Go Ask Alice

I found Go Ask Alice sideways, the way a lot of people my age did. It was on a cart in the school library with a taped spine and a cover that said A Real Diary, and the librarian kept it behind the desk. You had to ask for it. That made it sound secret and a little forbidden, which is funny because the book itself is trying to scare you straight. I read it in one evening and felt uneasy all night, not only about the drugs but about whether I was reading something true. That question has followed the book since Prentice Hall published it in 1971, and it changes how you read every page.

The copy most schools had in the seventies and eighties was short. The first edition ran 159 pages. It was credited to Anonymous, with a short note from the editors saying it came from the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old drug user, with names and places changed. The title came from the Jefferson Airplane song White Rabbit, with its line about going to ask Alice when she is ten feet tall, which itself points back to Lewis Carroll and eating things that change your size. The editor at Prentice Hall, Kathy Fitzgerald, is credited with thinking of that title after hearing someone singing the song in the office. Beatrice Sparks, whose name is on the copyright as author, had wanted to call it Buried Alive. Those two titles tell you a lot about the push and pull inside the book, between a warning and a lure.

Here is the part to keep in mind while I walk through the plot. Researchers now treat the book as fiction written by Sparks, possibly with help, in the shape of a found diary. Sparks said at different times that she worked from a real girl's pages and added material from case work, but she never produced pages that could be checked, and no diarist was ever identified. The publisher now classes it as fiction and prints a standard disclaimer to that effect, while still listing the author as Anonymous on the cover. I am using Beatrice Sparks as the author here because that is who the records point to, and because the site needs a name on the spine. If you grew up believing it was word for word real, you were not alone. Millions did.

A new town and a party back home

The diary starts in 1968. The writer is fifteen, sharp about clothes and weight and crushes, worried about getting along with her parents, trying to sound normal. Her father is a college professor who takes a job as a dean at a new school, so the family moves. Only the move is described in plain terms. Two college towns, universities in both, no names given. She hates the new school at first, then clicks with a girl named Beth.

When Beth leaves for summer camp, the diarist goes back to her old town to visit grandparents. An old school acquaintance invites her to a party. There are glasses of cola at the party, some mixed with LSD, and she drinks without knowing. She has a strong reaction to the drug. In the days after, she goes back to the same group on purpose, uses again, and loses her virginity while under the influence. She is scared she might be pregnant. Her grandfather has a minor heart attack around the same time, which piles guilt on fear.

She starts taking sleeping pills, first some taken from her grandparents and later some prescribed for her. Her friendship with Beth cools and then ends. The two girls have moved in different directions, and the diarist now spends her time with kids who use.

I want to pause here because this opening sets the method for the whole book. Dates pile up fast, feelings swing from high to low within a page, and adults are mostly offstage. Her parents love her but miss signals. Her grandparents are kind but do not see what is happening. If you have read a lot of teen diaries, real ones, the voice may strike you as a little too tidy and a little too stocked with vocabulary. That is one of the reasons skeptics flagged it early. A fifteen-year-old in 1968 would write about school gossip and clothes and fights with her mother at much greater length. This diarist gets to those things, but the entries keep steering back to the lesson.

Chris, Richie and Ted, and the road west

At the new school she falls in with Chris, a lively girl who becomes her closest friend and partner in trouble. They start dating two college men, Richie and Ted, who turn out to deal and who talk the girls into selling at schools. The arrangement falls apart when the girls come back early and find Richie and Ted together in bed, high. The point is blunt. The men were using them for business, not romance. The girls go to the police and then run.

They land in San Francisco. Chris gets work in a boutique run by an older woman named Shelia, who seems glamorous and generous. Shelia takes them to parties where drugs are passed around freely. One night Shelia and her new boyfriend give the girls heroin and assault them while they cannot fight back. The book handles this as trauma, not titillation, and the girls flee again, this time to Berkeley. There they open a small jewelry shop. It does well. They are good at it. But they miss home, and the shop cannot fix that, so they go back for Christmas. The homecoming is warm. For a few pages you think it might hold.

This middle stretch is where the book earned both its audience and its critics. Young readers in the seventies passed it around because it named things adults would not name. Running away, sleeping on couches, hitchhiking, trying to hold a job while using, getting raped while drugged. Older critics later said the fall happens too fast to believe, from a first involuntary taste to regular use to dealing to heroin in what feels like weeks. They have a point about pacing. Real addiction often grinds slower, with more boring days in between. The book compresses for effect. It wants each new city to bring a worse risk, so the reader feels the stairs going down.

I should be clear about how I am telling this. I am leaving out methods, amounts, and step by step detail on purpose. The book itself is fairly plain about what was taken and in what order, from LSD and pot to pills and heroin, and later to injectable stimulants, but it does not read like instructions. My summary will stay at that level. Names of substances matter for following the story. How to get or take them does not, and I am not going to fill that in.

Probation, running again, and a priest

Home does not solve it. Old friends pull her back into the scene. Her parents try rules and talks, and she tries to stay clean with Chris, but resolve slips. After a police raid they end up on probation. She gets high one night and runs again, this time mostly alone.

The road section is a string of short stays. She hitchhikes part of the way with a girl named Doris, who has survived sexual abuse at home and lives with the damage. The diarist keeps using when she can get something, and runs out of money fast. She hears about a hippie gathering where drugs are free and thinks she has found a safe place. Instead the man running supply there corners her and demands sex in exchange for keeping her supplied. She refuses as best she can and sinks lower. For a stretch she is effectively homeless, hungry, dirty, scared to sleep.

