Any summation of Cleo Virginia Andrews' life reads like the back cover of one of her books. She was born on June 6, 1923, in Portsmouth, Va., and had two brothers, Bill and Gene. Press accounts differ on what caused her crippling spine, hips, legs, and neck problems (a People magazine story from October 1980 says it began with a "traumatic fall down a flight of stairs."). According to Gene Andrews, Virginia was diagnosed in her early teens with rheumatoid arthritis. Medical interventions at Johns Hopkins Hospital did not help. After unsuccessful surgeries, she was, at one point, in a full-body cast. In an email from Joan Andrews, Virginia's sister-in-law (the widow of Bill, who died in 2012), she wrote, "Virginia lived her adult life able to turn her head to a limited degree." And, Joan added, she was "always in pain." Andrews' brothers moved out of the family home, but Virginia continued to live with her parents; after her father died in 1957, it was just her and her mother Lillian. Andrews, who had talent in visual arts, made money doing commercial art for local businesses. And then she began to write. She mostly struck out at first, but got a few things published. The exhaustive V.C. Andrews fan site The Complete V.C. Andrews has a copy of her first letter to the literary agent Anita Diamant (who was also, not coincidentally, Andrew Neiderman's agent until Diamant died in 1996). It's dated Jan. 13, 1978, and begins:



"Using a pen name, I have written and sold without an agent, three Gothic Romances. Before that, I wrote confession stories, just to finance my more serious efforts. All the while I was writing other tales… one kept bearing hard on my mind, begging to be told."

Andrews then goes on to describe — with building suspense, and dramatic use of ellipses — the plot of Flowers in the Attic.

"A young wife is suddenly widowed," and though she has no job skills and is in debt, "she has one solace," which is that if she tricks her father into re-inheriting her in his will, "she is the sole heir to a tremendous fortune." In order to wait out her father's death, the widow must secretly stick her four children, whom he doesn't know exist, in his attic until he dies; the widow's mother, who has "no heart," is complicit in this plot. As the years pass, the youngest children, twins, "cannot grow" in the dark attic. And Cathy and Chris, the two older kids, "struggle to keep themselves sane, decent, honorable…but they are tested time and time again as they reach adolescence."

The letter concludes: "I call my novel, which is not truly fiction… FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC." (Andrews always said that a doctor who had cared for her during her teen hospital stays had been hidden away for years, and his story had stuck with her; he became the character of Chris Dollanganger.)

She now had an agent in Diamant. But until Humphrey Evans, an assistant at Diamant's agency, passed Andrews' short version (fewer than 100 pages) of the Flowers in the Attic manuscript to his friend Ann Patty, an editor in her twenties at Simon & Schuster's Pocket Books division, no one wanted to publish the book.

"I met an agent once who told me that it had been rejected by 24 publishers before it was bought," said Patty in a telephone interview.

Evans and Patty went to a Patti Smith concert at CBGB in New York, and after she came home, Patty read Flowers in the Attic. "I read it, and I thought, 'This is really amazing. It's like a crazy fairy tale,'" Patty said. "She had a particular style. You wouldn't call it a good style, but it was a style. It was so unique. I just thought I'd never read anything like this. Never."

Patty bought Flowers in the Attic, her first acquisition as an editor, for $7,500 to publish as a mass-market paperback, which was distributed widely, from bookstores to supermarkets to airports. She wrote Andrews a long letter about how she thought the book should develop plot-wise, and they worked on the manuscript back and forth through the mail. As the book's November 1979 publication date approached, Patty and her boss realized that they might need to ready a sequel — the feedback from bookstores, which had received the book in galley form, was ravenous.

Patty flew to Andrews' home in Virginia to meet her in person for the first time and wasn't sure what to expect. Though she relied on the wheelchair, Andrews stood to write. Joan Andrews described it this way: "Her early novels were written standing up at a chest-high desk using a typewriter. She would be at that desk sometimes 10 to 12 hours writing. She once showed me the soles of her shoes where they were worn through and the bones were protruding on the bottom of her feet."

"I thought she was an older Southern woman," Patty said about that first meeting. "I was really young, I had never published a book. So when I met her and found her to be crippled, it was like this huge shock. And then it all became clear: She was that teenager. If you think about her emotional life and her experiences and independence — which there was none — her life kind of stopped when she was about 14 or 15."

"She never had a romance," Andrew Neiderman said.

A rare — and frank — interview with Andrews was published in 1985 in a book called Faces of Fear: Encounters With the Creators of Modern Horror. In it, Andrews told Douglas E. Winter, "When I wrote Flowers in the Attic, all of Cathy's feelings about being in prison were my feelings. So that, when I read them now, I cry."

Andrews was on the verge of becoming a publishing sensation at the age of 56. And she was dependent on her mother to eat and take care of herself. She had dedicated Flowers in the Attic to her mother, but, according to Patty, Lillian Andrews never read any of her daughter's books.

"You could say that Virginia is locked in the attic and her mother is the grandmother," Patty said. "But she seemed normal. I would take Virginia out for a walk around the neighborhood. And I would pretend I was a kid and get on top of her wheelchair and we would zoom down hills. She would say, 'Don't tell Mom.'"