More of “The Woman Behind the Attic”

Continuing with the V.C. Andrews biography written by her ghostwriter. I appreciate the respect with which it discusses her as a person and an artist. I feel like it would be very easy to patronize her, fail to acknowledge her talents, or judge her as pathetic for the limited life she led. There is a real solid effort in here to pin down what the appeal of her craft was, and to my surprise, Niederman does seem to have a sense of that her way of depicting coming into adulthood, specifically womanhood, captured that sense of simultaneous power and vulnerability. Strange, since that is the quality that I’ve heard his ghostwritten novels fail to capture about her style.

He also seems to have a strong sense of how ableism curtailed her life. She was not very mobile due to spinal injury and deterioration, and she lived in a world where there was both a lot of shame over it and not a lot of adaptive accommodations. I think the book may not always be using the correct terminology, but there is a lot of time and effort given to making it clear that her limited knowledge of the world, deficiency in social relationships, and immature perspective on life were the consequences of that ableism.

At the same time… it is also, at least thus far, wholly uncritical in any manner. I don’t mean of her as a person, I mean of anything about her work. Because while I believe it would be unfair not to acknowledge the appeal and verve of the thing she created… the books are not good in a global sense. Or even if you wouldn’t go that far, I feel one has to acknowledge they are deeply flawed. So far there’s no acknowledgement of anything in that direction at all. I’m only like a quarter through, so maybe that changes. But seeing as this guy has made his career of the Andrews brand, selling books for decades under that name, I doubt he’s going to say anything to bite the hand that feeds him. It’s a bit disappointing, as I mostly like author biographies as perspectives on their work.