It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Do you ever run into an old flame, or catch a rerun of a television show you used to love, or try on an old pair of white, Bedazzled jeans from 1994 and think to yourself, "What the hell was I thinking?"

Hi. I'm Erin, and that just happened to me, not with an ex-boyfriend or a pair of Jordaches, but with a book. When I was eight, I went rooting through a grocery sack of used paperbacks that someone had given my mom. Most of it was stuff that I'd end up reading eventually, but one book stood out from the rest. It looked mysterious, with a tortured, trapped figure on the front and a brief description on the back that promised intrigue and horror. This seemed right up my already-slightly-deranged, little-kid alley.

The book?




At eight, I didn't really know much about characterization or plot or prose. If I had, I would have put the book down after the first terrible chapter. But what I did know was that it was super-fun to try to get away with doing things my parents didn't want me to do, and since at the time I was grounded from reading (the only punishment that ever worked for me as a child), it seemed only right and just that I hide that book away under my bed and take it out at night and read it under the covers.

A whole new world was opened to me with that book; a world that seemed so totally implausible as to be considered endlessly fascinating. And when it got to the incest! Well, hot damn! Here was something I knew my parents didn't want me reading. So, of course, I wanted to read it all the more. And from there, my obsession grew - I wanted to read every seedy, trashy word that V.C. Andrews had ever written, and I think I continued to read her books for about six more years, until I of course finally realized that there was way more prurient stuff out there with which to offend my parents' sensibilities.

Recently, I decided to reread Flowers in the Attic to see if it was still as awesomely trashy as I remembered it to be. And, well . . . it's not. It's actually just pretty bad. I mean, really, incredibly, "fifteen weeks on the NYT bestseller list, SERIOUSLY?"-type bad.

Disheartened by this, my childhood love affair torn asunder, I decided to do what every twenty-something does when his or her expectations or demands aren't met by the world: mock stuff on the internet. And so, I present to you, this blog, in which I am actually tasking myself to read every V.C. Andrews book ever written (they're still coming out with them!) and write about them here. Why? Because, deep down, I know my eight-year-old-self deserves to be punished for breaking the terms of her grounding and sneaking books into her room. And because I think it might be really fun, in a "I don't get out much" kind of way.

So I hope you'll join me for this little experiment of mine. Everything you never wanted to know about FITA will be coming to this very blog in the next few weeks, while I steel myself for reading its follow-up, which features even more inappropriate sexual activities. Yay!