Go Ask Alice

One morning you wake up and your body has started changing, your thoughts seem foreign, and your parents seem to be harping on you constantly. You suddenly have an attitude, and you are confused as to why adults keep telling you to grow up when you still feel like a child. Adolescence can mean loneliness, confusion, and change. Adolescence is the in-between; the awkward time between childhood and adulthood when one is not sure exactly where he or she fits in.   Emotions are at an all-time high. Hormones are raging. Nothing seems to make sense. “Adolescents have a very rocky insecure time. Grown-ups treat them like children and yet expect them to act like adults” (Anonymous, 87). The journey to adulthood can be scary and overwhelming.

Throw drugs in the mix. My mind was blown when I read the 1971 novel, “Go Ask Alice.” Several entries in the book narrator’s Alice’s diary almost seemed unreal to me because I cannot imagine dealing with some of that insanity now, let alone when I was only a freshman in high school. Drugs take people into another world full of darkness and despair. Drugs isolate their users and turn them into people they never thought they would be; people they never wanted to be. “A raindrop just splashed on my forehead and it was like a tear from heaven. Am I really alone in the whole wide gray world? Is it possible that even God is crying for me?” (Anonymous, 114). Alice describes her descent into the horrendous and outlandish world of drugs through diary entries, taking readers with her on her journey through the highs and lows.

The 1971 novel, “Go Ask Alice,” effectively illustrates what adolescence can be like for someone actively experiencing it. The thoughts, emotions, trials, changes, and the everyday roller coaster that is a part of teenage life are captured in the pages of this fifteen-year-old’s diary.

Alice’s downward spiral begins when she is given a drink laced with LSD in a party game.   For almost a year before the party, Alice writes about her struggles of fitting in at school, having friends, wanting a boyfriend, and wanting to know who she is. After her acid trip at the party, Alice writes, “I don’t know whether I should be ashamed or elated. I only know that last night I had the most incredible experience of my life. It sounds morbid when I put it into words, but actually it was tremendous and wonderful and miraculous,” (Anonymous, 30). She suddenly feels like she fits in with these kids who are playing dangerous party games with dangerous drugs. She talks about how she feels at home with these friends because they accepted her like she had always been part of their crowd. Soon after the party, Alice starts dating one of the boys in the group who introduces her to speed. She uses a needle to inject the drug for her third experience with narcotics. She starts using frequently and starts having unprotected sex. Her fear of possible pregnancy causes her to suffer from insomnia resulting in her stealing her grandfather’s sleeping pills. She cannot eat for the drugs have stolen her appetite and she starts having to hide things from her family she is close with. She knows that everyone around her is worried about her and she begins to worry about herself. “I keep asking myself how I could have been such an idiot, and there is no answer other than the fact that I am an idiot! A stupid, bungling, senseless, foolish, ignorant idiot!” Alice said (Anonymous, 47). She starts selling drugs to middle-school kids for a guy she believes to be her boyfriend before running away with a friend to San Francisco because she feels her parents simply do not understand her. She goes back and forth between home and running away multiple times. After one of her returns home, Alice admits she is addicted to acid and pot, even though people claim they are not addicting. “All the dumb, idiot kids who think they’re only chipping are in reality just existing from one experience to the other. After you’ve had it, there isn’t even life without drugs. It’s a plodding, colorless, dissonant bare existence,” Alice wrote just six months after her first dance with drugs. The sex and drugs only continue to get worse, with Alice’s only “highs” being when she is using. If not, she writes about being depressed and always wanting to run away and never coming back.

Alice’s story is dark and at times very dramatic. When both of her grandparents die, Alice kind of goes off the deep end and ends up in a state mental hospital after severely injuring herself. She seems to get better and is able to return home. Her entries become more positive and seem to be full of hope for a better future. She appears to get so much better that she no longer feels it is necessary for her to write her thoughts down in a diary anymore. Three weeks after making that decision, Alice’s parents came home from a movie and found her dead. No one knows if it was an accidental or premeditated overdose. “No one knows, and in some ways that question isn’t important. What must be of concern is that she died, and that she was only one of thousands of drugs death that year,” (Anonymous, 214). That was Sparks intentions behind writing this novel. She clearly illustrates the nightmarish lives of teenage drug users and gives readers a glimpse into these kids’ personal hells.

“Go Ask Alice” is one of the most banned books of all time. It sits at number 18 on the American Library Association’s list of “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books from 2000-2009.” The novel has numerous references to sex, heavy drug use, and teen pregnancy causing libraries and schools across the country to ban the novel from their shelves (ALA).

Although the book’s author was published as Anonymous, the actual author Beatrice Sparks was made known as the real author years later in 1978. Sparks, a professional youth counselor, met a girl named Alice at a youth convention. Later, a convention counselor called Sparks after a hysterical Alice insisted she would only speak to her. They became friends, and Alice’s parents encouraged their relationship because they knew their daughter had a drug problem and thought it would help. During one of their visits, Alice gave Sparks two of her diaries so that she could better understand a kid who is on drugs. She also did not want her parents to find them. Six months later, Sparks received a phone call from Alice’s parents that Alice was dead. Alice’s story stood out to Sparks so much that she decided to write a book to tell her story as well as other kids like Alice.

Sparks published the novel anonymously because she wanted it to seem more credible to the readers, kids and adults alike. The story is based on Alice’s diaries but some entries in the diary are based on other teenage drug user’s stories as well. “Oh, there were many reasons for publishing anonymously, but my reason was for the kids,” Sparks said in a School Library Journal interview (House that Alice Built, 109). Her intent was to deter other kids from using drugs after reading Alice’s story. She uses Alice to relate to other kids who are feeling the same way or who have ever felt the same. “I wanted to ask God to help me, but I could utter only words, dark, useless words which fell on the floor beside me and rolled off into the corners and underneath the bed,” (Anonymous, 184). Sparks uses gripping testimony through Alice in an attempt to send a clear message by tugging at readers’ heartstrings. The dark hole of despair that pulls you down after using drugs is not a hole I ever want to experience, and after reading “Go Ask Alice,” my heart was broken for Alice and the thousands of kids caught in the same trap. It is truly heartbreaking that some have to experience such depressing realities. This book illustrated in detail how difficult being an adolescent can be, especially when drugs are added in the mix.