“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. 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. 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. “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.” Since Andrews “hated” her disability, she went along with her mother’s attempts at “disguising” her wheelchair, Neiderman said. She placed her daughter’s chair behind bushes when Andrews sat on the front porch so that passers-by would not see her. ”įor example, Lillian “made sure” Andrews always wore clothes that covered up her wheelchair in a way that would hide her disability from visitors.

Firstly, because she was ashamed of her for being disabled, and secondly, because she couldn’t handle it. Like the children in Flowers in the Attic, “her mother kept her under lock and key. Photograph: Courtesy of the VC Andrews estate The author at the time of the publication of Flowers in the Attic. By the time Flowers in the Attic was published, Andrews was 56 and had been dependent on her mother, Lillian, for decades. “She controlled who Virginia could see, what she could do and punished her for not doing what she wanted.”Īndrews 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. “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.

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. 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.

Flowers in the attic novel