Bookworm: V.C. Andrews biography puts rumors to rest

Provided by Gallery Books
There’s something upstairs.

Something on the roof or. . . maybe it’s inside. You heard the scratching, the footfalls, and when you’re very quiet, you can hear voices. Just the idea gives you gooseflesh, so now find “The Woman Beyond the Attic” by Andrew Neiderman and meet the woman who wrote about what’s up there.

You may know it from high school, or maybe you were a young adult when you became immersed in the Dollanganger saga, the fictional story that began in 1979 with “Flowers in the Attic.” In that novel, we met four siblings whose mother agreed, under duress, to lock her children beneath their grandparents’ rafters. The series became a national obsession and, as happens, rumors swirled about the author.

Cleo Virginia Andrews was born in Virginia in June of 1923, the second child of a Navy man and “a telephone operator” who lived a wild life while her husband was a-sea. When Virginia was four years old, the family moved to Rochester, New York, near the paternal family farm; five years later, the Great Depression changed everything and the Andrewses once again landed in Virginia to live with relatives.

These moves left their mark: even as a young child, Virginia thought of herself as “’an old soul’” and she had a strong belief in the paranormal. She claimed to have psychic powers and often imagined other, fantastical lives that she might have had.

This, hints Neiderman, may have helped Andrews become a writer after an accident, which happened when she was a young woman, resulted in a lifelong disability.

Neiderman describes the misfortune as a twist and a fall and ultimate time in a body cast that left Andrews “frozen in her adolescence for years” and in pain for the rest of her life. Indeed, her imagination and her fantasies were “clearly the door to escape the confinement her illness had imposed.”

Creepy stories are always a teen favorite and the Dollanganger books were right at the top of the list when you were younger. Half the fun was speculating about the kind of mind that could spin such a tale.

“The Woman Beyond the Attic” finally lays rumors to rest, broad-picture-like and repeatedly, as it turns out, since author Andrew Neiderman restates a lot of information in this biography. This, after awhile, becomes little but noise; it doesn’t help that the verbiage is quite florid, or that an abundance of secondary interviewees and articles serve to swirl the waters of this book. A little less would have gone a long way.

And yet, there’s appeal here, in the form of information that may’ve escaped your attention since you first read the Dollenganger series. There’s also a chance to share: this story-behind-the-story will appeal to a new generation of novel-lovers who are drawn to the fortieth-anniversary re-release of the original novel.

Absolutely, this is a fan’s book, and the previously-unpublished novella that’s included here seals the deal. If that sounds good to you, then let “The Woman Beyond the Attic” raise the rafters.

”The Woman Beyond the Attic: The V.C. Andrews Story” by Andrew Neiderman, c. 2022, Gallery Books. The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. She has been reading since she was 3 years old and never goes anywhere without a book. Terri lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 11,000 books. Terri can be reached at [email protected].