Divine lives in an attic room overlooking Montmartre cemetery, which she shares with various lovers, the most important of whom is a pimp called Darling Daintyfoot ("Mignon-les-Petits-Pieds" in French).

One day Darling brings home a young hoodlum and murderer, dubbed Our Lady of the Flowers.

The novel was an enormous influence on the Beats, with its free-flowing, highly poetic language mixed with argot/slang, and its celebration of lowlifes and explicit descriptions of homosexuality.

Jacques Derrida wrote on Genet in his book Glas, and Hélène Cixous celebrated his work as an example of écriture feminine.

Our Lady of the Flowers made Genet, in Sartre's mind at least, a poster child of existentialism and most especially an embodiment of that philosophy's views on freedom.

"Flowers" subsequently transferred to New York, Australia, Japan and all over Europe and South America... its last performance being in 1992 in Buenos Aires.

In Nigel Williams' Scenes from a Poisoner's Life (1994), the main protagonist gives Our Lady of the Flowers to his homosexual brother as a Christmas present.

Sopor Aeternus & the Ensemble of Shadows' album Les Fleurs du Mal – Die Blumen des Bösen was greatly inspired by the book.