Don't Go Ask Alice; Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Part Two

The real author of Go Ask Alice, not “Alice” and not “Anonymous, but a disaffected Mormon mom from Utah, Mrs. Beatrice Sparks, has the fictive diarist try her best to “stay away from drugs,” to “keep away from boys,” but drugs. “Alice” (never named) gets clean--and then relapses. She goes to j

ail--and gets out. On probation, she’s caught in a police raid--then gets out and runs away. She hitchhikes with Doris--also a victim of drug-use and sexual abuse. She does more drugs, runs out of money, and attends a Woodstock-like gathering where she does more drugs and is exploited sexually again by a drug kingpin. Nearing rock-bottom? Not even close. She becomes homeless, gets sick, enjoins a Catholic priest to help reunite her with her parents and then—cue plot device—runs out of space and “turns over a new leaf” by getting a new diary.

Having tried to “go straight,” to “avoid drugs and her old friends,” she loses her way again. She is harassed at school, suffers a bad trip, and is committed to an insane asylum where she suffers more and befriends a younger girl, “Babbi”—think a drug-addled “Iris” in Taxi Driver just a few years later. Let out, she returns home, gets off drugs, reunites yet again with her family, makes new friends, hooks up with Joel, and seems to be doing so well that she stops keeping her diary.

But drugs. Cut to the Epilogue: the editor says that “Anonymous” drug-overdosed and died only weeks after deciding not to start a third diary—yet another of the tens of thousands who die of drug overdoses every year in the U.S., says the publisher.

So far, so good. Massively popular and influential, a t.v. movie, a Broadway play, spin-offs and copy-cats: Jay’s Journal, It Happened to Nancy, Annie’s Baby, and others. Huge profits for the publisher. Forever linked in popular consciousness to the Jefferson Airplane song, “White Rabbit” and to its teasing lyrical imperative, “Go Ask Alice.”

But did “Alice” in fact know? Go Ask Alice was a fraud. “I had found the perfect and true and original language, used by Adam and Eve, but when I tried to explain, the words I used had little to do with my thinking.” What 15-year-old writes like that? None do. The “diarist’s” first drug experience being an L.S.D. trip? No. One that left her feeling fine in two hours? No. Injecting methamphetamine five days later? No. “Torpedo”-use? No. Drug-dealing, running away, music festivals close on their heels? No. Was the writing that of a 15-year-old girl? No. More like that of an uninformed, busybody, ignorant parent—not just square, but paranoid, too.

Cue Beatrice Sparks—author also of the 1967 self-help guide called Key to Happiness which showed girls how to pluck their eyebrows and primp for dates. What was Art Linkletter’s role?

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