At eleven years old, the walls of that attic were the pages of a forbidden adventure. In two feverish weeks, I devoured the entire V.C. Andrews saga: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and even the dark prequel, Garden of Shadows. I was fascinated by the macabre, by the gothic resilience of those flower-like children withering in the dust. The story was terrible, yes, but it was a dark fairy-tale kind of terror. The incest, the cruelty, the abandonment… they were pieces of a hideous puzzle that I could assemble from a safe distance. The transgressions were just that: broken rules in a grim game of survival. I understood everything, and nothing shook me. Honestly, I don't think it was premature reading. At that age, I had already read considerably worse things, and I believe it helped me mature.
What astounds me is what's happening now, in my thirties, upon deciding to return to that attic. I'm suffocating.
The same words that once narrated an adventure now whisper a condemnation. The story hasn't changed, but I have. Adulthood teaches us the anatomy of pain, and with that knowledge, reading has become an almost unbearable experience. The crying is constant, a painful cry for characters whose tragedies now have a real, tangible weight.
It's no longer the events that shock me, but the inevitability of the trauma. It's the realization that you can leave a place, but you carry it inside you forever. The attic has become a toxic legacy, a poison that runs through the bloodline, condemning each generation to relive the pain in different and equally desperate ways. Characters who act self-destructively no longer seem evil, but irredeemably lost, broken puppets dancing to the tune of an old, dusty ballet box. The true villainy, I now realize, lies not in the impulsive acts born of pain, but in the cold ideologies and fanaticism that offer false cures for incurable wounds.
The strangest part is when fiction touches a wound of your own. When a character's tragedy mirrors a vulnerability you know intimately. It's a disconcerting paradox: to feel their pain viscerally and, at the same time, to have a survival instinct whisper in your ear that their suffering is an indulgence, a gothic performance that real life, with its demand for resilience, doesn't allow.
I'm in the middle of the fourth book, Seeds of Yesterday, and every page is grayer than the last. And I ask all of you here:
Has this ever happened to you? What book, read with the invulnerability of youth, completely destroyed you when revisited with the weight of adult experience?
Can the true essence of certain stories only be understood after life has given us our own scars? Or is the child, free from the baggage of real empathy, actually the bravest reader?
by sEstatutario