This question troubled me, but I was hesitant to raise it with my parents. I’d awkwardly cleared the situation with my teachers, all of whom were supportive (“Have a fantastic time! I’m so jealous!” my sweet English teacher wrote on my homework packet), and not one of whom dared to ask me the obvious question: Why? It was not summer or Christmas or even spring break it was February, and I was missing two weeks of school. Then, helplessly, I turned back to the first page (“Editor’s Note: Go Ask Alice is based on the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old drug user”) and reread the whole thing from the beginning. I stared for a while at the final page (“Epilogue: The subject of this book died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary”). The prose, even by sixth-grade standards, was not challenging, and within mere hours I’d read it to the end. Picture that ship’s bunk: just me, my father, perhaps a pelican swooping past the porthole, and Go Ask Alice. I was in the sixth grade, weeks away from turning twelve, and I made the mistake of bringing along only one book-that book being, of course, Go Ask Alice-on a two-week father-daughter boat trip to the Galápagos Islands. Tompkins and Mallory Ortberg.) I will now add my own to the pile, if only to establish my credentials as the world’s foremost authority on Go Ask Alice. Howling hilarity upon rereading the book in this context.īy now, the Go Ask Alice reader’s narrative is a comic genre unto itself.Revelation, for the adult reader, that Go Ask Alice is not, in fact, a “real diary” but a fictional hoax written by a Mormon youth counselor named Beatrice Sparks whose other books included Jay’s Journal (the “real diary” of an anonymous boy who got involved in Satanism and died) and It Happened to Nancy (the “real diary” of an anonymous girl who got date-raped, caught AIDS, and died).Creeping suspicion, as the reader ages past adolescence, that there’s something fishy about the diarist’s life-destroying addiction to LSD and marijuana, not to mention the very premise that a diary kept by a homeless drug addict and “recorded on single sheets of paper, paper bags, etc.” was perfectly preserved for posthumous publication.Titillated horror, for the young reader, at the book’s dramatic depictions of drug use.Everyone who encounters Go Ask Alice goes through the same four stages: Reading Go Ask Alice-the so-called real diary, first published in 1971, of an anonymous girl who took drugs and died-is an experience so widely shared that there’s little point personalizing it.

Go Ask Alice by Beatrice Sparks