) fare.Īndrews published Flowers in the Attic in 1979 at the age of 56. By creating these complex and often outrageous family sagas, the author allowed us clandestine access to the very subject matter the adults in our lives were shielding us from. ![]() Whether intentional (or altogether healthy), there was a formative, coming-of-age quality to the teen-girl culture that surrounded Andrews's stories. My own worn copy of Flowers in the Attic was gifted to me by an older, wiser summer camp counsellor, and passed along with the whispered warning, "the brother and sister do it." When I was all done and sufficiently shocked by its content, my copy went along to another girl who was not yet initiated. The hugely successful Gothic horrors were like an illicit drug – grown-up fairy tales full of sex, violence and the intrigue of wealth and privilege. ![]() Andrews novels to each other like they were contraband. When I was a teen in the early 1990s, young women covertly slipped V.C. ![]()
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