September 29, 2025 • 10 mins
Welcome to Lucky Dip - our bite-sized weekly (sometimes fortnightly) pod! Each ep, we'll take turns sticking our mitts into the goodie bucket and unwrapping a topic to chinwag about. You never know what you're gonna get, so enjoy five minutes of randomness that we hope will bring a lil' nugget of joy to your day. Enjoy!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
It's Lucky Dip time. It's Lucky Dip time. It's so lucky,
we'll lucky to be alive.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Sometimes when you start like that, it reminds me of
Snappy Tom. I think I've said that.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Yeah, I think it's my fallback. Is that kind of tune?
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Your fallback? Super Mario Brothers?
Speaker 1 (00:23):
How does that for a while? That's all right, that's right,
it is, malam Monte. Thanks for joining us for Lucky Dip,
A little bite sized morsel of magic. What have you
got today, Melissa?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Oh god, well, a couple of weeks ago, I did
a little show and tell clip on our Instagram about
the Flowers and the Attic books. Did you read?
Speaker 1 (00:46):
I never read them, but I vaguely remember watching the
show and being fascinated with the incest, which is why
they're so pop, so well known.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I think, yeah, well they dip, They've done a few.
There was a movie that came out in night maybe seven,
which I remember, and it had the girl that played
the daughter or the main character was remember Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, not Sarah Michelle Galla. The movie that came out,
I think Luke Perry was in it. Oh wow, No,
Christy Swanson. Her name was Anyway.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
I never got into Buffy the Vampire to oh I
was so good.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
I remember the movie. Yeah, anyway, I thought the backstory
of Virginia Andrews, who wrote those books, was fascinating. Okay,
I'm going to tell you about that today. Actually, you
know what, before we start, I'm going to send you
a picture of her, Okay, because I feel this is
important for you to see. Okay, And when I say this,
(01:39):
it's going to sound mean. It's not that she's unattractive.
It's that she's the most terrifying looking woman I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Ah, Yes, she's got she's Can we put a picture
of this in our show notes? Can you put pictures
in show notes?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
No, you can't, but maybe we'll put it up on
instare or something.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Okay, little all right, Yes, she looks she looks a
bit sinister. It looks like.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
She's thinking about something she shouldn't be thinking of.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yes, she's got on quite a lot of eye makeup
and no teeth. Smile like you know, when you smile
with no teeth, it always looks suspicious.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Very dark under the eyes as well. That's sort of yeah,
but I mean there's a reason for this. Okay. So
her birth name is actually Cleo Virginia Andrews. And what
a travesty that is because Cleo is such a cute,
cute name and she's using Virginia. But anyway, So she
was born in nineteen twenty three. She was one of
three siblings. She was a middle child, which she explains
(02:31):
a lot, but she was also the only girl, and
she was creative when she was little, very good at
writing and painting. But when she was seventeen, she was
seriously injured when she fell down a flight of stairs.
So she had a pretty severe back injury, so they
decided to do surgery to correct it. But the surgery
went wrong, and then she was left with this like
(02:54):
crippling arthritis and just chronic pain all the time, so
she couldn't walk without crutches and eventually was sort of
pretty much in a wheelchair most of the time. Wow,
so this gets even more messed up. Her mum, Lilian,
was embarrassed about this that now her daughter had a disability. Yeah,
(03:15):
he wasn't happy about that, so she basically confined her
to the house.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Oh God, how's that? I feel like that used to
happen a lot in the oldie days. It was like
so unless your kid was perfect, they were hidden or
they were often sent off to places.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
One of the details that I read was that if
she let her go outside into the front yard to
just sit down and get some sun, she would take
the wheelchair around and put it at the back, like
behind bushes, so no one saw, and she'd make her
wear a really big skirt so nobody. It's so weird,
(03:56):
Like yeah, anyway, Virginia spent her time doing a lot
of painting, and she was very good at it. So
when she was thirty four and her dad died, she
had to support herself and her mum. So she started
selling these paintings, and she earned good money. Because imagine
how many she had after all those years like that,
twenty years found how much money would you've spent an
(04:19):
acrylic paint for me?
Speaker 1 (04:20):
I was disappointed? Ricey as okay.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
So in nineteen seventy seven she decided to try her
hand at writing, and she wrote a novel called Flowers
in the Attic. The story was inspired a little bit
by her own experiences of being confined to the house
by her maid, but also this is if this was
so hard for me not to go down this rabbit hole.
