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I was at Borders this week and was surprised to see a newly-minted copy of this book on the shelves:
When I was in junior high, this book was widely circulated among my friends and peers. It was purported to be the real diary of a girl who falls in with the ever-warned-against-by-our-parents “wrong crowd”, gets hooked on drugs but is redeemed at the end, when she realizes the error of her ways and gets clean. I fully believed that it was a real teenager’s diary and agonized at the abrupt ending, in which a unwitting Alice gets handed a “dosed” soft drink at some hippie party and od’s. Perfect for my adolescent, tragedy-loving soul.
Some time after graduating from college, I found a copy of the book at a thrift store and upon re-reading it, I remember thinking that the book’s overly-moralistic tone and writing style didn’t ring true somehow. Well, I just found out why. The book was actually written by one BEATRICE SPARKS, a Mormon, self-proclaimed psychologist of questionable credentials, who apparently wrote and published many of these “real” diaries through the 60’s and 70’s.
There’s a good dissection of Sparks and her fraud (and the enduring popularity of Go Ask Alice) HERE. All of which makes me wonder if James Frey and Laura Albert wish they’d stuck to writing and kept their mouths shut.
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June 28, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Friday
Ha, I remember it well, though as a film. Obviously not a diary then, but it was still pretty spooky. Some of the drug scenes were obscure and understated with disturbing effect, which was novel to my impressionable teen self. I thought about that movie on and off for years.
June 29, 2009 at 7:02 am
crankygirl
I’m crushed. At my Junior High, they really pushed that book as a great read. I never read it all the way through but DAMN, it’s upsetting to find another example of a propaganda best-seller. Lies are much easier, I guess.
June 29, 2009 at 7:21 am
freshhell
I had no idea. I know I’ve read the book but have no memory of it. Guess its message didn’t work too well. Because I’m a satanist drug addict who gave up all of the babies I had due to rape and prostitution.
June 29, 2009 at 8:38 am
Jeanne
I remember that book; I read it about the same time as I read The Bell Jar, when as a suburban midwesterner I aspired to become a Freshhell-type satanist drug addict, with perhaps some evocative absinthe-drinking on the side (now legal, I tell you). I will regard your revelation as just another of the frauds perpetrated on me and my generation by the nefarious baby boomers.
June 29, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Capricorn Cringe
Alice doesn’t live here anymore.
I don’t think I ever read it, therefore I don’t feel betrayed. I read Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack and Up the Down Staircase. I don’t remember the stories, just the titles.
July 2, 2009 at 6:19 pm
justJan
Being an illiterate, I only saw the Made for TV version (Disney perhaps?) but…..-Scared ME straight! Although homosexuality wasn’t really the issue at hand.