Book Review: Go Ask Alice by Anonymous

Title: Go Ask Alice
Author: Anonymous
# of Pages: 212
Published: 1971
Rating: 2/5

Summary:

From Wikipedia:
Go Ask Alice is a controversial 1971 book about the life of a troubled teenage girl. The book purports to be the actual diary of an anonymous teenage girl who died of a drug overdose in the late 1960s and is therefore presented as a testimony against drug use. Alice is not the protagonist's name; the actual diarist's name is never given in the book.

From Chapters.ca:
She doesn't want to get hooked on drugs. Every time after she uses, she feels guilty and low and vows to stay away. But she just can't resist the way the drugs make her feel - beautiful and popular and connected to the world around her. And since nobody understands how alone and miserable she is without the drugs, how can they possibly understand how much she needs them? We may not know her name, but we can imagine how she feels as her diary records a descent into drug-induced madness.

Review:

This review may contain some spoilers.
I had high expectations of this novel after hearing many good reviews and hearing that many high schools had read this book in their literature courses. Sadly, I was disappointed. I expected a detailed account of her drug use, her addiction, and the terrible consequences such as living on the street, starving, prostitution, rape, etc. I expected something that would really reach out to me, and make me feel emotionally involved with the speaker.

But no. Personally, I found the speaker way too immature to connect with. She would move back and forth incredibly often from loving drugs and saying they made her feel alive and that parents just couldn't understand to hating drugs and feeling extremely guilty. There was enough description about the way drugs affected her, but very little time spent on the consequences. In one entry, she states that she and her friend were raped and then she simply moves on. I didn't find it very believable for a 15 year-old girl to "move on" so quickly from being physically violated. It did not feel like I was reading a real diary, but in fact a novel pieced together in the form of a "diary". Certainly she spoke of personal matters, but her emotions felt fake - I couldn't connect with her at all.

Go Ask Alice has been published under the pretense that it was an actual diary of a 15 year-old girl who fell into the cruel world of drugs. However, Beatrice Sparks, the editor, claimed that Go Ask Alice had been based on the diary of one of her patients, but that she had added various fictional incidents based on her experiences working with other troubled teens. She said the real girl had not died of a drug overdose, but in a way that could have been either an accident or suicide. She also stated that she could not produce the original diary, because she had destroyed part of it after transcribing it and the rest was locked away in the publisher's vault. (Wikipedia - Go Ask Alice)

Personally, this sounds like a lie. After reading Go Ask Alice, I don't believe at all that this was diary of a teenage girl. I believe this was a novel intended to try and scare teenagers to stay away from drugs. Although an admirable cause, stating that this novel was a work of non-fiction when it isn't, takes away its best quality: its impact on young readers. If a reader felt they were reading the real, original diary of a addicted teenager, they may feel a much stronger connection and the story may have a much stronger impact.

Overall, I give Go Ask Alice a 2/5 for its false pretenses, its lack of description and its unconvincing account of a teenage drug addict.

(* cross posted from the collective blog Collision