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V. C. Andrews
Source: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 4, editors Agnes Garrett and Helga P. McCue, Gale Research Inc. (Detroit, MI, ©1990). Born Virginia Cleo Andrews, June 6, in Portsmouth, Va.; died of cancer, December 19, 1986, in Virginia Beach, Va.; daughter of William Henry (a tool and die maker) and Lillian Lilnora (a telephone operator; maiden name, Parker) Andrews. Education: Educated in Portsmouth, Va. Home: Virginia Beach, Va. Agent: Anita Diamant, The Writers' Workshop, 310 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017 (NOTE: Please do not write to this address - it is no longer current.). Career Writer. Formerly worked as a fashion illustrator, commercial artist, portrait artist, and gallery exhibitor. Awards, Honors Professional Woman of the Year from the City of Norfolk, Virginia, 1984. Writings, Novels:
Adaptations, Motion Pictures Flowers in the Attic, New World Pictures, 1987. Work in Progress A novel based in thirteenth-century France. Sidelights Born Virginia Cleo Andrews in Portsmouth, Virginia, the third child and first daughter to William Henry, a tool and dye maker, and Lillian Lilnora Parker, a telephone operator. "I was bought up in a working-class environment, with a father who loved to read as much as I did. When I was seven he took me to the public library and signed me up for my first library card. He went home with two books. I went home with nine. "Books opened doors I hadn't even realized were there. they took me up and out of myself, back into the past, forward into the future; put me on the moon, placed me in places, in jungles, everywhere. When finally I did reach London and Paris--I'd been there before." (1) "I loved Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe...moody books, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Thomas Hardy, books with atmosphere; Russian novels with rain and stormy weather." (2) "I never had the conscious thought of wanting to escape into another world; it's just that I didn't see fairies dancing on the lawn, I didn't see giants and witches, and I wanted to." (3) Although Andrews' father was an avid reader, the family kept only three books in their home. "They were the Bible, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, and The Navy Man's Journal. The Tarzan got me really turned on to fiction--a man living in the trees with apes! From the Journal I learned to send signal across the water." (3) "I was happy until I became an adolescent. then life comes at you too fast. People think that when you mature physically, you mature mentally as well, but you don't. Then you get confused. I was very pretty, and some fathers of my little girlfriends made advances. This threw me. but I was always wise enough to get out, to run away. I did a lot of running away, disappearing suddenly." (2) "I never wanted to be an ordinary housewife in the kitchen. I used to look at my mother and her sisters and all the pretty young girls who got married. All of a sudden, they were drudges. 'I'm not going to let this happen to me!' I said. I had no intention of getting married till after thirty, but life kinda threw me a little curve." (2) During her late teens, Andrews developed orthopedic problems that eventually left her an invalid, having to rely on the care of her mother and the use of crutches and a wheelchair. "I had a bout of growing bone which threw my body out of alignment. But the doctors would not believe me when I said my hip hurt. They said, 'You walk too gracefully; you can't possibly hurt; you look too good.' I found out that looking too good is a terrible way to go into a doctor's office. They don't take you seriously. They think women are vain anyway. "When it finally became obvious that the bone spur had thrown my spine out of alignment, it led me into a bout with arthritis, which I needn't have had if they had taken bone spur off immediately. This went on for four years, starting when I was about eighteen. Then they began to correct the damage with operations. I have had four major ones and have one more coming up. I can have corrective surgery, but I'm a little leery of doctors because they made mistakes with me. One doctor had a small stroke while he was operating. The saw slipped and he cut off the socket of my right hip." (4) Psychic experiences played an important role in Andrews' life. A firm believer of ESP and reincarnation, she claimed to have known, because of psychic flashes, that she was going to be crippled. "As a child, I really felt in my bones that I was not gong to lead an ordinary life. I had psychic moments which showed me I was going to have trouble, and that eventually I was going to end up using crutches. I was very angry at the time. these visions occurred often, like fate preparing me so that I'd be able to cope, a sort of kindness to get me ready. "I have adjusted to my way of living. I really don't think I'm missing out on too much. I think I'm happier than a lot of people who walk perfectly normal." (4) "It's not that I'm a hostage. That would mean that someone is deliberately holding me a prisoner. I can go out. I don't feel like a hostage. In fact sometimes I rather like it. "I always have a wonderful excuse not to see people I don't want to see. I find my characters much more interesting than the ones I meet." (4) With the assistance