Drugs were on the minds of everyone in the late 1960s and early 1970s, even those who weren't partaking of illegal substances or harboring plans to ever do so. Paternalistic concern about the burgeoning drug culture led to the youth of that day being heavily indoctrinated with anti-drug propaganda at almost every turn ? particularly in school, where they were subjected to health classes which were little more than "don't get high" lectures. Even the selection of recreational reading materials intended for them was booby-trapped with literary offerings purporting to be true life stories of real kids yet which were no more than "This is what could happen to you" sermonizings.
The most famous of these literary works was 1971's Go Ask Alice, presented as the diary of an anonymous teen girl who began her career as a stoner at age 15 and died of an overdose just weeks after her 17th birthday. Through the diary entries we see this girl quickly escalate from her first drug experience (LSD was surreptitiously slipped into her Coke at a party) to all manner of disaster, including:
* Indulging in a wide variety of illegal drugs.
* While high, losing her virginity to a boy she didn't much care about (rather than the one she was in love with).
* Becoming casually promiscuous, then deeply regretting almost every sexual escapade she engages in.
* Running away from home (twice).
* Being sexually abused by people she falls in with while on the road.
* Upon returning to her family, being ostracized by the nice kids and targeted for abuse by the stoners (who have decided she is a "squealer").
* After deciding to go straight, being slipped dangerous drugs by the stoner kids and then going on a horrifically bad trip, during which she tries to scratch off her face.
* Being committed to a psychiatric hospital.
(The "Alice" of the book's title refers to the druggie girl of that name in the 1967 Jefferson Airplane hit White Rabbit, a song that expounds upon a drug theme its lyricist found in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There is an "Alice" in the book Go Ask Alice, but she's a minor character mentioned in only one paragraph. The name of the teen diarist is never given.)
The unnamed girl's descent into the horrors of the drug world culminates with her death. The book closes with this epilogue:
The subject of this book died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary.
Her parents came home from a movie and found her dead. They called the police and the hospital but there was nothing anyone could do.
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.
Did she commit suicide? Did she take an accidental overdose? Did vengeful stoner kids return one more time to slip her a deadly dose? Or was the unnamed deceased teen who supposedly kept a diary detailing the drug-strewn path she followed to her own destruction merely a figment of a moralizing writer's imagination?
Go Ask Alice was the product of Beatrice Sparks, an author who has come out with a number of "teens who saw their lives ruined by their bad choices" offerings, each one presented as a true story, often in the form of a diary of an anonymous teen:
* It Happened to Nancy (she's dying of AIDS)
* Annie's Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, a Pregnant Teenager
* Treacherous Love: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager (teen girl is sexually taken advantage of by a teacher)
* Jay's Journal (yet another diary, this one of a teen boy who turns to satan worship and drug use)
* Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets
* Kim: Empty Inside: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager (eating disorders)
The precise authorship of Go Ask Alice is still a bit of a mystery. Beatrice Sparks is presented as its editor rather than its author, and one tantalizing mention in a 1998 New York Times book review indicates the book might have been the work of several people:
Linda Glovach, since exposed as one of the "preparers" ? let's call them forgers ? of Go Ask Alice, has just written Beauty Queen, about a girl who flees her alcoholic mother, becomes a stripper and dies of heroin addiction.
Our best guess is that a number of folks work at churning out these cautionary tales, which are then presented to an overly accepting public as real diaries of anonymous teens. Yet on the question of authorship, one thing is startlingly clear: whoever wrote the Go Ask Alice "diary" was not a 15-year-old girl.
