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From Wall Street Journal: The author of the notoriously lurid bestseller ‘Flowers in The Attic’ was careful to keep her own life private…

Fairy tales sometimes feature witches or ogres, but the most reliable villain is the stepmother. According to the 20th-century psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, these jealous, vain and crafty interlopers serve a purpose: They helpfully dramatize dark human emotions for young children yet preserve the faith that “real” mothers are essentially good.

But as children leave childhood, this faith starts to falter. In the eyes of adolescents, once wondrous parents can seem hopelessly flawed. V.C. Andrews understood this. In her wildly popular gothic novels, which appeal especially to young adults, mothers are narcissists, grandmothers are sadists, and the family unit is often a source of trauma and shame. Her first and most famous novel, “Flowers in The Attic” (1979), about four children who are locked in a sunless room for years by their scheming mother, is essentially a fairy tale about pluck in the face of maternal cruelty. It has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.

Andrews “was in a constant pursuit to understand why people who were supposed to love each other instead hurt each other,” writes Andrew Neiderman in his biography “The Woman Beyond the Attic.” Mr. Neiderman seems well-placed to assess Andrews’s motivations, having ghost-written scores of books in her name for over three decades.

When Andrews died of breast cancer in 1986, at 63, she left behind seven bestselling novels and notes for a few more. Her enormous success inspired her estate and her publisher, Simon & Schuster, to turn her name into a brand. Mr. Neiderman, a prolific novelist, was tapped to complete the unfinished manuscripts, in part because he and Andrews shared the same literary agent.

Read full post on The Wall Street Journal