Trivia / V. C. Andrews

• He Also Did: Andrews worked as a commercial artist and painter before going into writing.
• Missing Episode: Andrews wrote several books in her lifetime that were never published. These included the 800-page long The Obsessed (mistakenly believed to be the original transcript for Flowers in the Attic for years before it was cleared up by Andrews' editor), a 900-hundred page medieval romance called Castles of the Damned, and a story titled All the Gallant Snowflakes. Allegedly, the manuscripts were shelved because they deviated from the 'Children in Distress' type stories that made Andrews famous. Of the stuff that was published in her lifetime, the short story "I Slept With My Uncle On My Wedding Night" was only published in a pulp magazine, and Andrews never revealed the magazine's name for fear that her family might read it.
• Older Than They Look: Throughout her life, Andrews amazed people by appearing significantly younger than her true age, to the point that as a teenager, she often played with much younger children whose parents assumed she was a peer. Somewhere in her thirties, she began knocking ten years off her age, a deception that went unquestioned for decades until People magazine published her real age (which they obtained via public records) rather than the age she gave them. Andrews was so incensed that she avoided interviews thereafter. Curiously, Andrews complained in a letter to a relative that the magazine had gotten her age wrong even though the relative knew her real birth year, implying that Andrews herself might have come to believe her own story. Her real birth year is carved on her tombstone, posthumously vindicating People.
• Posthumous Credit: Flowers in the Attic (1987) was released about a year after Andrews' death (she helped out in pre-production, but died during production). She appears in a single shot in the film as a maid washing a window.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story:
  • According to a family member, Andrews got the inspiration for Flowers in the Attic from a doctor of hers that she had a crush on, who supposedly (along with his siblings) was hidden away in a house for several years.
  • The Casteel series was allegedly based on the life story of a real woman who grew up in poverty and whose father sold her and her siblings. This story, however, wasn't quite up to snuff, so the basic premise was supposedly handed over to Andrews, who expanded and dramatized it.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In one of her rare interviews, Andrews stated that she had outlines for dozens of future works, some in other genres (including an epic medieval romance), and was very interested in publishing other kinds of books once her contracted "children in peril" series were complete. Sadly, she never lived to fulfill the contract.
  • Gods Of Green Mountain, which was actually Andrews' first novel, was planned to be published in the 1980s as a trilogy. Andrews' death put an end to those plans and the book was published in its full form in eBook format in 2003, when Andrews had been dead for almost 20 years.