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Drugs were on the minds of everyone in the late 1960s and early 1970s, even those who weren't partaking of illegal substances or harboring plans to ever do so. Paternalistic concern about the burgeoning drug culture led to the youth of that day being heavily indoctrinated with anti-drug propaganda at almost every turn — particularly in school, where they were subjected to health classes which were little more than don't get high lectures. Even the selection of recreational reading materials intended for them was booby-trapped with literary offerings purporting to be true life stories of real kids yet which were no more than This is what could happen to you sermonizings. The most famous of these literary works was 1971's Go Ask Alice, presented as the diary of an anonymous teen girl who began her career as a stoner at age 15 and died of an overdose just weeks after her 17th birthday. Through the diary entries we see this girl quickly escalate from her first drug experience (LSD was surreptitiously slipped into her Coke at a party) to all manner of disaster, including: (The Alice of the book's title refers to the druggie girl of that name in the 1967 Jefferson Airplane hit White Rabbit, a song that expounds upon a drug theme its lyricist found in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There is an Alice in the book Go Ask Alice, but she's a minor character mentioned in only one paragraph. The name of the teen diarist is never given.) The unnamed girl's descent into the horrors of the drug world culminates with her death. The book closes with this epilogue: Did she commit suicide? Did she take an accidental overdose? Did vengeful stoner kids return one more time to slip her a deadly dose? Or was the unnamed deceased teen who supposedly kept a diary detailing the drug-strewn path she followed to her own destruction merely a figment of a moralizing writer's imagination? Go Ask Alice was the product of Beatrice Sparks, an author who has come out with a number of teens who saw their lives ruined by their bad choices offerings, each one presented as a true story, often in the form of a diary of an anonymous teen: The precise authorship of Go Ask Alice is still a bit of a mystery. Beatrice Sparks is presented as its editor rather than its author, and one tantalizing mention in a 1998 New York Times book review indicates the book might have been the work of several people: Our best guess is that a number of folks work at churning out these cautionary tales, which are then presented to an overly accepting public as real diaries of anonymous teens. Yet on the question of authorship, one thing is startlingly clear: whoever wrote the Go Ask Alice diary was not a 15-year-old girl. Girls of that age do not write the way the journal entries of Go Ask Alice are penned — both in terms of structure and content, it fails the adolescent test. For example, our doomed teen goes on for more than four pages about her first LSD experience, describing what happened and how, yet diary entries dealing with her broken heart over the loss of her one true love are given only two short paragraphs, barely a third of a page. Similarly, school, teachers, the casual gossip of the day, and ordinary He said; she said chit-chat which make up the bulk of teen girl chatter go almost unmentioned in this book, even though it's hard to imagine a real teenager's diary in which these topics wouldn't account for the greater number of the entries. Meanwhile, the diary is filled with sizeable words one would hardly expect to find in a teen's private account of her life. Polysyllabic terms such as gregarious, impregnable, conscientious, and ecstatic turn up within four pages of each other, yet we'd be surprised to find any one of these words in a real teen's diary. It's not that teens don't use large words in conversation or include them in written work meant to be handed in at school; but they certainly do not record their deepest, darkest secrets in words they'd be hard-pressed to spell. Remember, a diary is not meant for the eyes of anyone other than the diarist, so the writing style used tends to be far more casual than that employed in pieces intended to be read by others. The unnamed teen's fall is formulaic as well. The unsuspecting first time is a standard plot device used by writers looking to keep their main characters sympathetic. This gal's long slide into a pine box begins not with an actual intent to do drugs to see what all the shouting is about, but with an act of bad companions who introduce her to the world of drugs without her permission. Her fate thus becomes the potential fate of any teen, even one determined to Just say no. To quote Mark Oppenheimer's musings about the structure of teen morality novels: Cynicism aside, that's a relatively fair assessment of how to build one of those works. We noted one further theme that jumped off the pages of Go Ask Alice: with the exception of the diarist, every teen in the book who was heavily involved with drugs and whose home situation was described came from a broken home. It was not difficult to pick out the underlying secondary moralistic message, that divorce is one of the great social evils of our time. Another point to ponder: In an era when journalistic exposés are the coin of the realm, how is it that after more than thirty years (and More than 4 million copies sold), no intrepid reporter has managed to track down the identity of Go Ask Alice's anonymous author? That in over three decades, none of the people who knew this poor girl — friends, relatives, teachers, classmates — has ever identified or spoken about her is truly amazing. Our government doesn't keep classified secrets so well. The final proof, however, lies in plain sight on the book's copyright notice page: It's not necessarily wrong to present a cautionary tale in the form of a first-person narrative — that storytelling device has been used effectively as long as folks have been spinning yarns. But it is unfair to maintain that something is a true story when in fact it's manufactured hooey. There are enough real teens who lead short, tragic lives that we don't need to invent any more.
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