of tutors, Andrews graduated from high school, then completed a four-year art course. After her father's death, when she was twenty, the family moved to St. Louis, then to Arizona where Andrews supported herself without much enthusiasm as a commercial artist. "I was a professional artist--painting oils, acrylics, watercolors and portraits. I never liked it as much as I like writing, but it was easy. "We needed the extra income....And I sold everything I painted. "In order to sell paintings today you've got to paint in a way I didn't like. I felt I wasn't being true to myself.... "So I stopped painting and picked up a book on writing and started writing." (5) "When I was a child I thought it boring to be only me for a whole lifetime, and so I thought the perfect thing for me to be would be an actress who would play many parts, and be many people. Since life often has a way of diverting you from your chosen path, I became an artist, and was still unsatisfied, for an artist is an artist, during the same thing every day. then I began to write, and discovered to my delight, in writing f my characters, I assumed their bodies, and their minds, and literally, I became what they were, and so in a way when i write, I am on stage, speaking the lines, directing, producing, etc. "It takes about fifty pages before I can begin to really identify with my characters, so they do take me up and out of myself to such a degree my own life becomes secondary. As Flowers in the Attic, the situation was not pleasant, but there is no beauty without ugliness, and no enjoyment without suffering, we have to have the shade in order to see the light, and that is all I do in a story, put my characters in the shade - and try before the ending, to have them in the sunlight." (6) Andrews produced from thirty to forty pages a night, usually typing in bed, but often writing while standing up in a body brace. "I'm a very self-driven person, motivated by what is within me. I only begin to write a story when it has to come out of me. I trust my instinct." (7) Her output was prodigious, completing nine books in seven years; each of them was turned down. A major breakthrough was achieved when she submitted a novel called The Obsessed and was told by editors that her 290,000 word story--two boxes of manuscript pages--showed promise but was simply too long. Encouraged, Andrews began revising extensively and came up with a ninety-eight page version she titled Flowers in the Attic. Early readers responded favorable but agreed that she should get "more gutsy." "[I began to] deal with all those unspeakable things my mother didn't want me to write about, which exactly what I wanted to do in the first place." (2) "I stopped avoiding confrontation and all the things that made me feel uncomfortable." (8) 1979. A tale of child abuse and incest, V. C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic rocketed to the best-seller list only two weeks after it was published. It is the story of the four Dollanganger children. The offspring of incestuous union, the children are locked up in an attic because if their grandfather learns of their existence, he will cut off their mother out of his will. Forgotten by their unfeeling mother, physically beaten by their sadistic grandmother, the children turn to each other for love. Andrews sold the novel to Pocket Books for $7,500 and dedicated it to her mother. "She hasn't even read the books. She never reads any. She thinks they're all lies anyway." (8) "It is so appropriate to color hope yellow," she wrote in the prologue. "Like that sun we seldom saw. And as I begin to copy from the old memorandum journals that I kept for so long, a title comes as inspired, Open the Window and Stand in the Sunshine. Yet, I hesitate to name our story that. For I think of us more as flowers in the attic. Paper flowers. Born so brightly colored, and fading duller through all those long, grim, deary, nightmarish days when we were held prisoners of hope, and kept captives by greed. But, we were never to color even one of our paper blossoms yellow. "So, like Charles Dickens, in this work of 'fiction' I will hide myself away behind a false name, and live in fake places, and I will pray to God that those who should will hurt when they read what I have to say. Certainly God in his infinite mercy will see that some understanding publisher will put my words in a book, and help grind the knife that I hope to wield." (1) The sequel, Petals on the Wind, also became an instant success, rising to the number one position and remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for nineteen weeks. Petals' popularity was so great that it even caused Flowers to reappear on the list for a brief stint. If There Be Thorns, the third part of the Dollanganger trilogy, continued Andrews' impressive track record, attaining the number two slot on most best-seller list, the second week after its release. While the books' themes of incest, misogyny, rape, and revenge have outraged some readers, others, particularly adolescent girls who constitute the major proportion of Andrews' readership, have found the mixture irresistible. In fact, all three of the Dollanganger novels have been record breakers for Pocket Books, the first two alone selling over seven million copies within two years. In order to promote the sales of a first novel by an unknown author, her editor, Ann