But apparently there was a young doctor that she'd sort
(04:47):
of gotten close with when she was in hospital after
she fell down the stairs when she had that surgery,
and he had told her this story of how he
and his siblings had been locked away in an attic
for six years.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Oh wow, to.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Preserve the family's wealth or inheritance or something like that.
So she sort of merged these couple of stories together.
It's a big book. It's a decent book, right, lots
of pages, tiny.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Text, I hate tony text.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
She wrote it in two weeks. No, she wrote it
in two weeks, and she lost twelve pounds in the process.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
God, because she just was hyper focusing the fucking double trying.
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Okay, so she submitted it to an editor who returned
her original manuscript with notes to spice up the story
a bit. So she thought, I know what I'll do.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Shit, And that's how that because it didn't have the look.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
I don't know, maybe it didn't have the actual in
sex part, which was I mean from my memory from memory,
in that first book, it was actually like a rape situation.
I'm pretty sure brother. Yeah. Anyway, Virginia Andrews clearly had
ADHD because she made all of the review in one night. Wow. Yeah,
(06:03):
resubmitted it, and then in nineteen seventy nine, greatest year ever,
I was born. Your partner, Sammy was born in seventy
nine two, I believe. Yeah, Flowers in the Attic was
published and it was an instant hit. It was on
the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks, and
that was partly because of the controversy around it. You know,
people start talking, everyone wants to read it.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Yeah, they do. Isn't it weird that we would want
to read something like that?
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Well, it's just the curiosity, I think.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
And it was banned in like heaps of schools and
stuff like that because the incest portion. Fair enough. Anyway,
she made a shit ton of money off the book,
and then she was just hitting the town doing the
press tours and stuff for it, and her mum was
there always. It's got a bit of a gypsy rose
vibe to it. Yeah, mum was always there.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Which was the story of the Munchausen by proxy.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, so her captor was always by her side. But
Virginia Andrews even dedicated the book to her mum. I'm like,
I don't know, I don't know if I take that
as a compliment.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Mind yeah, yeah, trapped in an attic incest book. There
you go, mummy.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
I know this is for my mum, who inspired this
fucking horrific tale. Anyway, So it was a hit. Everyone
loved it. So then she continued giving the people what
they wanted, and she wrote three follow up books to
Flowers in the Attic. She wrote another book which is
equally as fucked, called My Sweet or Drina, and the
first two Heaven books, and from nineteen seventy nine to
(07:33):
nineteen eighty six she released a book a year, except
for in nineteen eighty three What Happened There. In nineteen
eighty six, though, at the age of sixty three, she
sadly passed away from breast cancer. At the time of
her death, she had almost finished two other books. One
was the prequel to Flowers in the Attic and the
other was the third in the Heaven series. So the
(07:54):
family were like, but we've got this almost finished book.
What do we do? They hired a ghost writer, the
guy called Andrew Niederman, and he took over and he
nailed her style. So he finished those last two books.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
That's like the book Verity by Colin Hoover where the
lady is an author. Oh yeah, and she's you know,
I forget what happened, but they hire the writer to
come and finish off in her way, in her style.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yes, well, that's what they did with this guy. In
nineteen eighty seven, both of those unfinished books were released
and they put him on the payroll and everything he
wrote was under the name VC Andrews. Ah. He went
on to publish ninety six books. What under that name?
Can you imagine coming up with the concept for book
(08:45):
ninety six? How would you have that many ideas?
Speaker 1 (08:48):
But then he was writing under her name as well, under.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Her name, so everything's published VC Andrews.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
That's so weird.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
It is weird, but pretty smart because I guess a
lot of people. Look, I wouldn't have known whether she
was alive or dead or.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
I guess not no, But then when you found out
it would be you'd be like, well, this isn't her writing.
It would be strange to know that it was a
dude that was writing like her.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, I know. And as of twenty twenty two, Flowers
in the Attica sold more than forty million copies. That's
more than Fleetwood Max Rumors album.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Is it really?
Speaker 2 (09:25):
It's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
It's pretty bloody amazing.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
You found them the other day and showed them on
Instagram and everyone was like, oh my god, I remember them.
People are like, I'm going to reread ith.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
God. I was thinking should I Should I try and
reread them. I don't know if I've got it in me.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Nah, it's hard. It's hard to reread a book, and
I don't know if it will hold the test of
time either. You know, all right, we're out of here everyone.
There's a little story for you to share with everyone.
