When I was a teen in the early 1990s, young women covertly slipped V.C. Andrews novels to each other like they were contraband. The hugely successful Gothic horrors were like an illicit drug – grown-up fairy tales full of sex, violence and the intrigue of wealth and privilege. My own worn copy of Flowers in the Attic was gifted to me by an older, wiser summer camp counsellor, and passed along with the whispered warning, "the brother and sister do it." When I was all done and sufficiently shocked by its content, my copy went along to another girl who was not yet initiated. Whether intentional (or altogether healthy), there was a formative, coming-of-age quality to the teen-girl culture that surrounded Andrews's stories. By creating these complex and often outrageous family sagas, the author allowed us clandestine access to the very subject matter the adults in our lives were shielding us from. In fact, it's worthy to note that although originally published for an adult mass market, the teen interest was so strong that the books were later explicitly remarketed as Young Adult (YA) fare.
Andrews published Flowers in the Attic in 1979 at the age of 56. At the time, she was a relative literary unknown, a wheelchair-bound writer from Virginia, cared for by her mother while living with the chronic pain of rheumatoid arthritis. Her disturbing tale of four beautiful children locked in an attic for years by their pious grandmother went on to become a bestseller in mere weeks, and secured Andrews wealth, fame and multiple book deals.
By the time she died of breast cancer in 1986, Andrews had written six subsequent novels, garnering so much commercial success that ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman was called in to finish her manuscripts and continue her legacy. She's been translated into more than a dozen languages, and there are now 80-plus books that bear her name – with at least two more on the way this year. The numbers prove that many decades later, the ghost of V.C. Andrews has rare staying power in a YA market saturated with Twilight and The Hunger Games spawn.
While most of Andrews's short career was centred on documenting two fictional families –the Dollangangers and the Casteels – she did produce one stand-alone novel in her lifetime. My Sweet Audrina (1982) is an eerie, claustrophobic tale told in the voice of the "surviving" daughter of Damian and Lucietta Adare, and set almost entirely in Whitefern, their secluded Victorian-era mansion. It, too, was a No. 1 bestseller in North America, and is now getting its made-for-TV premiere on Lifetime, with India Eisley (The Secret Life of the American Teenager) starring in the title role.
True to the Andrews tradition of pushing the teen envelope, the hefty novel touches on a laundry list of sensitive subjects, including rape, murder, abortion, miscarriage, infidelity, promiscuity, sadomasochism, amputation, electroshock therapy and post-traumatic stress disorder. (I could go on, but you get the idea.)
Although absurdly soap opera-esque in its execution, Audrina the novel speaks to a pervasive, ingrained fear of sexuality that young women once were familiar with. Its protagonist is continually warned by her father not to go out into the world, or even be close to men, because she'll end up raped and murdered in the woods like her sister before her. While primarily read for trashy titillation, the bedroom scenes are more disturbing than arousing – sex is a dirty, bad, forbidden thing that women must endure and never enjoy. (And is, oddly, often viewed through keyholes.) Whether the intention was prescriptive or critical on Andrews's part, this limiting of a young woman's freedom with violence, fear and judgment resonated with multiple generations of readers, many of whom were raised on scare tactics and shoddy sexual education.
Not permitted to go to school (or anywhere, really,) Audrina is forced to be a virtual shut-in by the people she loves and supposedly love her back. Confused about the passage of time and even about how old she is, she exists in the oppressive shadow of her dead sister, "the first and best Audrina," and is subject to some pretty acute gaslighting, deception and abuse by the adults in her life. This highlights some of Andrews's real teen appeal. In her world, adults could be – and often were – flawed and wrong, and young women were always capable of revealing the truth.
Although the hunger for Andrews's novels has waned in recent years, her legacy still has a rabid following – making it wise for Lifetime to capitalize on her appeal. Starting with fan favourite Flowers in the Attic in 2014, the U.S. network has already aired four campy Andrews movie adaptations prior to My Sweet Audrina, and encourages its audience to live-tweet and host viewing parties to celebrate the occasion. They're wisely tapping directly into the inherent shared experience – and naughty nostalgia – that's invoked in Andrews's now grown-up audience.
While the films undoubtedly fall into the melodramatic category of "so bad they're good" – you can dismiss the content as salacious, junk-food fare – you can't deny their cultural importance. For better or worse, V.C. Andrews gave girls something they needed, even if it was just the bond of a whispered secret at summer camp.
My Sweet Audrina airs on Lifetime Canada Jan. 9 at 8 p.m. ET.