Go Ask Alice
 | This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. (January 2010) |
| File:Goaskalicsedfs.jpg | |
| Author | Anonymous (Beatrice Sparks) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Prentice Hall |
Publication date | March 5, 1971 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 214 |
| ISBN | 0133571114 |
| OCLC | 164716 |
| LC Class | PZ7 .G534 |
Go Ask Alice is a controversial 1971 book about the life of a troubled teenage girl. The book purports to be the actual diary of an anonymous teenage girl who died of a drug overdose in the late 1960s and is therefore presented as a testimony against drug use. Alice is not the protagonist's name; the actual diarist's name is never given in the book. A girl named Alice is mentioned briefly in one entry during the diarist's stay in Coos Bay, Oregon; she is a fellow addict the diarist meets on the street. Despite this, some commentators refer to the diarist as "Alice" in error or for the sake of convenience.
The story caused a sensation when published and remains in print as of 2010. Revelations about the book's origin have caused much doubt as to its authenticity and factual accounts, and the publishers have listed it as a work of fiction since at least the mid-late 1980s. Although it is still published under the byline "Anonymous," press interviews and copyright records suggest that it is largely or wholly the work of its purported editor, Beatrice Sparks. Some of the days and dates referenced in the book put the timeline from 1968 until 1970.
The title is from the lyrics to the Jefferson Airplane song "White Rabbit". Grace Slick wrote the song based on perceived drug references in the classic novel Alice In Wonderland. (On July 14 [page 36 of the 2006 edition], the writer says she "feel[s] like Alice in Wonderland" and "maybe Lewis G. Caroll [sic] was on drugs too.")
The book was made into an ABC Movie of the Week in 1973.
Plot summary
An unnamed fifteen-year-old begins writing a diary. With a sensitive, observant style, she records her adolescent woes: she writes of average teenage concerns such as crushes, weight gain, sexuality, social acceptance, and difficulty relating to her parents. Her father, a college professor, accepts a teaching position at a different college and the family will move at the start of the new year, which cheers her up.
The diarist finds the move difficult because she feels like an outcast at school. Soon she meets Beth, a neighbor, and the two become fast friends. When Beth leaves for summer camp the diarist goes back to her hometown to stay with her grandparents. She reunites with an old school acquaintance, Jill, who is impressed by the diarist's move to a larger town, and soon invites her to a party. At the party, the diarist unwittingly ingests LSD and experiences a fantastic drug trip.
The diarist willingly uses more drugs and ends up losing her virginity while on acid. She doesn't know who she can talk to about drugs. She is secretly worried that she may be pregnant, and her grandfather has a small heart attack. These events and the tremendous amount of guilt she feels begin to overwhelm her. She begins to take sleeping pills from her grandparents and when she returns home, she receives sleeping pills from her doctor. When those aren't enough she demands powerful tranquilizers from her doctor.
The diarist meets a hip girl, Chris, when she shops at a local boutique. The diarist and Chris become best friends quickly. In their spare time they use drugs and are popular at school. Soon the pair begin to date two college boy-drug dealers named Richie and Ted. The girls are turned onto marijuana and ecstasy. They begin selling drugs for the boyfriends, and are mortified when they realize that Richie and Ted are actually in a homosexual relationship together and have just been using them to make money. Vowing to stay clean, they flee to San Francisco, moving into a cramped apartment. Chris secures a job in a boutique with a glamorous older woman, Sheila, while the diarist gets a job with a custom jeweler, Mr Mellani, who the diarist views as a father figure.
Sheila invites the girls to lavish parties at her house where they start to use drugs again, including heroine. At one party, Sheila and her new boyfriend get the girls stoned on heroin before raping the pair. The diarist and Chris, traumatized, move to Berkeley where they open a jewelry shop. Throughout her time away, the diarist misses her family and longs to contact them. She and Chris return home for Christmas, and the holiday spirit and family camaraderie revive her.
The diarist moves back home, where she finds extreme social pressures and hostility from her former friends from the drug scene. She and her family are threatened and shunned at times. Chris and the diarist get back on drugs and off of drugs several more times. Disastrous situations occur in the life of the diarist, including prostitution, hitchhiking, homeless shelters, being drugged against her will, and insane asylums.
She gets straight again one last time. She meets a love interest named Joel. Things are looking up for her at last as relationships with her family are improving, and she has some prospects for love and friendship. She is worried about starting school again, but feels stronger with the support of her new friends and Joel. She comments that she no longer needs a diary, for she now has people in her life with whom she can communicate.
