Not all doughnuts...

"An intensely claustrophobic book, Flowers in the Attic owes a lot to pulp Gothic novels. Typified by authors like Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney, these books were usually about young women trapped in mysterious houses with frightening men, a form Joanna Russ famously summed up with the phrase, 'Someone’s trying to kill me, and I think it’s my husband.'

In Flowers in the Attic, though, the menace comes not from a husband (despite what happens between Cathy and Chris) but from older female relatives. Their primary jailer is their grandmother, who frequently addresses them as 'devil’s spawn.' She is regularly cruel to them, and occasionally starves them. In one memorable scene, she covers Cathy’s blonde hair with tar.

Their mother, though, is ultimately even more menacing. As time passes, she visits the children less and less. After one bout of starvation, they start to receive sugar-covered doughnuts in their food. Soon afterwards, all four children start to become ill, which culminates in one of them dying.

Cathy and Chris realise the doughnuts have been laced with arsenic – and while they initially blame their grandmother, they later realise that their mother was actually responsible. ('I still cannot eat powdered donuts and am very suspicious of all white powdery substances,' wrote Gay in 2013.)"

~ Jodi McAlister

"Flowers in the Attic at 45"

https://theconversation.com/flowers-in-the-attic-at-45-the-awful-and-fabulous-gothic-megaseller-that-influenced-gillian-flynn-and-obsessed-roxane-gay-241685