SLIS 5420 Go Ask Alice

Week Ten: Censorship Issues – Go Ask Alice


Book Summary: 

         Go Ask Alice is a cautionary tale of a 15-year-old girl’s decent into drugs in the early 70’s.  It was published as a real diary that had only been edited, but several years after publication, it was realized the book is fiction.  The protagonist of Go Ask Alice, who is not named Alice, nor named at all throughout the book, is given LSD unknowingly at a party beginning her decent into the drug culture of the late 60’s and 70’s.  At first, she loves the feeling of drugs, and then just as quickly, she realizes drugs are not for her.  This pattern repeats itself over and over, along with her running away twice, before she eats chocolate covered peanuts laced with acid, which lands her in a mental hospital.  Of course, in this rollercoaster ride of a book, that is not the end of our protagonist who has seemingly finally kicked drugs once and for all.  In an afterward that appears as if it were written as an afterthought, the author tells the reader the girl who kept the diary died three weeks later of, guess what, a drug overdose. 


APA Reference:  

Anonymous. (1971). Go ask Alice. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers. 


My Impressions: 

         The book is written in diary entry style and is attributed to an anonymous author, but with the advent of easy online searches to verify authorship, it is simple to find that the “editor,” Beatrice Sparks, is most likely the sole dramatist of this invented story.  It is housed in the fiction stacks at my public library, as it should be, but I am sure it was sold as nonfiction for years before this move. 
         As I began this “diary” of a 15-year-old girl, I knew the writing was not true to an adolescent, but the story for the first half of the book is believable and fairly good.  Then, I can’t even pinpoint exactly when, sometime around the middle of the book the story becomes fanciful.  The over imaginative storyline didn’t bother me at first, but then when the diary entries reveal the “writer,” who never is named, has been drugged while babysitting, torn her hair out, scratched up her hands and face, and now sits in a mental hospital, I was left confused and annoyed at the situation and quickness of it all so close to the end of the book.  There is little in the way of a resolution to the story other than her basically saying she is all better now and does not need a diary anymore followed by a short epilogue. 
         Since the book is written in a diary format, it goes chronologically fairly slowly.  Entries are made daily at some points, and sometimes skip several days, but overall there is a consistency to the story and pacing until the last 20 or so pages.  At this point, it is as if the author got tired of writing and wanted to kill the protagonist off as quickly as possible.  So she gets miraculously better, is on her way to becoming the most amazing teen in the history of “fixed” teenagers, then decides diaries are for young people who can’t talk to other adults as she can, so she is through with keeping a diary and the story stops.  This is abrupt to an extreme.  The short epilogue telling the reader that maybe she wasn’t so fixed and sugar candy sweet because she died three weeks later is worded like an afterthought to a poorly executed after school special that needs to make a point right now.  Drugs are bad kids.  If you do them, YOU WILL DIE!  There is no redemption.  There are no second chances.
         I do understand why Go Ask Alice is rather consistently on the challenged and banned books lists.  There is a lot of drug use.  There is quite a bit of sex under the influence of drugs, or at least the mention of sex under the influence of drugs.  There is abuse, again because of drugs.  And there is language some would consider offensive.  Some adolescents think this was real.  Others think it was written to scare them.  (I found this out when asking friends about the book.  The first read it in high school, the second in junior high.) 
         But when it boils down to it, this could have been an uplifting story of redemption after falling into depths of despair most middle class kids only reach in books.  Instead of leaving the diary entries as the whole story though, the author chose to shock the reader with the girl’s death. Personally, I do not like that most American stories are sugarcoated and feel the need to end on a positive note, but just this once, I think I would have enjoyed it.


Professional Review: 

A Second Look

Published in 1971 by Prentice-Hall, Go Ask Alice spread like wildfire among teen readers as soon as it appeared as an Avon paperback — "more than four million copies sold," touts the current Aladdin paper edition. Conjuring all the pulsating power of the Jefferson Airplane rock song from which it borrowed its name, Go Ask Alice gave an insider's look at the simultaneously glamorous and frightening world of drugs. As a curious pre-teen, I lapped up the "real diary" of this anonymous fifteen-year-old, eager to learn of the thrill and lure of those forbidden substances from the smugly satisfying position of not sharing Alice's fate (and of suddenly "getting" what Grace Slick was singing about).

