Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Virginia Andrews's shocking success

Monday 20 January 2014- 

It's alarming being reminded that as a teenager I enjoyed the Flowers in the Attic author's horrific family sagas – and that I'm far from alone

Heather Graham
Anybody else? … Actor Heather Graham at a press conference for the 2014 TV film of Flowers in the Attic. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Did anyone else out there have a Virginia Andrews moment in their impressionable youth?

This intriguing Buzzfeed interview with the late author's family and her ghost writer Andrew Neiderman, who has been writing Andrews novels since she died in 1986, brought my early teenage years rushing back.
The interview is fascinating, particularly the details about the queen of gothic romance herself: usually confined to a wheelchair by "crippling spine, hip, leg, and neck problems", Andrews would type standing up at a chest-high desk, according to her editor. "She would be at that desk sometimes 10 to 12 hours writing. She once showed me the soles of her shoes where they were worn through and the bones were protruding on the bottom of her feet."

She was also, according to the editor, the figure of the teenage girl who inhabits all her stories. "She was that  teenager. If you think about her emotional life and her experiences and independence – [of] which there was none – her life kind of stopped when she was about 14 or 15."
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