Forbidden Books
The recent death of Sidney Sheldon coincided with an online column and lengthy comment section at Entertainment Weekly on surreptitious reading–what books did people read as teenagers and hide from their parents, because the books were about sex, profanity, rebellion, violence, etc?
I was a precocious reader. My parents didn’t forbid me from reading anything, but I tried to hide some of the racier ones. (Interestingly, they forbade my sisters and me from watching Three’s Company, Charlie’s Angels, Love Boat, and Fantasy Island, so TV was censored more than books. Yet I remember watching all those shows many times, and I couldn’t have spent THAT many nights at friends’ houses.)
A list of forbidden books is the antithesis of the more usually found top ten lists, like those recently compiled in The Top Ten by J. Peder Zanes. Forbidden books were usually selected more for their racy content than for their literary merit; very few of the forbidden books I read as a teenager have survived in my library.
Here, in all their embarrassing glory, are some of the books and authors I read when I was a teenager. I couldn’t contain myself to ten, even when I collapsed a few authors and categories.
1. Flowers in the Attic, V.C. Andrews’s cult classic. I don’t even want to know how far I got in that series.
2. Judy Blume: The progression for me was Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, Then Again Maybe I Won’t, Forever, and Wifey.
3. Horror Books: The Amityville Horror (couldn’t sleep for weeks), The Omen, anything by Stephen King. These books often had sex AND scary stuff, so there was plenty of stuff that parents would disapprove of.
4. The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills by Mary Stewart. Merlin! Magic! Naughty bits! But, oh, the later books were pretty bad.
5. Restoree, Dragonflight (and far too many of its sequels), Get off the Unicorn, by Anne McCaffrey, who had some non-explicit racy bits mixed into her fantasy stories and novels.
6. Chances and Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins
7. Rage of Angels, Bloodline, If Tomorrow Comes, and Master of the Game by Sidney Sheldon
8. The Promise by Danielle Steele, strangely, a novelization of someone else’s screenplay. I remember a stirring love story, yet when I re-read it as an adult I was horrified by how badly written it was.
9. Bodice rippers: Whitney, My Love by Judith McNaught, A Rose in Winter by Kathleen Woodiwiss, and the Steve and Ginny books by Rosemary Rogers.
Years later, my younger sister pointed out that most of McNaught’s books have a rape scene; I hadn’t noticed or been bothered by them when I was younger–yikes.
I loved most of the books by Woodiwiss, but this Beauty and the Beast homage was one I read again and again.
Even when I was reading them, I found the Steve and Ginny books by Rogers to be kind of disturbing. Steve cheated on her all the time, yet she only cheated on him when she had amnesia or was being tortured, then he’d be horrible to her after she got rescued. And I don’t recall what he went through, but she was a captive army prostitute, a harem girl, an opium addict, so I definitely think she got the worst of it. A most embarrassing moment: I was reading one of the Rogers books while waiting to go on a school trip. The teacher commented, “Oh, you have such a look of intensity on your face while you read!” Given the racy cover of the book, and the very racy scene I’d just read, I was mortified.
I always wondered–why was the man always 33, and the woman always 18? That was a hard age difference for me to buy when I was young, yet I suppose it was mostly that a man would have to be significantly older to have achieved the kind of financial success necessary for a romance hero.
10. It looked like a bodice ripper, but it had more substance to it: Amanda/Miranda by Richard Peck. I had to tear off the cover, because I got tired of being teased about it. It was a romance, a mystery, and about the Titanic! It was a girly dream come true.
11. Lace by Shirley Conran, The Debutantes by June Flaum Singer (these were pretty much the same book) Lace had a very naughty part involving a goldfish.
12. Scruples, Princess Daisy, and probably my favorite of them all, Mistral’s Daughter by Judith Krantz