What breaks the slide, for now, is a Catholic priest. She goes to him in desperation. He listens, feeds her or finds her food, and calls her parents. She comes home again. Her diary is full at this point, and she writes that buying a new one feels like starting over. If you are keeping count, this is the second fresh start. The book is honest about how thin those promises can feel a week later.

There is a small detail I kept thinking about on rereading. The diarist records weights, dollars, bus fares, who paid for what. Those concrete bits feel lived in. Then a crisis arrives and the writing smooths out into a moral, as if someone older stepped in to underline it. That wobble, between a teen counting change and an adult drawing the line underneath, is the authorship fight in miniature. I do not think you need to settle it to feel it.

The hospital, Joel, and the last entry

The last third is the hardest to read. Determined to stay away from drugs, she finds her old circle hostile. One former friend shows up high to babysit, and the diarist tells the child's parents, who beg her not to go to the parole officer. At school the harassment gets open. Threats follow, aimed at her and her family.

Then she is drugged without her consent and has a terrible reaction that leaves her physically and mentally wrecked. She goes to a psychiatric hospital. The diary itself breaks down here into short, scrambled passages. She writes about her body being eaten by worms, a delusion she returns to until it loosens. In the ward she befriends a younger girl named Babbie, who has lived through addiction and exploitation as a child prostitute. Their friendship is one of the few tender things in this part, two kids looking out for each other in a locked place.

She gets out. Home is calmer. She gets along better with her mother and father. She makes new friends. She starts seeing Joel, a young man attending her father's college on the GI Bill, who is patient and steady. School still scares her, but she has support. In an optimistic entry she decides to stop keeping a diary and to talk with people instead of writing at them. It reads like an ending.

It is not. An epilogue, in another voice, says she died three weeks later. Her parents came home from a movie and found her dead. The cause is given as an overdose, with no firm ruling on whether it was accidental or planned, and the note adds that hers was one of thousands that year. No name is supplied for her. The girl called Alice who appears briefly on the road in Coos Bay, Oregon is a different person, a fellow runaway, not the writer. The writer is never named, though covers and blurbs over the years have called the book Alice's true story for convenience.

Why it lasted, and what sags

Go Ask Alice was a sensation. Advance orders were large before publication, helped by broadcaster Art Linkletter, for whom Sparks had once worked as a ghostwriter, and by a moment when parents knew little about youth drug use and wanted a book that told them. Libraries could not keep it on the shelf. A television film followed in 1973, with Jamie Smith-Jackson as the girl and William Shatner among the cast, billed as based on a true story, and a stage version adapted by Frank Shiras came in 1976 and has been done by schools since. Sales ran into the millions and the book stayed in print for decades. An American Library Association list put it at number one for young adults in 1971, and later lists put it high among the most challenged books of the nineties and the two thousands, usually for profanity, sex, rape, and drugs.

That split, loved by teens and fought over by adults, still fits. As a cautionary story it is direct and readable. Short entries, clear dates, no long lectures. Teens who would not touch a pamphlet would read this. Some adults who read it young say they skipped the moral and latched onto the diarist's feelings about being lonely and judged. Others say seeing the slide laid out, party to dealing to streets to hospital, made them step back. Both reactions make sense. The book aims at fear but runs on identification.

The criticisms are fair and worth naming. The drug progression is compressed past belief, with a jump from pot to heroin and from first use to injection that does not match how most use unfolds. The voice often sounds adult, stocked with neat morals and a wide vocabulary. The portrayal of gay characters as proof of decay has aged badly and reads as prejudice rather than observation. And the ethics bother me more now than they did when I was young. Selling fiction to kids as a real dead girl's diary, keeping Anonymous on the cover after the publisher added a fiction disclaimer, printing This Is Alice's True Story on some editions, all of that trades on trust. A reader who learns the backstory can feel tricked, and that feeling can undercut the warning the book wants to give.

So who might still read it, and how. I would not give it to a younger teen alone, and I would not give it as punishment or as a dare. It fits best for older teens and adults willing to talk about it, ideally with some context about 1968 to 1970 in California, Colorado, Oregon, and New York, about why runaways headed to San Francisco and Berkeley, about what probation meant, about why a priest or a counselor might be the only adult a kid on the road would trust. It pairs well with a frank talk about consent, since two of the worst scenes involve assault while drugged, and with a clear statement that the book offers no safe way to experiment. There is none in these pages. Every shortcut ends in a smaller room.

My own copy is marked up in pencil from years ago. Next to the jewelry shop pages I wrote shop good, which makes me laugh now because I had missed the point. The shop is good. That is the point. The girls are capable and likable when they have sleep and work and family around them. The book keeps pulling that life away to show what fills the gap. Reading it now, I see the seams more, the adult hand in the diary, the speeded up fall, the blurbs that call an unnamed girl Alice. I also remember why it worked on me at fourteen. Someone close to my age was writing down fear without dressing it up, or seemed to be. That illusion was powerful, even if it was an illusion. Knowing what I know now, I read it as a period piece with a live wire inside. The wire is the fear of losing yourself a little at a time and calling it freedom until you cannot find the way back.