Patty, then associated with Pocket Books, instituted a massive publicity campaign, complete with complimentary preview editions, haunting radio advertisement, and aggressive in-store merchandising. The boost combined with the book's chilling cover graphics and controversial themes. "Not long after my first novel, Flowers in the Attic, was published, many letters came to fill my mailbox, clearly indicating that most of my readers think I am writing about my own life. Only in someways is this true. Cathy Dollanganger's persona is not mine, but her way of responding to the traumatic events in her life reflects what mine would have been in the same situation. Her emotions are my emotions. Her dilemmas are somewhat similar to mine, but not precisely. "It's difficult to say where a writer leaves off and the character takes over. One could hope to be as verbal as Cathy, and say all the right things at the right time, but in real life that seldom happens. Dialogue can move the action along speedily. When you construct a good strong character, often he or she will take off and lead the way, surprising you. Shout hooray when your characters do this for you. "When I look back and try to understand why I write as I do, and why so many of my readers are convinced that only an autobiography can be written as emotionally and powerfully, I realize that I do put a great deal of myself into my stories. I suffer when my characters suffer. I lose weight when they do. (Take notice, all of you writers who are overweight--starve your characters.) "In formulating situations and characters, I take bits and pieces from my life, from the lives of my friends, and from the tales told to me by older family members, and I weave them into my novels. I use my dreams, too. It seems my dreams are the most powerful imaginative force I have going for me, but for memories. Yet, somewhere in my chest, near my heart, lives that force I draw upon for ideas, too. The more I trust it, the more willing it is to give. it seems I have a warehouse of memories--my own, and those belonging to other--to draw upon. if you don't have that kind of retentive memory, keep a journal. "There is the magic of memories...they do not have to be inhibited by the strict truth. A writer can, and a writer must, embroider and embellish what might be a simple tale without all the imaginative trappings. To take one's own life story and tell it exactly as it happened (unless you've led one very exciting life), usually makes for a less than suspenseful story. A novel has to be paced so it has peaks of excitement that grow ever higher as it approaches the climax. Life just doesn't move along speedily enough, as a novel must. Dialogue in reality can be so mundane as to be absolutely boring. "One of my most effective methods of finding story ideas is to take one situation from my life and ask, What if I hadn't run as fast as I had? What if I had been caught? What then? Would I have suffered? – been kidnapped? – raped? -- then killed?" (9) "Why do I write about such oddball situations? Why have an imagination if you don't go that way? I guess I'm just drawn to that sort of things. I don't like everything to be explained by scientists who say there are no little green men from Mars. I don't like that. I want them to be there." (2) "I don't think those people creating the stew over incest have read the books. They think I'm going to have brothers and sisters all over country looking at each other with lust. That's not it at all. "It was just a natural event in the story that came out, and it was referred to specifically only in one paragraph that was not that explicit. "After all, there's incest in the Bible!" (3) "It takes a certain amount of loneliness to get kinky. you cannot be kinky when there are a lot of people around. They normalize you. But a writer can build on these odd notions." (10) Despite the overwhelming popularity, Andrews' novels have not met with proportionate critical acclaim. In her Washington Post Book World review of Flowers in the Attic, Carolyn Banks says it "may well be the worst book I have ever read." She calls the book's plot "unbelievable" and its dialogue "indigestible." She adds, "The principle of selection does not seem to have entered the author's head, nor her editor's." 1982-1984. My Sweet Audrina and Seeds of Yesterday proved to be two more smashing commercial successes. "For a certainty, in my novels, the worse is bound to happen. My characters are clever enough, and fast enough, but by playing God, I always trip them up in some way and allow what I escaped to happen to them. Then the fun--or terror--begins. "In...My Sweet Audrina my main character, Audrina, meets her fate in the woods. In the incident that I experienced, the memory of which was the basis of what happens to Audrina, I could have met my fate in the valley between a ring of low hills that swallowed my screams for help. I was lucky enough to escape. Pity my poor character who didn't" (9) Reviewing My Sweet Audrina in the New York Times Book Review, Eden Ross Lipson finds the storyline difficult to follow, claiming: "Most of the brief sexual passages involve third parties watching in fascination, which give things a little spin, I suppose. Nothing else makes much sense." However, not all the reviews of Andrews' novels have been so negative. Without dismissing the criticism leveled by other reviewers, some