V.C. Andrews: A Few Serious Words on the Handling of Toxic Waste

It was last night, when I was feeling a little punchy, that I posted my handwritten blurb about V.C. Andrews’ low-gothic novel Flowers in the Attic. I realize that it’s a little hard to read what I wrote, so I’m going to make it clearer here:

GO AHEAD. TELL ME I’M TRASHY.
See if I care. The reality is, for what it is, V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic is a Great Book! I’m totally serious. This thing is so appallingly awful, I adore it wholeheartedly. Join Edith on the dark side…


I originally wrote some version of this when I was working in a real-life bookstore, and taped it up next to a copy of said book. It did inspire a few sales, perhaps – but I knew the book would have sold anyway. When I first read Flowers in the Attic, I believe it was being marketed as a romance novel, or something like it; you could buy it at the supermarket checkout counter, in a rack where things like Harlequin romances were sold. Trash, you know? But somehow, over the years, the angle for this book has changed. I think the publisher – is it Simon and Schuster? – has figured out that the people who really want to read this book aren’t women but young girls, girls who’re maybe eleven to sixteen years old. So now it gets listed in publishers’ catalogues as a young adult book, and that is where booksellers are urged to shelve it. Which seems a little crazy to me, frankly, but all right; I won’t fight it.

One of my last hurrahs as a bookseller in an open shop came early last summer – perhaps almost a year ago, now I’m thinking about it – when a customer who I’d helped time and time again asked me for help with a thorny problem. This woman, an esteemed curator and scholar, had a granddaughter who was going away to sleepaway camp for the first time. The girl, maybe twelve years old, was a real reader, and Devoted Grandmama wanted to select three novels to slip into the girl’s duffel bag as a kind of surprise present. I thought this was nice, and said I’d be happy to help pick some things out. Grandmama wanted there to be different kinds of books. “She reads like a grownup,” she told me, “But at the same time, I think she needs things that are just fun. I was thinking maybe one should be a mystery?” I strode confidently to the mystery section and plucked a few titles from the shelf: some Agatha Christie, I remember; I think I picked up a Josephine Tey, too; and something else that I now cannot recall. Grandmama picked the Tey book, which turned out to be a personal favorite of her own. We selected some current light fiction – was it Prep? I can’t remember; I hope not, but it might have been – and then we needed one more. I asked Grandmama, “How protective are the girl’s parents? I mean, can you send this girl anything and it’d be ok?” Grandmama considered the question and told me that as long as something came from her, it was pretty much an anything-goes situation. “The girl’s twelve,” I said, meandering to the Young Adult section. I plucked Flowers in the Attic from the shelf and held it in front of me for Grandmama to see. “This book,” I said, “should be required reading for every young girl. However, it is filled with graphic sexual accounts, including incest, and really bad writing.” Grandmama laughed and asked why I was recommending it if it was badly written. I said, “I’ll tell you the truth: I don’t know. I just know that I read this book over and over again when I was that age, and almost all of my friends who read would say the same thing.” I called over to Kate, my co-worker, who was working the cash register. “Kate: Flowers in the Attic for a twelve year old girl?” Kate nodded her head vehemently and said, “Oh, you’ve got to. I mean, she’s going to get her hands on it one way or another anyhow.” I turned back to Grandmama. “The thing is,” I said, “Kate’s right. And,” I added, leaning in, as they say, conspiratorially, “if the kid gets it from you, you get infinite Cool Grandma points.”
Grandmama bought all three of the books, and we wrapped them up. Two weeks later, she came back into the store on her lunch break. I was puttering around in the basement but she came down to find me. She wanted to tell me that she’d gotten a phone call from her granddaughter, who’d read all the books and loved them all, but loved Flowers in the Attic best. “She thought it was great,” Grandmama laughed. “I certainly would never have picked it out myself!”
Ah, Grandmama; wherever you do your book shopping now, I hope there’s someone around to help you navigate so that you can always be the person who gives the kid cool books. In a couple of years, you might want to look into Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School….