In the 1970s, this fake diary scared—and tempted—teenage girls all over America
Thinking about doing drugs? ‘Go Ask Alice.’
If you spent any time in the young adult section of a library, you probably remember a slim paperback that — with its chiaroscuro cover depicting a haunted girl staring out at you, and subtitle labeling it “A Real Diary” — almost vibrated with secret knowledge. Published in 1971, at the height of the psychedelic era, Go Ask Alice is a visceral and harrowing depiction of a teenage girl’s fatal decline into drugs. Named for Grace Slick’s mind-expanding “White Rabbit” lyrics and credited to “Anonymous,” the book seemed specially designed to scare young readers away from experimenting with substances. It became a phenomenon and eventually sold over five million copies. Even so, the real author has never been identified, though there is strong evidence suggesting it was actually written by a middle-aged Mormon.
“Even now I’m not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I’ve gotten from books.”
— Go Ask Alice
The story begins when a girl on the verge of her fifteenth birthday decides to keep a diary. (Although she goes unnamed, some reviewers and also the 1973 made for TV movie starring William Shatner call her Alice for clarity’s sake.) Although an introductory note urges the reader not to take her account as “the definitive statement on the middle-class teenage drug world,” that is certainly the book’s setting. The diarist’s family is a stable, vanilla configuration of married parents, three siblings, and the kindly Gran and Gramps.
The diarist’s complaints are the usual adolescent stuff: mood swings, and anxiety about her weight, appearance and social standing. The entry for September 20th reads, in its entirety: “It’s my birthday. I’m 15. Nothing” — a hilarious and poignant nugget of teen angst. At other times, she veers exuberantly goody-goody, as on December 25th when she begins, “Wonderful, magnificent, happy, holy Christmas. I’m so happy I can hardly contain myself.”
These concerns shift forever when her mousy best friend Beth goes off to summer camp, leaving Alice to attend Jill Peters’s party alone, where she is unwittingly dosed with LSD and discovers that drugs are way more fun than Jesus’s birthday.
Although she claims she’s not sure whether to be “ashamed or elated” by this experience, her initial response is mostly positive, even euphoric: “It was fun! It was ecstatic! It was glorious!” Fearing dire consequences, she resolves never to try drugs again. But by the time she turns sixteen, she is taking Bennys, Dexies, and tranquilizers, having casual sex while high, washing her hair with mayonnaise, and tossing around hippie-speak like “the fuzz” and “the Establishment.”
The following year is a wild cycle of lurid trips and hopeful attempts to get clean. At times Alice sounds like a hardened runaway (“I’m ready to take on the Fat Cats, the Rich Philistines, or even the whole public for one good shot”) and at others like a girl scout after a weird night (“My pillow! My mattress! My old silver hand mirror. It all seems so permanent, so old and new at the same time.”). Her style is not always convincingly adolescent, although lines like, “Anyone who says pot and acid are not addicting is a damn, stupid, raving idiot, unenlightened fool!” keep the drug use scare factor at a fever pitch.
Eventually her seeking takes her to San Francisco and Coos Bay, Oregon, and other places kids go to escape the squares, though her parents never fail to welcome her home. In her final entry, a sober and optimistic “Alice” decides to give up her diary. Yet, in the editors’ vague, final note, the reader learns she has died at home, seemingly of an overdose.
Despite the popularity of Go Ask Alice, the mystery of the diarist’s identity has never been truly solved, and none of her relatives have ever come forward to claim a share of the royalties. Yet the book was largely treated as authentic by reviewers in the 1970s, and touted as such for the television adaptation. Only Publisher’s Weekly threw shade, remarking that it “seems awfully well written,” to be real.
Then, in 1978, a book called Voices, a compilation of stories about troubled teens, was released, with jacket copy attributing it to “Beatrice Sparks, the author who brought you Go Ask Alice.” A year later came Jay’s Journal, the diary of an adolescent boy who succumbs to Satan worship, which similarly credited Dr. Beatrice Sparks and invoked the Alice brand. Sparks, a sometime ghostwriter and adolescent therapist, was at that time a sixty-ish woman living in the Mormon stronghold of Provo, Utah.
In a 1979 interview with School Library Journal, Sparks told the writer Alleen Pace Nilson that there really had been an Alice, whom she had met in her capacity as a youth counselor. According to Sparks, the inspiration was an intelligent but insecure girl from California, who, before her death, handed over her diaries so that her parents wouldn’t be able to read them. In order to honor this promise, Sparks added stories from other troubled youth she had worked with, so that the girl’s parents would never know which entries belonged to their daughter. However, when Nilson asked Sparks what had become of the original diaries, she replied with a story — both cold-hearted and ridiculous — about throwing out the pages as she transcribed them.
By the time of her death in 2012, Sparks’ name had become so associated with the book’s authorship that her obituary described her profession as writer and listed Go Ask Alice as one of her many titles. The obituary also references her doctorate, although this is another fact that Nilson questioned, writing that she saw “no evidence of formal training or professional affiliation,” and asserting that Sparks’ anecdote about working in a drug rehabilitation center was scant on details. From the obituary — she was a devout Mormon, and great-grandmother to nineteen — it seems plausible that she took her mission to enlighten at-risk youth from the LDS rather than the DSM.
If her most popular work is any indication, Sparks was as much a storyteller as she was an anti-drug crusader. From the cool, counterculture reference of the title to the thoroughness with which she degrades her protagonist (rape, prostitution, trouble with the law, forced institutionalization and psychological destruction are all crammed into two hundred brief pages), Sparks seems to be acting on the instinct that nobody will read a cautionary tale if it isn’t sexed up with maximum scandal.
She also must have understood, like James Frey and JT LeRoy puppeteer Laura Albert, that pain is most transfixing when we believe it actually happened. Of course the personal narrative as fictional conceit is almost as old as the novel itself, and, from Moll Flanders to Bridget Jones, has been particularly effective at telling the stories of women in trouble. Contrary to Publisher’s Weekly, I find Go Ask Alice most convincing (not as an authentic diary, but as literature) when the prose is what we usually call bad writing. The narrator’s style is so bland, her tendency to dwell on the banal while skirting the biggest traumas so un-novel like, that she actually is believable as a character prone to denial and vulnerable to annihilating drug use. And the plot is so random and poorly paced that the book does, at times, achieve the texture of real life.
Sparks, and the publishers who still package Go Ask Alice to obscure its fictional origins, certainly wanted to have it both ways. For the book to seem approachable yet melodramatic; to teach a lesson but also call the crowds with a dog whistle of naughtiness. But my hunch is that kids consume it they way they might that copy of the Joy of Sex their parents keep on the top shelf — titillated by lines like “Another day, another blowjob,” and laughing at Mormon mom clunkers like “dopey dopers.” Young readers will always have it their way, anyway, skimming over the false passages to get to the dog-eared good parts.