Thank you for listening. If you can share our podcast
with a buddy or give us a rating or a
comment wherever you listen to podcast, that would be so
(10:02):
bloody fantastic. We are going to get out of here,
but we're going to chat to you so soon, bry
for now, love Ees,
It's Lucky Dip time. It's Lucky Dip time. It's so lucky,
we'll lucky to be alive.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Sometimes when you start like that, it reminds me of
Snappy Tom. I think I've said that.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Yeah, I think it's my fallback. Is that kind of tune?
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Your fallback? Super Mario Brothers?
Speaker 1 (00:23):
How does that for a while? That's all right, that's right,
it is, malam Monte. Thanks for joining us for Lucky Dip,
A little bite sized morsel of magic. What have you
got today, Melissa?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Oh god, well, a couple of weeks ago, I did
a little show and tell clip on our Instagram about
the Flowers and the Attic books. Did you read?
Speaker 1 (00:46):
I never read them, but I vaguely remember watching the
show and being fascinated with the incest, which is why
they're so pop, so well known.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I think, yeah, well they dip, They've done a few.
There was a movie that came out in night maybe seven,
which I remember, and it had the girl that played
the daughter or the main character was remember Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, not Sarah Michelle Galla. The movie that came out,
I think Luke Perry was in it. Oh wow, No,
Christy Swanson. Her name was Anyway.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
I never got into Buffy the Vampire to oh I
was so good.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
I remember the movie. Yeah, anyway, I thought the backstory
of Virginia Andrews, who wrote those books, was fascinating. Okay,
I'm going to tell you about that today. Actually, you
know what, before we start, I'm going to send you
a picture of her, Okay, because I feel this is
important for you to see. Okay, And when I say this,
(01:39):
it's going to sound mean. It's not that she's unattractive.
It's that she's the most terrifying looking woman I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Ah, Yes, she's got she's Can we put a picture
of this in our show notes? Can you put pictures
in show notes?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
No, you can't, but maybe we'll put it up on
instare or something.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Okay, little all right, Yes, she looks she looks a
bit sinister. It looks like.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
She's thinking about something she shouldn't be thinking of.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yes, she's got on quite a lot of eye makeup
and no teeth. Smile like you know, when you smile
with no teeth, it always looks suspicious.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Very dark under the eyes as well. That's sort of yeah,
but I mean there's a reason for this. Okay. So
her birth name is actually Cleo Virginia Andrews. And what
a travesty that is because Cleo is such a cute,
cute name and she's using Virginia. But anyway, So she
was born in nineteen twenty three. She was one of
three siblings. She was a middle child, which she explains
(02:31):
a lot, but she was also the only girl, and
she was creative when she was little, very good at
writing and painting. But when she was seventeen, she was
seriously injured when she fell down a flight of stairs.
So she had a pretty severe back injury, so they
decided to do surgery to correct it. But the surgery
went wrong, and then she was left with this like
(02:54):
crippling arthritis and just chronic pain all the time, so
she couldn't walk without crutches and eventually was sort of
pretty much in a wheelchair most of the time. Wow,
so this gets even more messed up. Her mum, Lilian,
was embarrassed about this that now her daughter had a disability. Yeah,
(03:15):
he wasn't happy about that, so she basically confined her
to the house.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Oh God, how's that? I feel like that used to
happen a lot in the oldie days. It was like
so unless your kid was perfect, they were hidden or
they were often sent off to places.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
One of the details that I read was that if
she let her go outside into the front yard to
just sit down and get some sun, she would take
the wheelchair around and put it at the back, like
behind bushes, so no one saw, and she'd make her
wear a really big skirt so nobody. It's so weird,
(03:56):
Like yeah, anyway, Virginia spent her time doing a lot
of painting, and she was very good at it. So
when she was thirty four and her dad died, she
had to support herself and her mum. So she started
selling these paintings, and she earned good money. Because imagine
how many she had after all those years like that,
twenty years found how much money would you've spent an
(04:19):
acrylic paint for me?
Speaker 1 (04:20):
I was disappointed? Ricey as okay.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
So in nineteen seventy seven she decided to try her
hand at writing, and she wrote a novel called Flowers
in the Attic. The story was inspired a little bit
by her own experiences of being confined to the house
by her maid, but also this is if this was
so hard for me not to go down this rabbit hole.
But apparently there was a young doctor that she'd sort
(04:47):
of gotten close with when she was in hospital after
she fell down the stairs when she had that surgery,
and he had told her this story of how he
and his siblings had been locked away in an attic
for six years.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Oh wow, to.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Preserve the family's wealth or inheritance or something like that.
