Flowers in the Attic at 45: the ‘awful and fabulous’ gothic megaseller that influenced Gillian Flynn and obsessed Roxane Gay

In 1978, Ann Patty, a young, inexperienced editor for Pocket Books, was on the subway with her friend Humphrey Evans, who told her about an “awful and fabulous” 98-page manuscript he’d read that day, in his role as assistant to a literary agent.

Patty, intrigued by Evans’ description, came by his apartment later to pick the manuscript up. She stayed up until 2am reading it, then promptly phoned him, saying that it was “some sort of brilliant” and that she “must have it”. That manuscript would become Flowers in the Attic (1979) by V.C. Andrews, who was 56 when it was published.

Initial reviews were not kind – one described it as “deranged swill”. But the book quickly became a runaway success, selling almost three million copies in its first year of publication.

Sensing they had a hit on their hands, Pocket Books quickly solicited a sequel. Petals on the Wind came out a year later and topped the New York Times mass-market paperback bestseller list. So too did the next two books in what became known as the Dollanganger series: If There Be Thorns (1981) and Seeds of Yesterday (1984).

Flowers in the Attic was adapted as a 1987 telemovie starring Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoos’ Nest’s Nurse Ratched) as the evil grandmother and Kristy Swanson (the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as Cathy Dollanganger, the story’s narrator. It was adapted again in 2014.

It has been 45 years since Flowers in the Attic was published, but it still looms large in the minds of many. As Tammy Oler wrote for Slate, “we are clearly not over Flowers in the Attic. For women of my generation, Cathy Dollanganger’s story continues to possess a weird, singular power.”

Murderous mothers and dubious consent

Flowers in the Attic is the story of, as a once “obsessed” Roxane Gay puts it: “Wealth! Children! An attic turned into a playground! Evil grandmother and eviler mother! Incest!”

The narrator, Cathy, is the second of the four Dollanganger siblings. When their father is killed in a car accident, their mother Corrine is unable to support the family. She was disinherited by her wealthy father Malcolm upon her marriage – and so now, Corrine decides, her only hope is return to her childhood home, Foxworth Hall, and try to get herself reinstated into his will.

There’s a catch, though. Malcolm does not know Corrine has children. When she and the children arrive at Foxworth Hall, she hides them away in the attic, assuring them they will only have to be there for a few days.

In the end, though, the four Dollanganger children – Cathy, her older brother Christopher, and their younger twin siblings Cory and Carrie – are locked in the attic for three years. During this time, Cathy and Chris become surrogate parents to the twins, which eventually culminates in the novel’s most notorious moment: an incestuous sexual encounter, in which Cathy’s consent is dubious at best, although she later assures Chris, “I could have stopped you if I’d really wanted to.”

An intensely claustrophobic book, Flowers in the Attic owes a lot to pulp Gothic novels. Typified by authors like Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney, these books were usually about young women trapped in mysterious houses with frightening men, a form Joanna Russ famously summed up with the phrase, “Someone’s trying to kill me, and I think it’s my husband.”

In Flowers in the Attic, though, the menace comes not from a husband (despite what happens between Cathy and Chris) but from older female relatives. Their primary jailer is their grandmother, who frequently addresses them as “devil’s spawn”. She is regularly cruel to them, and occasionally starves them. In one memorable scene, she covers Cathy’s blonde hair with tar.

Their mother, though, is ultimately even more menacing. As time passes, she visits the children less and less. After one bout of starvation, they start to receive sugar-covered doughnuts in their food. Soon afterwards, all four children start to become ill, which culminates in one of them dying.

Cathy and Chris realise the doughnuts have been laced with arsenic – and while they initially blame their grandmother, they later realise that their mother was actually responsible. (“I still cannot eat powdered donuts and am very suspicious of all white powdery substances,” wrote Gay in 2013.)

This shift, where the menacing husband of the pulp Gothic became the Dollangangers’ mother and grandmother, was arguably key to the appeal of the book to younger audiences. What is a more teenage experience, after all, than feeling unfairly oppressed and imprisoned by your family?

Indeed, that feeling may have come from Virginia (“V.C.”) Andrews’ own life: “When I wrote Flowers in the Attic, all of Cathy’s feelings about being in prison were my feelings,” Andrews told an interviewer in 1985.

Progressive arthritis had left her limited in terms of movement. A wheelchair user, she was largely dependent on her mother, who her biographer Andrew Neiderman describes as controlling. Her editor Patty, though, was more circumspect. “You could say that Virginia is locked in the attic and her mother is the grandmother,” Patty said. “But she seemed normal.”

According to her sister-in-law, Joan Andrews, the money Virginia made from her books enabled her to become more independent, buying her own home, a computer to write on, and a van that accomodated her wheelchair. “She became very mobile and loved getting out and about,” Joan told Buzzfeed.

The thrill of the forbidden

Flowers in the Attic was not originally marketed to teens. Like most pulp Gothics, it was published as a mass-market paperback, a form Patty described as “cheap editions not meant to endure, not intended for review, often selling in the hundreds of thousands but utterly unknown to the sophisticated, literary reader”.

Given this, it would have been easy for the book to completely disappear into the wilds of literary history, never to be thought of again. But a few things worked in its favour.

Firstly, it was published in the heyday of mass-market paperbacks. In the same year Flowers in the Attic was published, paperback rights for Judith Krantz’s novel Princess Daisy – which, coincidentally, also centres on a heroine raped by her brother at age 15 – were sold for a record $3.2 million: an indication of the paperback market boom of the time.

Secondly, Flowers in the Attic almost accidentally became a lead title for Pocket Books, due to a lack of any reprints of major hardcover bestsellers coming out in the month of its publication. This meant it received a much more substantial marketing push than it would have otherwise.

Thirdly, it benefited substantially from its iconic cover, which, due to said marketing push, featured in a lot of bookshop displays. The cover shows a heavily foiled image of a house with a keyhole cut-out over the attic window. Through the window, Cathy’s face is visible, but when the cover is opened, all four Dollanganger children are revealed.

The wholehearted embrace of the book by younger readers, however, was fundamental to its success. It combined a particularly teen-resonant form of the pulp Gothic with the scandal and taboo of more explicit books like Princess Daisy.

All of this contributed to a feeling that it was a book young people should not be reading, that even knowing about it was illicit and forbidden.

Of course, this just made them want to read it even more.

A style icon

Whether or not V.C. Andrews was a “good” writer is up for debate. Plenty of critics have derided her books – but those books have also clearly struck a chord with many, who still remember them very well, many decades later.

What she certainly was, though, was a distinctive writer. “It may be awful, but it is a style,” Patty said when defending the book to Pocket’s sales manager.

Neiderman, Andrews’ biographer, became her ghostwriter after she died of breast cancer in 1986. He studied that style intently and is still publishing books under her name.

She was also clearly an impactful writer. Andrews has influenced many other authors: (including, but not limited to, Gillian Flynn).

Decades after its publication, Flowers in the Attic in particular has proved to be iconic. It holds an enormous place in the collective cultural memory of people who read it growing up: even if all they remember is that “the brother and sister do it”.

Jodi McAlister does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.