The epilogue explains that the diarist died three weeks later of an overdose—whether it was premeditated or accidental remains unclear—and that she was one of thousands of drug deaths that year.
Authorship
Go Ask Alice was originally promoted as nonfiction and was published under the byline "Anonymous." However, not long after its publication, Beatrice Sparks, a psychologist and Mormon youth counselor, began making media appearances presenting herself as the book's editor.
Searches at the U.S. Copyright Office[1] show that Sparks is the sole copyright holder for Go Ask Alice. Furthermore, she is listed on the copyright record as the book's author — not as the editor, compiler, or executor, which would be more usual for someone publishing the diary of a deceased person. (According to the book itself, the sole copyright is owned by Prentice-Hall.)
In an October 1979 interview with Alleen Pace Nilsen for School Library Journal, Sparks claimed that Go Ask Alice had been based on the diary of one of her patients, but that she had added various fictional incidents based on her experiences working with other troubled teens. She said the real girl had not died of a drug overdose, but in a way that could have been either an accident or suicide. She also stated that she could not produce the original diary, because she had destroyed part of it after transcribing it and the rest was locked away in the publisher's vault.
Sparks' second "diary" project, Jay's Journal, gave rise to a controversy that cast further doubt on Go Ask Alice's veracity. Jay's Journal was allegedly the diary of a boy who committed suicide after becoming involved with the occult. Again, Sparks claimed to have based it on the diary of a patient. However, the family of the boy in question, Alden Barrett, disowned the book. They claimed that Sparks had used only a handful of the actual diary entries, and had invented the great majority of the book, including the entire occult angle. [2] This led many to speculate that "Alice's" diary—if indeed it existed—had received similar treatment. No one claiming to have known the real "Alice" has ever come forward.
Sparks has gone on to produce many other alleged diaries dealing with various problems faced by teenagers. These include Treacherous Love: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager, Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets, Annie's Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, a Pregnant Teenager and It Happened to Nancy: By an Anonymous Teenager. Although billed as "real diaries," these do not appear to have been received by readers or reviewers as anything other than fiction.
There have recently been hints that at least one other author was involved in the creation of Go Ask Alice. In an essay called "Just Say Uh-Oh", published in the New York Times Book Review on November 5, 1998, Mark Oppenheimer identified Linda Glovach, an author of young-adult novels, as "one of the 'preparers' -- let's call them forgers -- of Go Ask Alice", although he did not give his source for this claim.[3] Amazon.com's listing for Glovach's novel Beauty Queen also states that Glovach is "a co-author" of Alice.
In an article on the Urban Legends Reference Pages (snopes.com), urban folklore expert Barbara Mikkelson points out that even before the revelations about Go Ask Alice's authorship, there was ample internal evidence that the book was not an actual diary. The lengthy, detailed passages about the harmful effects of illicit drugs and the relatively small amount of space dedicated to relationships and social gossip seem uncharacteristic of a teenaged girl’s diary. Furthermore, the book uses many long words, such as gregarious and impregnable, which are uncommon in casual pieces of writing, especially those of teenagers.[4] There are also other errors such as on page 16 when she says that she has not "Had time to write for two days". Then in the same paragraph she refers to the last entry as yesterday when she says, "I've apologized to every room about the way I felt last night" even though according to her first sentence she would have felt that way two nights ago, not "last night".
Censorship controversies
Because Go Ask Alice includes profanity as well as relatively explicit references to runaways, drugs, sex, and rape, conservative parents and activists have sought to remove it from school libraries. Bans started in the 1970s: Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1974, Saginaw, Michigan in 1975, and Eagle Pass, Texas and Trenton, New Jersey in 1977 through removal from local libraries. Other libraries in New York (1975), Ogden, Utah (1979), and Florida (1982) required parental permission for a student to check out the book. Additional bans occurred in 1983 in Minnesota and Colorado, 1984 in Mississippi, and 1986 in Georgia and Michigan. Also, in 1993 in New Jersey and West Virginia, 1994 in Massachusetts, 1998 in Rhode Island, 2003 in Maine, and in Feb 2007 Berkley County School District in South Carolina. The American Library Association listed Go Ask Alice as number 23 on its list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s.[5] The book was number 8 on the most challenged list in 2001 and up to number 6 in 2003. The dispute over the book's authorship does not seem to have played any role in these censorship battles.