So she sort of merged these couple of stories together.
It's a big book. It's a decent book, right, lots
of pages, tiny.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Text, I hate tony text.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
She wrote it in two weeks. No, she wrote it
in two weeks, and she lost twelve pounds in the process.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
God, because she just was hyper focusing the fucking double trying.
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Okay, so she submitted it to an editor who returned
her original manuscript with notes to spice up the story
a bit. So she thought, I know what I'll do.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Shit, And that's how that because it didn't have the look.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
I don't know, maybe it didn't have the actual in
sex part, which was I mean from my memory from memory,
in that first book, it was actually like a rape situation.
I'm pretty sure brother. Yeah. Anyway, Virginia Andrews clearly had
ADHD because she made all of the review in one night. Wow. Yeah,
(06:03):
resubmitted it, and then in nineteen seventy nine, greatest year ever,
I was born. Your partner, Sammy was born in seventy
nine two, I believe. Yeah, Flowers in the Attic was
published and it was an instant hit. It was on
the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks, and
that was partly because of the controversy around it. You know,
people start talking, everyone wants to read it.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Yeah, they do. Isn't it weird that we would want
to read something like that?
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Well, it's just the curiosity, I think.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
And it was banned in like heaps of schools and
stuff like that because the incest portion. Fair enough. Anyway,
she made a shit ton of money off the book,
and then she was just hitting the town doing the
press tours and stuff for it, and her mum was
there always. It's got a bit of a gypsy rose
vibe to it. Yeah, mum was always there.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Which was the story of the Munchausen by proxy.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, so her captor was always by her side. But
Virginia Andrews even dedicated the book to her mum. I'm like,
I don't know, I don't know if I take that
as a compliment.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Mind yeah, yeah, trapped in an attic incest book. There
you go, mummy.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
I know this is for my mum, who inspired this
fucking horrific tale. Anyway, So it was a hit. Everyone
loved it. So then she continued giving the people what
they wanted, and she wrote three follow up books to
Flowers in the Attic. She wrote another book which is
equally as fucked, called My Sweet or Drina, and the
first two Heaven books, and from nineteen seventy nine to
(07:33):
nineteen eighty six she released a book a year, except
for in nineteen eighty three What Happened There. In nineteen
eighty six, though, at the age of sixty three, she
sadly passed away from breast cancer. At the time of
her death, she had almost finished two other books. One
was the prequel to Flowers in the Attic and the
other was the third in the Heaven series. So the
(07:54):
family were like, but we've got this almost finished book.
What do we do? They hired a ghost writer, the
guy called Andrew Niederman, and he took over and he
nailed her style. So he finished those last two books.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
That's like the book Verity by Colin Hoover where the
lady is an author. Oh yeah, and she's you know,
I forget what happened, but they hire the writer to
come and finish off in her way, in her style.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yes, well, that's what they did with this guy. In
nineteen eighty seven, both of those unfinished books were released
and they put him on the payroll and everything he
wrote was under the name VC Andrews. Ah. He went
on to publish ninety six books. What under that name?
Can you imagine coming up with the concept for book
(08:45):
ninety six? How would you have that many ideas?
Speaker 1 (08:48):
But then he was writing under her name as well, under.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Her name, so everything's published VC Andrews.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
That's so weird.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
It is weird, but pretty smart because I guess a
lot of people. Look, I wouldn't have known whether she
was alive or dead or.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
I guess not no, But then when you found out
it would be you'd be like, well, this isn't her writing.
It would be strange to know that it was a
dude that was writing like her.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, I know. And as of twenty twenty two, Flowers
in the Attica sold more than forty million copies. That's
more than Fleetwood Max Rumors album.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Is it really?
Speaker 2 (09:25):
It's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
It's pretty bloody amazing.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
You found them the other day and showed them on
Instagram and everyone was like, oh my god, I remember them.
People are like, I'm going to reread ith.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
God. I was thinking should I Should I try and
reread them. I don't know if I've got it in me.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Nah, it's hard. It's hard to reread a book, and
I don't know if it will hold the test of
time either. You know, all right, we're out of here everyone.
There's a little story for you to share with everyone.
Thank you for listening. If you can share our podcast
with a buddy or give us a rating or a
comment wherever you listen to podcast, that would be so
(10:02):
bloody fantastic. We are going to get out of here,
but we're going to chat to you so soon, bry
for now, love Ees,
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