My motives were not as lofty as those of the critics who strongly recommended the book when it first appeared. Knowing that many parents (and teachers and librarians) would be uncomfortable with the subject matter — and the vulgar language — of the book, the Christian Science Monitor implored, "Precisely because of this reluctance to expose one's children to such material…the book must be read." From Library Journal: "This diary depicts all the confusion, loneliness and rebellion associated with adolescence ….Unlike other 'true-to-life' stories, this is true (it's based on an actual diary). An important book, this deserves as wide a readership as libraries can give it." And Publishers Weekly recommended the book as an "eloquent look at what it must be like to be in the vortex" of drug use. However, PW was, it seems, the only source at the time to question tine book's authenticity: "Maybe we're all too cynical on that subject these days, but it does seem awfully well written, and in any case brilliantly edited."

But most readers accepted the book for what it claims to be — a real diary by an anonymous teen. The question of authenticity was raised again only when Alleen Pace Nilsen interviewed Beatrice Sparks for School Library Journal in October 1979, after seeing Sparks listed on the cover of a new book as "the author who brought you Go Ask Alice." Nilsen's article, "The House That Alice Built," depicts Sparks in a less than flattering light as a purported youth counselor with sketchy qualifications. Nilsen relates Sparks's claim that she compiled the book from diaries given her by a young girl she befriended but added other incidents and ideas from similar cases. Nilsen concludes, "The question of how much of Go Ask Alice was written by the real Alice and how much by Beatrice Sparks can only be conjectured." (In a letter to SLJ Sparks later defended not only the book's credentials and her own but the decor of her house, which also came under attack in the article.)

Whatever the proportions of their contributions, Sparks and her Alice together created a phenomenal success. What accounts for it? Timing, for one thing. Published right at the height of the psychedelic era and the dawning awareness that experimenting with drugs might have a downside, Go Ask Alice provided the perfect combination of voyeuristic appeal and high-mindedness the book got credit for opening important lines of communication about the dangers of drug use. Though we don't know precisely to what extent Sparks shaped or added to the diary, she seems to know when to let Alice's own words and experiences speak for themselves — and thus speak directly to teen readers as she relates her feelings about friends, boyfriends, and fine thrill and "beauty" of her first encounters with drugs. Yet somehow, either by conscious design or happenstance, each of Alice's drug-influenced adventures ends unhappily, whereupon Alice gives discourse to the evils of drugs and renews her promises to "rectify [her] life." This is all quite feasible as a true picture of the up-and-down cycle of addiction, and perhaps Sparks is simply fortunate that Alice makes the case against drug use so eloquently for her. However, Sparks does admit in Nilsen's article to altering the ending of the book Alice did not die of an actual overdose as it says in the epilogue, "but in a way that could have been either an accident or a suicide…probably influenced by her being on drugs." Apparently the "probable influence" was not sufficient to assure the moral of the story as Sparks intended: Alice took drugs; Alice died from drugs.

Clearly, many readers were taken with the story of the sweet, confused girl lured into the sordid world that would eventually take her life, and critics and educators were delighted with the opportunity to show the dangers of drugs to kids in a way accessible to them — "See, don't take my word for it. Just Go Ask Alice." But much of the book's merit was derived from its status as a "real diary," so if it's not all Alice talking, does it deserve to be judged differently? As Nilsen pointed out, the book was "more or less exempt from the regular kind of literary criticism since it was supposedly the diary of a deceased young girl." If Sparks did in fact serve as an author who crafted and shaped her raw material, and we apply some literary standards accordingly, how will Alice stand up today?