critics have found praiseworthy elements in her works. While she acknowledges that certain situations in Petals on the Wind tax credibility, Bea Maxwell, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, praises Andrews' storytelling ability, particularly her skill in ensnaring her audience. "Andrews lulls the reader, she shocks and awakens," she says. Dale Pollock, another Los Angeles Times Book Review critic, sees weak spots in If There Be Thorns, namely the ending, but finds the book "an absorbing narrative" in which the two speakers "emerge as credible (if pitiable) characters." Pollock also sees considerable merit in Andrews' ability to tell the story through the eyes of two adolescent boys. "Andrews excels at re-creating the confusion and frustration of being old enough to grasp the pieces of a family mystery, but too young to assemble the puzzle." London Times reviewer Patricia Miller seems to sum up the attitude of many of those who find themselves attracted to Andrews' books when she writes: "Virginia Andrews' writing is embarrassingly crude and naive, especially in her first books, though she has improved greatly in the course of writing four." Ruth Piepgras in the Chicago Tribune's "Point of View" feels that "the question that author Andrews fails to answer, and the one that possibly makes these books so enticing to youngsters, is whether incest is wrong. It seems to be a question with which the author herself is struggling." Piepgras' response to that question is "Yes, Virginia, incest is wrong. Incest needs to be made an open subject, but it must be done in such a way that little girls will know they are not alone. They need to know that it happens to others, too, and they need to know that it's all right to tell someone....Virginia C. Andrews and publisher Pocket Books could have used their skill in marketing to youngsters to help open up this subject in a way that helped, not hurt, children. When kids read these books and come to the conclusion that incest is okay, that's not helping. That's hurting. Perhaps a more direct question to Andrews would be in order: 'Why don't you properly research the subject of incest and present it as the crime against children that it is? Or are you afraid that if you don't titillate the curiosity of youngsters in this fanciful way, you won't be filling your bank account so rapidly?;" And so it goes. Andrews' books are wildly successful, but always seems to stir great controversy, sometimes bordering on anger. "I don't think anything that appears wonderful and shiny on its surface doesn't have a dark side to it. I never write a scene with a sunny day that there isn't a little loud up there. I think that's realism." (2) The city of Norfolk, Virginia named Andrews "Professional Woman of the Year." "You bet I'm glad. I know I'm a celebrity and like it. I like the attention I get and I like the money. I like the things I can buy. It takes the worry off. But being a celebrity can sometimes be pesty. "The fans are kind, loving and understanding. the sales people aren't. They have an expensive product to sell and they chase you out into the mall. But I can go pretty fast in my motorized chair." (5) "I used to be very bitter. I think if I had failed at writing, maybe I would be bitter now. I always wanted to be somebody exceptional, somebody different, who did something on her own, some creative things...." (2) 1984-1986. Heaven and Dark Angel, which chronicle the sage of the Casteel family, published. With six novels, and over twenty-four million books in print, Andrews was named #1 Best Selling Author in a survey by the American Booksellers' Association's list of American's Top Ten paperbacks in the horror/occult category. It showed that she held five spots, topping Stephen King. Andrews sold the movie rights of Flowers in the Attic to Fries Entertainment--New World Pictures, retaining final script and cast approval. "I did picture the movie in the back of my mind when i was writing it. "It's thrilling to see my characters come alive, to see actors and actresses playing them. "I turned down five scripts before... [the final] one. I was upset at the beginning when there were changes from the book, till I began to see their point. They changed everything I objected to. they had really horrible things in there. I kept thinking, 'You idiots, you don't know what you're doing.' "But my film agent told me, "Virginia, you say tat in such a nice way, they want to do what you say.' I kept writing them letters, blasting away at all the gross things they had in there. Like when Cathy [the oldest child] is kissing Bart [her mother's second husband\ they had him wake up and go into action, and I said, 'You can't have him do that!' "They wanted to make it more gothic--they even had Dobermans nipping at the escaping children's heels." (11) "Right after [the producers] meet me they said they would give me a cameo role. I thought they would conveniently forget it, so it surprised me when they invited me to Ipswich, Mass. to do my little bit. I was a maid. They had me cleaning window." (5) December 19, 1986. Andrews died of cancer at her home in Virginia Beach. She continued to write up to he time of her death. Garden of Shadows and Fallen Hearts, which continue the saga of the Casteel family, were published posthumously. Footnote Sources:
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