Go Ask Alice

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 35 years later (as of 2006). 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; the diarist's name is never given in the book. A woman named Alice is mentioned briefly in one entry; 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.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

At the beginning of the book, 'Alice' is a typical, insecure, middle-class teenager preoccupied with boys, diets, and popularity. Her fortunes take a sharp turn for the worse when her family moves to new town and she finds herself less popular and more alone than ever before. Unhappy in the new town, she is overjoyed to be allowed to return to the old town to spend the summer with her grandparents. During this stay she is invited to a party by an old acquaintance, there she unwittingly ingests LSD that had been added to random glasses of Coca-Cola and distributed to the party guests as a game. After this first unwitting but pleasurable experience, she seeks out drugs deliberately, and rapidly proceeds to marijuana, amphetamines, and casual sex. She describes her drug experiences intricately; the more extreme the supposed diarist's drug experience the more sophisticated and descriptive her writing becomes.

A pregnancy scare and the return to her new town encourage her to turn away from drugs; however she soon willingly falls in with the drug crowd where finally she finds acceptance. She starts dating a drug dealer and sells drugs to grade-schoolers for him. After realising he was using her, she turns him in to the police and runs away from home with her friend Chris, moving to San Francisco. She tries cocaine, and opens a boutique with Chris. However she misses her family, and after being given heroin and then being raped by Chris's boss Sheila and Sheila's boyfriend she and Chris return home.

She finds herself ostracized by the community and has difficulty keeping her resolve to not take drugs. She soon weakens and while high runs away again. She spends time living on the streets, a period during which her diary is not dated and entries were purportedly recorded on scraps of paper or paper napkins. She finds herself having sexual relations 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.

When she returns home she vows to stay completely off drugs, and succeeds, even without the support of Chris who has now moved away. However she is again ostracised by her former friends who continue to label her a police informant, and is ignored by the "square" kids. One day while she is babysitting she is drugged without her knowledge - someone leaves out peanuts at the house where she is sitting but they have secretly been drugged. She has a violent, bad trip, during which a neighbour locks her in the closet, where she badly injures herself trying to claw her way out, and is committed to a psychiatric hospital. After being released she returns home, is finally happy and over her drug addiction, and starts a new romance. At this point she decides to stop keeping a diary. An editorial note informs readers that three weeks after the last entry the diarist died of an overdose.

1 Authorship
2 Censorship controversies
3 References
4 External links

[edit] 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 counselor, began making media appearances promoting 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.

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 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' 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. ISBN 0-06-205161-X.

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 are what many critics would expect of anti-drug propaganda and 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. ^[1]

There are also some factual inconsistencies in the book that suggest it might not be an authentic diary.

"Alice" apologizes to her new house in her diary for "the way I felt last night." However, her negative feelings towards the house are recorded two days previously, not one.
"Alice" tells her diary that she had been using drugs, "since July 10 exactly." The July 10 entry is written the morning after she first takes LSD - and thus she had been taking drugs since July 9 exactly.
One night while alone in her bedroom and during a period when she is not using drugs, the protagonist experiences an intense hallucenogenic trip, waking the next morning lying naked on her bedroom floor. Although some LSD users report flashbacks not unlike the reliving of memories experienced by sufferers of post-traumatic stress syndrome, Alice's account rings of falsehood because this phenomenon would not cause a blackout.
The epilogue tells us that "Alice" died of a drug overdose, though the only drugs she regularly used (i.e., used more than once for pleasure) and could easily obtain at the position she was in at the end of the book were LSD and marijuana, both of which are virtually impossible to overdose on.

[edit] Censorship controversies

Because Go Ask Alice includes relatively explicit references to drugs and sex, parents and conservative activists have often sought to remove it from school libraries. Bans started in the 1970's: Kalamazoo in 1974, Saginaw in 1975, and Eagle Pass and Trenton in 1977 through removal from local libraries. Other libraries in New York (1975), 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, and 2003 in Maine. The American Library Association listed Go Ask Alice as number 23 on its list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s. [4] 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.