Books - Go Ask Alice

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	Books - Go Ask Alice

:This article is about the book. For the health website, see Go Ask Alice!.

Go Ask Alice, an account of drug abuse that has been controversial on several levels, is considered a classic of American young adult literature. First published by Prentice-Hall in 1971, the book purports to be the actual diary of an anonymous teenage girl who died of a drug overdose in the late 1960s. The book is presented as a cautionary tale against drug use. Marketed to other teen girls, it caused a sensation when published and remains in print more than 30 years later. However, revelations about the book's origin have caused much doubt as to its authenticity, and the publishers have listed it as a work of fiction since at least the mid-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.

The title is from the Jefferson Airplane song, "White Rabbit", which includes the lyrics, "Go ask Alice/When she's ten feet tall". Grace Slick wrote the song after noticing possible drug references in Alice In Wonderland
. Alice is not the protagonist's name; in fact, the supposed diarist's name is never given. A woman named Alice is mentioned briefly in one entry, but she is a fellow addict whom the diarist meets on the street. Despite this, reviewers generally refer to the diarist as 'Alice' for the sake of convenience.

Synopsis

At the beginning of the book, 'Alice' is a typical, insecure middle-class teenager, preoccupied with boys, diets and popularity. All this changes when she attends a party with new friends and is slipped Coca-Cola spiked with LSD. After this first unwitting experience, she seeks out drugs deliberately, and rapidly proceeds from marijuana and amphetamines to heroin and cocaine. Within a few months, she has run away from home and is living on the streets, eventually getting raped by her friends' boss in San Francisco. She even starts selling drugs to grade-schoolers to pay for her habit. After returning home from her first run away, she finds herself completely addicted to drugs, and while high she escapes the clutches of her parents again. From then, her diary is not dated. She finds herself sleeping with strangers and loses track of everything, but her fear for her family finally gives her enough courage to ask a priest to help her return home. She describes all her experiences faithfully; indeed, the more extreme the supposed diarist's addiction gets, the more sophisticated and descriptive her writing becomes.

When she returns home, she vows to stay completely off drugs, and succeeds until one day someone tricks her into using drugs while babysitting. She goes crazy temporarily, deeply injures herself and is committed to a psychiatric hospital. At the end of the book, she returns home, finally happy and over her drug addiction. She decides to stop keeping a diary. However, an editorial note tells us that three weeks after the last entry, she either died of an overdose, committed suicide or was murdered. The readers are left to make up their own minds about 'Alice's' death.

Authorship

Go Ask Alice was originally promoted as nonfiction, and was (and is) published under the byline 'Anonymous.' However, not long after its publication, Beatrice Sparks, a psychologist and Mormon youth counsellor, began making media appearances promoting herself as the book's editor.

Searches at the U.S. Copyright Office 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.

In an October 1979 interview with Aileen 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 'Alice' 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 Alices 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. 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.
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