Capturing the girl rage

I got a copy of that biography of V.C. Andrews by Andrew Niedermann from my library. I’m only a chapter in, but it presents disability as a very influential factor on her life and work— how she was affected by her own, how much her defensive and internalized ableism made it into her writing. While I didn’t necessarily expect that, it makes sense, and shows a sensitivity about her that I wasn’t sure I could expect from a male writer.

The one thing that remains to be seen that may make or break the thing for me is whether or not he has an understanding of her, for lack of a better term, “girl rage”— the sense of simultaneous visceral wonder and injustice Andrews was so good at capturing that made her appeal to young girls, who found their impending womanhood to be simultaneously a great power and a terrifying vulnerability. That’s how that Casteelkidsstolemygrocieries writer so eloquently characterized it, and that’s the quality she always felt was missing from the Niedermann ghostwritten books. I wonder if he’ll have any sense of it. It’s so fundamental to her work but he never really managed to capture it, and I’m curious whether it’s because he just failed at doing it, or if he couldn’t really understand that it was there.