V.C. Andrews Fans, I Know You Are Out There

Here, at last, is the essay about Flowers in the Attic.

Great essay, filled with very funny quotes from people who had devoured the books as pre-teens.

“These books really got me tingly, and they made me feel like my parents and teachers were oblivious fools,” a novelist friend says. “I read the damn things in class and in carpool and at Christian summer camp and no one ever thought to ask what the basic premises were. Also, they addressed two troubling issues that all teens struggle with, namely, incest and arsenic poisoning, which really helped me to feel a little less alone in the world.”

I know I struggled on a daily basis with arsenic poisoning when I was 13. Didn’t we all?

Mead writes:

Even now, I am powerless to resist Andrews. I know that Grandma will sedate Cathy one night and tar her flowing, tempting tresses; that Momma will fail to tell her new, much-younger man-friend that she’s got an anemic brood stashed away in the attic; and that Cory will die after eating one too many arsenic-powdered donuts. But she has me in her bony-fingered grip — again — anyway.

What sick trashy addictive books. I should read them again. I bet there are entire passages I remember word for word. However, the tar-in-the-platinum-hair debacle had most definitely slipped my mind.

“Bony-fingered” grip indeed.

(via Book Slut)