Musical artist Nicole Dollanganger likewise took her stage name from the books and sometimes obliquely references the novel in her lyrics.
Sofia Coppola's first film Lick the Star was influenced by Flowers in the Attic and directly references the book as part of its plot, as a group of schoolgirls plan to poison their enemies with arsenic after reading it.
Sleeper Hit: While Simon & Schuster gave it a generous publicity campaign for a debut novel by an unheard-of writer, the combination of the eye-catching cover with a cut center-hole, strong word-of-mouth, and No Such Thing as Bad Publicity from the various censorship roadblocks the novel faced for its themes, turned it into a runaway best seller, with almost 2 million copies sold in its initial run.
Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The story goes that Andrews got the inspiration for Flowers in the Attic from a doctor who treated her in her teen years, who she had a crush on. When she mentioned to him that she wanted to be a writer, he told about how, when he was growing up, he and his siblings were hidden away in a house for several years for financial reasons, and suggested this would make a good premise for a novel.
What Could Have Been: The first draft (which was donated to Boston University after by Andrews' mother in 1993 after Andrews' death, among other writings and notes) was titled Open the Window and Stand in the Sunshine. As a Mythology Gag, the prologue (the first draft lacked a prologue) to the final draft has Cathy briefly considering titling her story Open the Window and Stand in the Sunshine, but remarked that she and her siblings were more like "flowers in the attic" instead.
The 2014 TV movie provides trivia of:
Billing Displacement: Like the 1987 movie, the actress playing Cathy is billed after her mother. Kiernan Shipka is actually billed third after Heather Graham and Ellen Burstyn. It's the same in Petals On The Wind, where those two get billed above Rose McIver.
Kiernan Shipka (outside her more mature, complex role in Mad Men) is largely known for playing the precocious, good-humored Girl Next Door. Her role as Cathy seems almost a dark parody of her usual trope: the Girl Next Door in Danger.
Ellen Burstyn finds herself playing a lot of Cool Old Lady characters or else sympathetic older women. Playing the Evil Matriarch like Olivia Foxworth is very different.
Disowned Adaptation: Jeffrey Bloom, the director of 1987 film, is not a fan of this adaptation. He even said "I tried to watch it, but I just couldn't."
