Adolescence is a world all its own. This world, all sugary-sweet on the outside – a pretty present wrapped up in taffeta prom dresses, strawberry lip gloss and football games – is also a time when young lives are plagued with recklessness, insecurities, drama and constant battles with authority. It’s a harsh time period, one that grabs malleable young minds and shapes them for better or for worse. From the tough-guy, letter-sporting varsity football player to the sheepish bookworm, every adolescent faces the same tribulations about sex, drugs and coming into one’s own.
Go Ask Alice is a diary supposedly written by an anonymous 15-year old in the late 1960’s. The young diarist, herein called “Alice,” begins the book with typical teenage insecurities about her weight, her stringy hair and her nonexistent love life. As the book progress, the reader watches “Alice” helplessly spiral down the rabbit hole of mild anorexia, depression and rampant drug use to her inevitable death.
Go Ask Alice, however, is not an account of just one young girl’s demise. Instead, it’s believed that the book creates a universal “Alice,” a typical, beautiful, confused girl who fails to navigate the muddy waters of adolescence. Within the book, the author uses “Alice” as a pawn to illustrate the dangers of illicit sex and reckless drug use. The author is not an anonymous teenager, but instead is believed to be a character concocted by the editor, Beatrice Sparks, as a way to simultaneously shine a spotlight on and stigmatize this lifestyle. The over-relatability of “Alice,” her extremely sophisticated writing and the predictable, “I-told-you-so” ending all contribute to this idea.
Originally published in 1971, Go Ask Alice was devoured by young readers who delighted in this delicious, fast-paced story of a girl who, at the beginning of the book, is much like themselves. Considering that the novel was released in the wake of the psychadelic 60’s, when acid trips were as common a form of rebellious entertainment as scouring your parent’s liquor cabinet for Jack Daniels, it is no surprise that the book took so well. In fact, “Alice’s” first drug experience is while playing the game “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button?” where LSD was randomly dropped in cups of Coke and then distributed to party-goer’s.
However, despite its popularity, there are several reasons why “Alice” may not be who she claims. Perhaps one of the first tell-tale signs that “Alice” is a fraud is how she is extremely relatable. Take, for example, the way “Alice” is characterized at the beginning of the book. She is helplessly in unrequited love with a boy named Roger, she thinks “school is a nightmare” (2) and is also struggling with body image issues, complaining that she has “gained fifteen pounds” and her hair is “so stingy and oily she has to wash it every night” (17). Not only that, but she also feels extreme pressure from her family to “‘Be happy, put up [her] hair, be positive, smile, show some spirit, be friendly'” (17). What teenager girl in the history of the modern world has not experienced these same emotions and pressures to some degree? The generalizations presented in the beginning of the book make “Alice” appear like she could be anyone – from your shiny, bubbly neighbor to the mousy girl in your Science class or perhaps even yourself. The back cover of the Aladdin paperbacks version even boasts that
Go Ask Alice is “a diary so honest you may think you know Alice – or someone like her.” Quotes like this further the idea that Sparks’ wanted “Alice” to play a universal teenager with no real stand-out characteristics of her own.
Alice’s” relatable character is what hooks young readers, but it is the honest look at the glamorous, exciting side of drugs that keeps them. The writing in this novel is striking, complex and emotionally-charged. However, the words don’t seem to spew from the mouth of the average teenager, but rather someone much more intelligent and worldly.
For example, although “Alice” appears rather intelligent at the beginning of the novel, her eloquence with words increases after her first drug experiences. She uses many adjectives, analogies and metaphors that seem far above a fifteen year old reading – let alone writing – comprehension. For example, “Alice” described her first acid trip in vivid, fluent prose: ” I looked at a magazine on the table, and I could see it in 100 dimensions. It was so beautiful that I could not stand the sight of it and closed my eyes. Immediately I was floating in another sphere, another world, another state. Things rush away from me and at me, taking my breath away like a drop in an elevator” (29). A description like this, especially the “like a drop in an elevator” part, sounds much more like a thought-out sentence that was written and revised, not something scrawled in seconds in a young girl’s diary.
