Go Ask Alice is a 1971 book about a teenage girl who develops a drug addiction at age 15 and runs away from home on a journey of self-destructive escapism. Attributed to "Anonymous" and first published in the United States, the book is in diary form, and was originally presented as being the edited actual diary of the unnamed teenage protagonist. Questions about the book's authenticity and true authorship began to arise in the late 1970s, and Beatrice Sparks is now generally viewed as the author of the found manuscript–styled fictional document. Sparks went on to write numerous other books purporting to be real diaries of troubled teenagers. Some sources have also named Linda Glovach as a co-author of the book. Nevertheless, its popularity has endured, and, as of 2014, it had remained continuously in print since its publication over four decades earlier.
Intended for a young adult audience, Go Ask Alice became a bestseller. It is praised for conveying a powerful message about the dangers of drug abuse. Go Ask Alice has also ranked among the most frequently challenged books for several decades due to its use of profanity and explicit references to sex and rape, as well as drugs. The book was adapted into the 1973 television film Go Ask Alice, starring Jamie Smith-Jackson and William Shatner. In 1976, a stage play of the same name, written by Frank Shiras and based on the book, was also published.
Title The title was taken from a line in the 1967 Grace Slick-penned Jefferson Airplane song "White Rabbit": "Go ask Alice/ when she's ten feet tall"; the lyrics in turn reference scenes in Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, in which the title character Alice eats and drinks various substances, including a mushroom, that make her grow larger or smaller. Slick's song is understood as using Carroll's story as a metaphor for a drug experience.
The title Go Ask Alice was actually thought up by Kathy Fitzgerald, Sparks' editor at Prentice-Hall. Sparks' title was "Buried Alive", which Fitzgerald greatly disliked. Fitzgerald hit on the new title after overhearing a co-worker singing "White Rabbit" in an office hallway.
Plot summary In 1968, a 15-year-old girl begins keeping a diary, in which she records her thoughts and concerns about issues such as crushes, weight loss, sexuality, social acceptance, and relating to her parents. The dates and locations mentioned in the book place its events as occurring between 1968 and 1970 in California, Colorado, Oregon, and New York City. The two towns in which the diarist's family reside during the story are unidentified, the only indications being that universities are situated in both. The Great Salt Lake is also mentioned as a place where the diarist tried to dive and swim as a child.
The diarist's father, a college professor, accepts a dean position at a new college, requiring the family to relocate. The diarist has difficulty adjusting to her new school, but soon becomes best friends with a girl named Beth. When Beth leaves for summer camp, the diarist returns to her hometown, where she meets an old school acquaintance, who invites her to a party where glasses of cola—some of which are laced with LSD—are served. The diarist unwittingly ingests LSD and has an intense and pleasurable trip. Over the following days the diarist socializes with the other teens from the party, willingly uses more drugs, and loses her virginity while on acid. She worries that she may be pregnant, and her grandfather has a minor heart attack. Overwhelmed by her worries, the diarist begins to take sleeping pills, first stolen from her grandparents, then later prescribed. Her friendship with Beth ends, as both girls have moved in new directions.
The diarist befriends a hip girl, Chris, with whom she continues to use drugs. They date college students Richie and Ted, who deal drugs and persuade the two girls to help them by selling drugs at schools. When the girls walk in on Richie and Ted stoned and having sex with each other, they realize that their "boyfriends" were just using them to make money. The girls report Richie and Ted to the police and flee to San Francisco. Chris gets a job in a boutique with a glamorous older woman, Shelia, who invites both girls to lavish parties, where they resume taking drugs. One night Shelia and her new boyfriend introduce the girls to heroin and brutally rape them while they are under the influence of the drug. Traumatized, the diarist and Chris move to Berkeley where they open a jewelry shop. Although the shop is a success, they quickly grow tired of it and miss their families; they return home for a happy Christmas.
Back at home, the diarist encounters social pressure from her drug scene friends, and has problems getting along with her parents. Chris and the diarist try to stay away from drugs, but their resolve lapses and they end up on probation after being caught in a police raid. The diarist gets high one night and runs away. She travels to several cities, hitchhiking part way with a girl named Doris, who is a victim of child sexual abuse. The diarist continues to use drugs, running out of money. She thinks she has hit the jackpot when she goes to a hippie festival where "drugs are as free as the air", only to catch the eye of the event's drug kingpin, who demands the diarist fellate him or else her supply will be cut off. The diarist hits rock bottom when she experiences homelessness. In desperation, she seeks out a Catholic priest, who helps her and contacts her parents. The diarist runs out of space in her diary and says that the decision to buy a fresh one is synonymous with turning over a new leaf.
