Hard to believe it's been twenty-five years since V.C. Andrews — gothic godmother to generations of preadolescent girls — published Flowers in the Attic, the runaway bestseller that really put incest and infanticide on the map for fifth graders. It's still being passed around girls' locker rooms, although with ninety million copies of her forty-plus novels in print, there's really no reason to share: every secondhand store across this great land seems to have at least one dog-eared, drooled-upon copy of her catnippy, extra-lite smut floating around.
For those of you who grew up on one of Saturn's moons, Flowers in the Attic begins the epic saga of the Dollanganger children, four Aryan siblings (fourteen-year-old Christopher, twelve-year-old Cathy, and five-year-old twins Carrie and Cory) whose strong, handsome father dies in a tragic accident and leaves their beautiful, glamorous mother to provide for them on her own. Unfortunately, Momma was raised to be a socialite, not a bacon-earner, so she crawls back to her ancestral Virginia mansion to the cruel, fabulously rich father who disowned her when — gasp! — she married her half-uncle. Of course, her dying daddy would never write her back into the will if he knew she'd borne four devil's spawn, so it's "Up to the attic 'til grandpa kicks off" for the apple-cheeked fruit of her unholy union.
Fortunately for curious teens everywhere, puberty makes a surprise guest appearance during their three-and-a-half-year incarceration, leaving Chris and Cathy to grapple with "little hard apples [poking] out my chest" and "that hillock of his growing maleness before his strong thighs, beginning to swell." (I'll leave you to guess which sib wound up grappling what protrusion.)
When I was eleven, sex had only been explained in clinical, reproductive terms. This left me puzzled as to why movie- and TV-people were always risking life and limb to get naked with each other. Every moment of my existence then was fraught with worries that I would "do it wrong", whatever "it" was, and be ridiculed and humiliated for being, well, a child. So I, like almost every other now-twenty-to-forty-year-old woman I know, I turned to books for answers.
One Cleveland-raised friend cites Portnoy's Complaint as a formative influence, most notably the scene in which Portnoy masturbates with a piece of liver he's been sent to the butcher's to pick up for dinner. (So much for Middle America and family values.)
But by far the most popular item on my friends' reference shelves (alongside Judy Blume's Forever; Wifey and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret) was Flowersin the Attic.
With its peculiar, tantalizing mix of prudish naiveté and breathless carnality, Flowers was deeply dirty without being intimidating. Chris and
A friend was traumatized by a description of Chris's penis that isn't even in the book.
Cathy were so guileless and kind that even after 200 pages of lingering looks, unnameable urges and sadistic whippings with a willow switch, they were still straddling the divide between childhood and adulthood, just like I was.
The sex parts, rare and oblique as they were, felt familiar to me, too — my first little horny urges also felt dirty and wrong and confusing. When Cathy, letting Chris treat her wounds after being beaten by their grandmother, says "it felt odd to be kissed while lying naked in his arms . . . and not right," I could certainly relate to the sentiment, if not the circumstances. And I wasn't alone.
"I can't remember what I reviewed six months ago," a magazine-writer friend admits, "but I could tell you every plot detail from the Judy Blume, Sweet Valley High or Ramona books. Those were all exciting, but Flowers in the Attic was a different kind of 'Whoa!'"
Another friend says that she's still traumatized by a description of Chris' penis that isn't even in the book: "She calls it his 'knobby thing'. That still pops up in my head every once in a while, and I'm like 'Thank you, V.C. Andrews!'"
"I remember it being more disturbing than exciting," the guy in the office next to me recalls. "It's kind of like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, where you've read it and you're wondering, 'Wait, did she just get raped or what?'"
So what made it so thrilling? Andrews was a master tease, building tension as Chris and Cathy's relationship gradually becomes overtly sexual. When will Chris succumb to the siren call of Cathy's hot new ballerina bod?
"The books made me feel like my parents and teachers were oblivious fools,"a friend relates.
While she's doing her ballet exercises in a white leotard so sheer that her flesh shows pink through it? As he gazes upon her filmy Christmas nightie and shiny, much-brushed hair? When they lie naked together on a tatty mattress, soaking up the last wan rays of sunshine that pass through their attic window?
Maybe none of us proto-pervs found exactly the answers we were looking for, but for me, at least, the Action in the Attic raised some questions that I hadn't known enough to ask at that age — questions about why people want sex, about the thrill of teasing, about the siren call of secrecy and taboo. It would be years yet before I'd have firsthand knowledge of the mechanics, but some of the impulses became a little less obscure. And like a lover, the book was infinitely sexier for being forbidden.
"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."
The rest of the Dollanganger books — and the bulk of Andrews' subsequent series — are even purpler in their prose, and are largely comprised of the same elements in different configurations, like Mexican food for the horny preteen soul.
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. The sex parts aren't so exciting and new this time, but it's no less creepy and gross to hear a girl wax on romantically about how her brother touches her "so tenderly with magical tingling fingers and lips." This time around, the moment that makes me gasp out loud isn't the one in which the dirty little monkeys finally get it on. This time, it was the moment when I found myself actually rooting for them.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Emily
Mead is a freelance writer and scavenger. She lives in
Brooklyn.