Rereading the book in the context of current young adult literature, I was amazed by how unenthralling I found it. Poor Alice sounds ridiculously melodramatic and immature compared to today's more worldly teens. Upon learning of her family's impending move, she writes, "Dear precious Diary, I am baptizing you with my tears. I know we have to leave and that one day I will even have to leave my father and mother's home…. "Most fifteen-year-olds I know are slightly more excited about the prospect of eventually getting some space away from mom and dad. Yet we must believe in Alice's innocence if we are to believe that she has no idea what's happening to he when she is slipped some LSD at a party twenty pages later. Somewhat harder to swallow than the acid-laced Coke are the moral platitudes slipped in throughout the diary. Alice writes of her friends, "Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other…. Kids are like robots, off an assembly line." Above all, we are to believe that Alice is not a bad girl, but a good girl who loves God and her family and who happens to get mixed up in some very bad things.

Alice's childish and often vacuous ramblings may be plausible as the actual diary entries of a searching, as-yet-undefined teenager, and granted, I related to them more readily at age twelve than I can as an adult reader. Totally implausible, however, are the diary entries of Sparks's latest book, Annie's Baby, featuring a voice that sounds remarkably similar to Alice's (with the exception of a few contemporary words such as rad tossed in and a plethora of capital letters and "soooooo"s to fill up the pages). The fourth in an apparent series of "anonymous true stories," following Almost Lost (about life on the streets) and It Happened to Nancy (about AIDS), Annie's Baby is about a fourteen-year-old who becomes pregnant by her abusive boyfriend. Even if we were to believe in this new incarnation of Alice (and while I assume that Sparks is attempting to simulate the "real" teenage voice of her greatest publishing success, the similarities do again raise the question of how much of the original Alice was Sparks's fabrication), the book's overt didacticism precludes any aesthetic claims. Here Sparks is not satisfied with the lessons given by Annie herself — "[Mom] and Dad fought from as long back as I can remember… That's probably what makes me so insecure" — or even by the way that this particular diary actually responds to Annie with its own advice, a la Jiminy Cricket: "I'm going to think only of what Danny wants us to do… and besides, 'everyone is doing it.' [New paragraph] 'Everyone is not doing it!'" In an amazing coincidence, Annie turns out to be distantly related to "Dr. B." (Sparks) and goes to visit for a therapeutic weekend. The tapes of their discussions, as well as a quiz on "What Is Love?" are handily transcribed in Annie's diary. The transcripts do nothing to enliven Annie's tedious tale of her abusive relationship, pregnancy, and young motherhood. The book is appended with further information about pregnancy, STDs, abuse, and "out-of-wedlock births."

None of Sparks's more recent message-laden books will even approach the phenomenal popularity of Go Ask Alice. Their blatant fictionalizing assures that they will not be accepted as the sensational, true document that Alice was, while their heavy-handed proselytizing prevents them from being remotely successful as works of literature. And again, the timing of Alice's release was exceptionally opportune, addressing breakthrough subject matter in young adult books at a time when we were ready to hear about it. With so many taboos having since been broken in young adult literature, is it possible for any book to have this kind of impact today?

…
But Alice's era is over. Go Ask Alice was a phenomenon of its time that cannot be repeated, by Sparks or anyone else. Education and discussion about drugs is part of every school child's experience, and there is probably no remaining subject under such a delightfully enticing taboo. The book's immense popularity spills over to today's readers in some part due to Alice's universal adolescent angst, and in large part due to the power of legend and legacy of the sixties' drug culture, of teens of every generation, and of Alice herself and her tragic tale.

Adams, L. (1998). Go ask Alice [Review of Go Ask Alice]. Horn Book Magazine, 74(5), 587-592. Retrieved from
          http://www.hbook.com/horn-book-magazine/

 
Library Uses: 

         Go Ask Alice is obviously a great book to talk about, show off, and discuss with patrons during Banned Books Week in the fall. 

It could also be used to kick start a lesson in the use of reliable sources.  The librarian could have students look over the book and read the introduction stating the book “is based on the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old drug user.”  The librarian could talk about the credibility of such a source.  Would you listen to someone your age who had been on drugs versus an adult?  What does it mean to you that the author is “Anonymous?”  After discussing reliability, the librarian will show them how to research online to find valid information starting with journal reviews of Go Ask Alice.  When the students find that the book is not truly the diary of a teenager, the librarian can discuss authorship of articles.  This would be a unique way to discuss the fact that anyone can post online, especially on sites like Wikipedia, and you might not know if it’s true or not.  After all, many online postings can be anonymous.