Now determined to avoid drugs, she faces hostility from her former friends. When one girl shows up high for a babysitting job, the diarist informs the girl's parents who beg her not to tell their daughter's parole officer. The diarist's former friends harass her at school and threaten her and her family. They eventually drug her against her will; she has a bad trip resulting in physical and mental damage, and is sent to a psychiatric hospital. The diary goes through passages of nonsense until the diarist can write clearly again, believing her body is being eaten by worms, which she eventually stops imagining. There she bonds with a younger girl named Babbie, who has also been a drug addict and child prostitute.
Released from the hospital, the diarist returns home, finally free of drugs. She now gets along better with her family, makes new friends, and is romantically involved with Joel, a man attending her father's college on the GI Bill. She is worried about starting school again, but feels stronger with the support of her new friends and Joel. In an optimistic mood, the diarist decides to stop keeping a diary and instead discuss her problems and thoughts with other people.
The epilogue states that the subject of the book died three weeks after the diarist's decision not to keep a third diary. The diarist was found dead in her home by her parents when they returned from a movie. She died from a drug overdose, either premeditated or accidental. The epilogue says that while the precise cause of death was never determined, it is but one of thousands of drug overdoses every year.
Diarist's name
The anonymous diarist's name is never revealed in the book. In an episode where the diarist describes having sex with a drug dealer, she quotes an onlooker's remark indicating that her name may be Carla. Although a girl named Alice appears very briefly in the book, she is not the diarist, but a fellow runaway whom the diarist meets on the street in Coos Bay, Oregon.
Despite the lack of any evidence in the book that the diarist's name is Alice, the covers of various editions have suggested that her name is Alice by including blurb text such as "This is Alice's true story" and "You can't ask Alice anything anymore. But you can do something—read her diary." Reviewers and commentators have also frequently referred to the anonymous diarist as "Alice", sometimes for convenience.
In the 1973 television film based on the book, the protagonist played by Jamie Smith-Jackson is named "Alice". The protagonist is also named "Alice Aberdeen" in the 1976 stage play adaptation.
Production The manuscript that later became Go Ask Alice was initially prepared for publication by Beatrice Sparks, a Mormon youth counselor then in her early 50s, who had previously done various forms of writing. Sparks had reportedly noted that the general public at that time lacked knowledge about youth drug abuse, and she likely had both educational and moral motives for publishing the book. Sparks later claimed that the book was based on a real diary she received from a real teenage girl, although this claim was never substantiated and the girl has never been identified (see Authorship and veracity controversies). In the 1982 Avon paperback version of Go Ask Alice the Library of Congress lists the book as "fiction."
With the help of Art Linkletter, a popular talk show host for whom Sparks had worked as a ghostwriter, the manuscript was passed on to Linkletter's literary agent, who sold it to Prentice Hall. Linkletter, who had become a prominent anti-drug crusader after the 1969 suicide of his daughter Diane, also helped publicize the book. Even before its publication, Go Ask Alice had racked up large advance orders of 18,000 copies.
Reception
Public reception Upon its 1971 publication, Go Ask Alice quickly became a publishing sensation and an international bestseller, being translated into 16 languages. Its success has been attributed to the timing of its publication at the height of the psychedelic era, when the negative effects of drug use were becoming a public concern. Alleen Pace Nilsen has called it "the book that came closest to being a YA phenomenon" of its time, although saying it was "never as famous as [the later] Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games series". In addition to being very popular with its intended young adult audience, Go Ask Alice also attracted a significant number of adult readers.
Libraries had difficulty obtaining and keeping enough copies of the book on the shelves to meet demand. The 1973 television film based on the book heightened reader interest, and librarians reported having to order additional copies of the book each time the film was broadcast.
By 1975, more than three million copies of the book had reportedly been sold, and by 1979 the paperback edition had been reprinted 43 times. The book remained continuously in print over the ensuing decades, with reported sales of over four million copies by 1998, and over five million copies by 2009. The actual number of readers probably surpassed the sales figures, as library copies and even personal copies were likely circulated to more than one reader. Go Ask Alice has been cited as establishing both the commercial potential of young adult fiction in general, and the genre of young adult anti-drug novels, and has been called "one of the most famous anti-drug books ever published."
Critical response Go Ask Alice received positive initial reviews, including praise from Webster Schott in The New York Times, who called it an "extraordinary work", a "superior work" and a "document of horrifying reality [that] possesses literary quality". It was also recommended by Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and The Christian Science Monitor, and ranked number 1 on the American Library Association's 1971 list of Best Books for Young Adults. Some reviews focused on the realism of the book's material, without further addressing the literary merit of the book. According to Nilsen and Lauren Adams, the book was not subjected to the regular forms of literary criticism because it was presumed to be the real diary of a dead teenager. Lina Goldberg has suggested that the publishers were motivated to list the author as "Anonymous" partly to avoid such criticism.