“The doctors found that the twist had been very violent, and that it tore the membrane on my hip and started little bone spurs,” she once explained. Andrews drew on elements of her own life to create Cathy Dollanganger, who narrates Flowers in the Attic.Īndrews spent most of her life using a wheelchair after falling down the stairs at school as a young girl. Fun fact: Neiderman also wrote The Devil’s Advocate, which was later adapted into the 1997 movie starring Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves. Writer Andrew Neiderman, who shared an agent with Andrews, was tapped to take over the throne as her ghostwriter and has been churning out books as Andrews ever since, writing at a pace of about three novels per year.

Andrews.Īndrews died of breast cancer in 1986, after writing the first four books of the Dollanganger series (of which Flowers in the Attic was the first book), one book of the Casteel series, and the standalone My Sweet Audrina. Given Andrews's popularity, she found the amount unfair-and so when she started the Casteel series in the mid-1980s, she received a $2 million advance for a two-book deal and $3 million for another trio of novels. By the time the third book in the series, If There Be Thorns, was released in 1981, Andrews was pulling down a $75,000 advance. Andrews’s payday for Flowers in the Attic was modest.Īndrews was paid just $7500 for her debut novel, but the numbers rose quickly. And then I typed it into 90.' So really, who knows what's true. I plotted the whole thing in longhand-it was 18 pages. “I like to amaze my editor and tell her that I wrote it in one night.

By that time, however, I had been writing for seven years and had written nine unpublished novels.” However, she also once claimed that she wrote it in a single night. In 1983, Andrews told Twilight Zone magazine, “I wrote in two weeks. Andrews claimed to have written Flowers in the Attic in two weeks. No matter how many times you’ve indulged in this guilty pleasure, here are a few facts you may not have known. Andrews’s debut novel, published in 1979, was a Gothic gateway for many a young romance reader, while the numerous reviews that deemed the incestuous plot 'scandalous' and 'shocking' only enticed readers more.įlowers in the Attic hasn’t lost any steam in the more than 40 years since its debut it has sold more than 40 million copies and been translated into 25 languages. We don’t have any hard data on exactly how many tweens discovered too-old-for-them romance novels by stumbling upon the intriguing cutout cover of Flowers in the Attic, but surely it’s somewhere close to 100 percent.

Flowers in the attic novel