So I’m not going to let anybody put one of my books down and not finish it. When I read, if a book doesn’t hold my interest in what’s going to happen next, I put it down and don’t finish it. However, as a sufferer of arthritis who had to spend much of her life in isolation with chronic back pain, Andrews admitted that many of Cathy’s feelings about her confinement arose from her own real-life feelings.Īndrews defended her sensationalist plots in a 1985 Faces of Fear interview, saying “I think I tell a whopping good story.

Flowers in the Attic(1979), which she wrote an early draft of in 1975, became a bestseller, although The Washington Post declared the book “deranged swill” and Andrews possibly the “worst writer I have ever read.” However, for leagues of teenage girls, Andrews became in the words of The Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers, the “Emily Brontë of the MTV generation.” Gillian Flynn, author of the 2012 crime bestseller Gone Girl, said that the mother and grandmother characters in Flowers in the Attic spawned her fascination with “wicked women It felt so new to me-these witches who seemed quite real.” Andrews, who wrote her novel in two weeks, claimed that it was not autobiographical.

Andrews, she became a novelist late in life, having previously worked as a commercial artist, illustrator, and portrait painter. Andrews was born Cleo Virginia Andrews, in Portsmouth, Virginia.

Flowers in the attic books in order