Out of sight: how Flowers in the Attic mirrored its author’s captivity (2024)

When VC Andrews’s debut novel, Flowers in the Attic, was published in 1979, it was not well received by all critics: one described it as “possibly the worst book I have ever read”.

However, her gothic horror-romance about four children who are locked in an attic for three years by their beautiful, conniving mother – who seems loving but actually starves and poisons them – went on to sell more than 40 million copies, was on the New York Times bestseller list for 14 weeks and is still in print more than 40 years later.

Now, startling parallels between the lives of the children imprisoned in the attic and Virginia Andrews’s own life as a severely disabled woman are to be laid bare for the first time in a forthcoming biography, The Woman Beyond the Attic.

The book claims that when Andrews – who spent most of her adult life housebound in a wheelchair – was disobedient, her “controlling” mother would imprison her in her bedroom and deprive her of a meal as a punishment.

“Her mother would lock her in her room and not give her dinner, if she got angry at her,” said Andrew Neiderman, author of the new biography, which will be published on Thursday. “She controlled who Virginia could see, what she could do and punished her for not doing what she wanted.”

Andrews suffered from rheumatoid arthritis but lived a relatively independent life before a surgical treatment in her late teens left her unable to walk and move her neck without pain. By the time Flowers in the Attic was published, Andrews was 56 and had been dependent on her mother, Lillian, for decades.

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“She was trapped,” said Neiderman. Like the children in Flowers in the Attic, “her mother kept her under lock and key. Firstly, because she was ashamed of her for being disabled, and secondly, because she couldn’t handle it [Andrews’s disability].”

For example, Lillian “made sure” Andrews always wore clothes that covered up her wheelchair in a way that would hide her disability from visitors. She placed her daughter’s chair behind bushes when Andrews sat on the front porch so that passers-by would not see her. “She didn’t want people looking at her.”

Since Andrews “hated” her disability, she went along with her mother’s attempts at “disguising” her wheelchair, Neiderman said. “She thought that when people looked at her and saw her illness, they looked at her as ugly.” It was her mother who taught her to feel that way, he said: “If, as a child, your mother wants to hide you, obviously it is going to affect the way you look at yourself.”

Neiderman became Andrews’s ghostwriter following her death from breast cancer in 1986, completing her unfinished manuscripts and penning 96 bestselling novels in her style under her name, approved by her estate.

Many of the revelations contained in the book emerged from his interviews with her closest living relatives, who also gave him unprecedented access to Andrews’s personal letters. “I said to them: I think it’s time to write her biography, but I need all the little details, all the personal letters and the personal information. And they agreed.”

Andrews always maintained that the plot of Flowers in the Attic was “a fictionalised version of a true story” that a hospital doctor had told her when she was a teenager. But as an isolated disabled woman, reliant on her mother’s care, “she felt so trapped by her illness – and was so incarcerated by her mother sometimes – that she could understand how children would feel locked up in an attic,” believes Neiderman.

In the filicidal novel, which Andrews dedicated to her mother, Cathy becomes a sexually frustrated teenager after years of being confined in the attic with just her siblings for company. She is then raped by her older brother.

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Like Cathy, Andrews would have known how it felt to be penned up and sexually frustrated: “Even though she was in her 50s, she thought like a young girl because she didn’t have adult experiences with men.”

Her mother had prevented her from going on dates as a young woman. “When she was writing, she interviewed her [adult] niece about sex – because she had no idea about it.” She asked her niece to tell her how it felt to have sex and what the experience was like, emotionally and physically, he said.

Because Lillian could not drive and the family had very little money, Andrews rarely left her home: “It was very difficult for her to move about,” said Neiderman. He does not think Andrews even had access to a garden for some of her life – like the children in the attic, who make paper flowers in an attempt to turn their prison into an imaginary garden.

It wasn’t until Andrews achieved fame and fortune as a novelist that her living conditions as a disabled person improved – but even in 1980, a journalist who interviewed her wrote: “Her only companion is her mother.”

By 1981, Andrews had moved into an 11-bedroom mansion but despite her success, another journalist, Stephen Rubin of the Washington Post, noticed that during an interview, she “always returns to the subjects that seem to preoccupy her most – her wheelchair and her mother”. When Rubin questions her about her relationship with her mother, who fusses constantly over Andrews and seems to him “an adorable little old lady”, she tells him, darkly: “Mothers wear two faces like most people.”

When Flowers in the Attic celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2019, it had become a global bestseller. Andrews’s mother, however, never read it. “She wouldn’t read her books, she wouldn’t read anything she wrote,” said Neiderman. She did not encourage her, either. “It wasn’t until Virginia became famous and did readings and book signings and a trip to Europe that her mother respected her as a writer.” At that point, her mother became “proud” of her, he said. “Yes, Virginia Andrews had a difficult life. But the thing about her is: she overcame it all – and went on to have one of the biggest successes of commercial fiction.”