Hello. This was somewhat useful to me. I am an English teacher (10th grade) and my classes are reading FITA this six weeks. Some students vaguely remember or know of some elements, but most of them are entirely new to this story. Your essay is not directly useful for the class, but it does give me an insight into how to approach it and how to prepare the students for its "purpler" areas.
--MJT
03/05 |
In my grade at junior high school, I was probably the only preteen girl who didn't wildly love Flowers in the Attic. I just found the story too horrible and weird for even the taboo sex bits to overcome. But that may have been because I was getting my lit-porn from Delta of Venus, which I'd found stashed at the back of the 7th grade councillor's personal bookshelf. Now THAT blew my 12-year-old mind. I guess being a precocious reader has to have some sort of non-nerdly reward.
--JMB
08/22 |
absolutely classic; I knew I wasn't the only one whose sexual awakening came about over v.c. andrews novels. I remember a sultry summer day, ten or eleven years old, on the slide at the little park down our street. I was surrounded by three of my soon-to-be-no-longer-naive girlfriends, eyes wide and mouths slightly open unconsciously as I read aloud page 333 from the Heaven series, where the step father gives into his lust of his twelve-year-old daughter and is muttering things like "must teach you. . . .show you. . ." as he "uses his strong thighs to push my legs apart, my blows as ineffectual as a fly to him" or something to that effect. Needless to say I was implored to re-read this page and oh, many others from her various series, though Flowers started it off indeed. What a familiarly, awesomely written article. You laid your finger right on the button, no pun intended.
--lsr
08/21 |
this piece is 24K gold. awesome. thank you for putting it up.
--FRL
08/21 |
Brilliant. I haven't read any of VC Andrews (I've heard her name is actually now the house name for a bunch of ghost writers) but I love the idea of girls getting their first sexual inklings from a gothic horror/incest porn novel you can buy in supermarkets. Apparently the lastest Andrews is about a girl forced to take her male twin's place by her wicked, batty mother. Just goes to prove how kinky supposedly normal people and things are.
--PST
08/20 |
VC Andrews DEFINIED masturbation for me as a gradeschooler. "...And that is where he took me, a filthy mattress..."
LOL!!
--kk
08/20 |
Was having the suckiest of days until I read this hilarious piece. Sister Marie Terese confiscated my copy of “Flowers In the Attic” during English class. The next day, (I get much enjoyment from picturing her eagerly devouring it cover to cover in one night) she confronted me on the “act of copulation” it included and told me that she would not be returning the book. I didn't know what that word meant, but I was sure by the look on her face that it was pretty damn bad. But now I had to know what copulation was. I informed her that the book was an Easter gift from my mother (it was!) and that she better return it or I'd have my mother call her. The thought of having to discuss copulation with another adult woman must have been too much for her, because she gave it back. That afternoon I cracked the binding on my Webster's dictionary for the first time. Then, I finished the book in one night looking for that section!
In college, I graduated to the goth fiction of Anne Rice for my sex ed. I'd be happy to submit an article on that subject.
--sam
08/19 |
This was so much better than that hired-killer piece. Good god. Nail on the head. I grew up in the same lit-as-porn shielded world. This story was feminine without being awful and feminine.
--slg
08/19 |
I'm now 40, but when I was a teenager in the small town I grew up in, sex was still whispered about ("they did it!") but judged to be ok if "they were really in love". In a warped way, I carried that same attitude with me when I read the Flowers in the Attic series. I totally rooted for Cathy and Chris, because obviously their love was real and pure enough to negate the whole incest thing! Oh what a romantic fool I was!
--Kali
08/19 |
I just wanted to thank Emily Mead for calling Flowers in the Attic out on the carpet for what it really is. A novel about sex.
I got my copy as a hand-me-down from Mom, who usually wasted her time with blood & gore from the likes of John Saul. (ugh.)
SHe threw it on my bed and announced that it had stolen two days from her that she could never get back. That may've been the reason I went in with less than no expectation with regard to it's entertainment value, but at least Mom finished it, it had to be worth SOMEthing.
I must've read it four times before Andrews came out with another, then another. I snatched them up just as fast.
All the time thinking I was reading a grown-up novel about a family troubled by an overly-religious father and wicked grandmother. Nobody knew how focused I was on the sexual content, and I was more than a little ashamed by it.
Emily's comments on the story let me know I'm the only one with those dirty little phrases indelibly burned in my mind.
--SB
08/19 |
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