flowers in the cellar

Austrian Man Locked His Daughter In The Basement For 24 Years

Upon first reading the horrific story of 73-year-old Austrian Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter, Elisabeth, in the family cellar in 1984 and proceeded to allegedly father as many as seven of her children, my reaction was damn, that is some V.C. Andrews shit. But then I read more of the reports, and I can no longer relate Fritzl's crime to a campy, pop culture artifact: Keeping your daughter and half of her children locked for over two decades in what authorities describe as a damp, narrow "series of underground rooms equipped for sleeping and cooking," according to the BBC, is nothing short of evil. CNN reports that on August 8, 1984 Fritzl's daughter, the now 42-year-old Elisabeth, was enticed by her father "into the basement, where he drugged her, put her in handcuffs and locked her in a room." Elisabeth, who had been sexually abused by Josef since she was 11, was reported missing two weeks later. More »

fine lines

My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer/reviewer/blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'My Sweet Audrina', V.C. Andrews' X-rated, 1982 gothic horror novel in which Audrina Adare, an innocent, is Desperately Seeking Sister.

There was something strange about the house where I grew up.

For a three-month span in my early twenties, when I was under the profound misimpression I was an appropriate candidate for a PhD in English literature, I was obsessed with writing a paper on the narrative conceit of what, in a sort of pertinent Q.E.D., I went around calling "The Man You Seek is Yourself." The most obvious example of my pet trope is Oedipus, who is so busy killing his father and sleeping with his mother he doesn't realize he is killing his father and sleeping with his mother, but you see it in mysteries everywhere, from Mary Higgins Clark's Where Are the Children to No Way Out, a.k.a. Last Decent Costner. While reading most mysteries feels like having a scatter of jigsaw pieces suddenly fuse into a picture with a satisfying click, the TMYSIY™ theme is closer to trying to locate, with increasing irritation, the weird corner piece with some blue cloud stuff in one corner and half the villager's hat along the edge, then realizing you've been holding it in your hands the whole time.

More »

jezebook club

Were You a Judy Blume Enthusiast or a Babysitters Club Nerd?

In today's Washington Post, book critic Jonathan Yardley extols the virtues of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books as part of "An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past." Though I was never personally a fan of all those Prairie books (they were kind of boring and unsexy for my tastes. Where was the talk of making out and menses??), the article got me thinking about the kinds of books I loved as a tween. I asked the other Jezebels what books they read under the covers in their pre-teen years. Anonymous Lobbyist and I were closet Greek mythology lovers (I particularly loved D'Aulaires). Tracie was obsessed with V.C. Andrews, Moe was into Ray Bradbury, Dodai loved Kurt Vonnegut, and we all were into old standbys like Judy Blume and the Babysitters Club. More »