
When does a girl become a woman? Is it a biological or a psychological phenomenon? Likely a combination. Important signposts along the road: First bra. Actually needing one’s first bra. Menstruation. First love. Starting to shave one’s legs and…other things. First sex. First orgasm. (Note that those last two don’t necessarily go together.) Personally, I feel that I reached such a milestone on my thirteenth birthday, but not because of my age – because of a book.
I remember opening my presents that spring morning. There may have been some now-forgotten items of clothing among them, but the other stuff is still vivid in my mind. First, Whitney Houston’s debut album (on vinyl). Then I unwrapped a paperback, thick, with a spooky cover: a girl’s face, looking like she was holding a flashlight under her chin in a dark room. Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. Thanks, Mom and Dad. They wouldn’t let me go to R-rated movies but I could read anything I wanted. I knew I would start reading on the bus on the way to school. Soon, I would be sucked into a literary obsession, lost in a world of Southern gothic psychodrama from which I would never completely return.
In a nutshell (a sick, sick nutshell), Flowers in the Attic is a late-’70s bestseller about a newly pubescent girl who, along with her three siblings, is hidden in the attic of her grandparents’ mansion so her mother can collect an inheritance. For three years, these extremely blond children are tortured by their bat-shit crazy grandma, who whips them, starves them and poisons them while telling them they are the spawn of Satan. Deprived of sunshine and fresh air, the youngest two fail to thrive, leaving them with little kid bodies and big kid heads. Meanwhile, the oldest girl and boy get super horny and…well, you can imagine where that goes. After tearing through the entire 400 pages in about three days, it was off to the bookstore to buy the next one in the series.
Oh yeah, it’s a series.



It seems almost mind-blowing to think this now, but at the end of the 1980s there was no bigger star in the pop sky than Bobby Brown: 