There are several other places in the book where “Alice’s” knowledge and talent with words seem rehearsed. She explains her experience with speed, for example, like “riding shooting stars on the Milky Way” (32). When she moves to San Francisco with her friend Chris, she describes their friend Sheila’s apartment gorgeously: [It] was like walking into a a decorating magazine. Two whole walls were glass overlooking the twinkling city” and later, “…bright colored pillows were stacked around a large gold and antiqued mirrored coffee table” (65). Although it is possible that a young girl would be able to accurately and beautifully describe a place this way, the writing here far surpasses that of the average teenager.
It’s not just the eloquent prose in the novel that strikes readers as possibly fraudulent. Once Sparks’ – or whoever the author may be – has readers hooked, she starts to do just what she intended to with the novel. She begins to use “Alice” – the normal, average girl readers have now grown attached to – to explore the harrows of drug use. Throughout the 184 pages of the novel, “Alice” follows the traditional path of drug user to abuser to pusher. She also cycles back and forth between using and staying clean. It is possible that these events really happened, but the predictability of the events is what makes the plot questionable. Alice experiences almost every single typical drug situation that one has heard of from selling to youngsters, to running away, to experiencing rape and violence, to her eventual death,
Go Ask Alice leaves no vice undiscussed. For example, she lets her friend Bill shoot speed into her arm after the first time she tries LSD, claiming that she “remembered how much [she] hated shots when [she] was in the hospital” but that “this is different” (32). This seems a little bit of a drastic jump for a girl who just a week before had never seen a drug in her life. Later in the book, after experimenting with heroin with two new friends – for her first time, no less – she wakes up disoriented and states that “it wasn’t until later [she] realized that the dirty sonsofbitches [the people who had given her heroin] had taken turns raping us and treating us sadistically and brutally” (68). There are no details and it seems rather cliché that the first heroin addicts she encounters are depicted as evil rapists.
Alice” also sells drugs to elementary school kids, is ostracized by kids at her school when she makes an attempt to quit using, finds solace in talking with a priest and eventually becomes a paranoids mess who thinks “worms” are eating her. All of these events seem extremely stereotypical of drug users – too stereotypical to be real. The ending is predictable as well, as “Alice” returns home and supposedly has found positive people to connect with and is about to start the new school year off right. Then, “Alice” conveniently stops keeping a diary three weeks before her death.
Not only are the events within the story super-predictable and, if condensed, would read like a bad anti-marijuana/drug commercial, it is the last page of the book that really convinces readers that “Alice” never really existed. The epilogue states that the diarist died three weeks after deciding to quit writing. Supposedly, her parents found her dead in their home after they had gone out to a movie. Then, the epilogue continues like a bad episode of Unsolved Mysteries: “Was it an accidental overdose? A premeditated overdose? No one knows, and in some ways that question isn’t important. What must be of concern is that she died and that she was only one of thousands of drug deaths that year.”
This vague, cliché epilogue provides absolutely no insight into the actual human being, the real girl behind “Alice.” Although “Alice’s” parents could have requested that personal information not be revealed, it seems just as likely that no “Alice” existed to reveal information about! Also, in order to wholly understand the reasons why many critics believe that
Go Ask Alice is a work of fiction, it is important to note that Beatrice Sparks’ has edited many, many “anonymous” diaries during her career as a family therapist, according to Harper Collin’s Publisher’s website. Not surprisingly,
Go Ask Alice – which was a major seller – was her first.
Despite the fact that Go Ask Alice is littered with trite, cliché drug references and follows a rather predictable plot, the writing contained within its pages is undeniably beautiful – and influential. “Alice’s” demise seems inevitable, but it is true that many drug users suffer the same fate. Like the epilogue states, the main point here is that drugs
do kill, and whether a real “Alice” existed is insignificant to the fact that there are other real “Alice’s” out there who need help not to end up like the one in the book. Whether Sparks’ wrote the book herself or just edited it, she had an obvious point to make. Instead of preaching to an audience, she decided to show how drugs can affect teenagers. Basically, Sparks’ intention was to tell her readers, “Don’t ask me about the dangers of drugs, simply Go Ask Alice.”
