Let’s set the scene.
It’s the mid-1980s and I’m with my mother at Bradlees. She’s combing the clearance racks and I slip away to the book section and home straight in on the black paperbacks with covers opening onto ominous paintings of hyper beautiful people with darkness looming. I grab one and start reading as much as I can before my mother finds me and it’s back to the real world.
Now fast forward to very early 2022, I really shouldn’t be buying more books. I have so many unread books and I vowed to do a book buying ban to start the year right. But in passing I see something online about a biography on V.C. Andrews. And not just any V.C. Andrews biography but one done with the blessing of her family and by her chosen ghostwriter, the legendary author in his own right, Andrew Neiderman.
Did I pre-order this biography I’ve wanted for years, even though I haven’t read any of the latter V.C. Andrews ™ books since the mid-Culter series? Do I drink oceans of tea? And given the chance will eat a tuna cucumber sandwich at 5:45am while my work computer boots up?
<sighs>
Okay, so I’m predictable and weak.
I’ve had The Woman Beyond The Attic: The V.C. Andrews Story for two weeks now and this has been one of my more challenging reviews to write. It’s not a difficult book, filled with high scholarship that even Helene Hanff’s beloved Arthur “Q” Quiller-Couch would have a hard time grasping. And it’s not the sugar-coated fluff biography cranked out in days and sold in mass market paperbacks in the airport newsstand/bookstore.
I was just expecting…more from The Woman Beyond The Attic: The V.C. Andrews Story. Perhaps I’m a greedy-guts wanting a deep dive into a favorite author, something meaty and 16 CDs to play on my commute to work. Think Barbara Seaman’s excellent Lovely Me on Jacqueline Susann, Ruth Franklin’s acclaimed Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life or Gerri Hirshey’s Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown.
It’s lovely to have a proper biography of V.C. Andrews and learn more about the woman behind the paperbacks. I never knew just how disabled she was and the lengths she went to disguise her infirmities and how narrow life must have been living with her mother until she found success and a new world opened to her. It’s easy to see how she could translate those parts of her life onto the page. And having some of her personal letters and an partial unpublished manuscript is something very rare. But I wanted more.
I wanted more on each book than a few paragraphs, especially the novels written by V.C. Andrews herself. And here’s the part where the biography failed my expectations. One might expect, given the author is the very person who took over the V.C. Andrews mantle and has produced more V.C. Andrews books than Lindt truffles I’ve eaten (and I might just be addicted to Lindt truffles) to have what happened after her death. What it was like to be chosen and have your legacy become tied to her eternally. Heck, even a bit more of the cultural impact of Andrews on pop culture and teenager reads would be nice. But these are pipe dreams.
Let’s be brutally honest, The Woman Beyond The Attic: The V.C. Andrews Story, is written for the people who remember reading her books as teenagers, watch the Lifetime movies with awe and reverence. And I am not That Person or That Reader. Does that make me A Monster? Perhaps?
I am not The Woman Beyond The Attic: The V.C. Andrews Story’s Ideal Reader but it’s Ideal Reader is out there and I’m glad I read it even if I found it lacking.
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