Edit: 18/07/2014 After some research, I've finally found out that this book is NOT a true story, at all. It was passed off as a real, anonymous diary for years and years, but the author is actually Beatrice SparksDoes this change my opinion of the book? Only slightly. I'd like to know when I'm about to be cheated out of my opinion. If I'd known this beforehand, I probably would not have felt so invested in the book. So, yeah, you can say I am really, seriously, beyond pissed. But I'm not going to change my review because, at the time, this is what I felt.Consider this a friendly warning that it isn't a true story.***WARNING: Triggers are contained within this review.Read more reviews at The Beautiful World of Books! "Go Ask Alice is based on the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old drug user. It is not a definitive statement on the middle-class, teenage drug world. It does not offer any solutions. It is, however, a highly personal and specific chronicle. As such, we hope it will provide insights into the increasingly complicated world in which we live."Go Ask Alice is the first book that I have read that had me bawling my eyes out from around 50% up to right at the very end. It's raw, brutal and terrifying.You're inside a fifteen-year-old anonymous girl's head.You're watching her struggling to fit in.You begin getting that clammy feeling in your hands and neck that means something horrid is going to happen.You watch a fifteen-year-old spiral out of control, and there is nothing you can do to help her.After some research before writing this review, I'm still not 100% sure if this is a true story or if it's based on true events. Everything I have looked at either tells me it's unknown or it's true, so I'm not going to be adamant about the 'true story' bit. The passage I quoted at the top is a note from the editors, but that doesn't mean much, really.It's a difficult book to review, the worst one so far this year. We have no idea whose diary we're reading, or who this girl even is (we're never actually given a name). All we know is that it takes place in the late sixties/early seventies, when drugs were easier to come by than alcohol; when drugs were literally given out in the streets.It's not an easy book to read, either. From the outset, I knew it was going to be a tough book, one I wasn't sure I could stomach. It hit too close to home with the drugs (I've known and lost friends to extensive drug abuse and it's the most horrible feeling when you watch them abandon themselves and there is nothing you can do. They're too far gone to listen) but it's the most accurate portrayal of the downward spiral drugs have to offer; it shows the ugliest parts of an addict, that they are willing to do anything just to get high. People become so dependant that when they're not constantly on, they can't remember what it's like to feel free and happy without chemicals in their bodies.We follow a fifteen year old's journey on this route. She's always struggled to fit in -- maybe she was too pudgy, then far too skinny, her hair wasn't right, she was too nice or not nice at all -- and at a party, her drink is spiked and suddenly, she's accepted: Now that I think back I should have known what was happening! And dum-dum should have known, but I thought the whole party was so strange and exciting that I guess I just wasn't listening or maybe I didn't want to listen - I'd have been scared to death if I'd known. So I'm glad they did it to me, because now I can feel free and honest and virtuous about not having made the decision myself. And besides the whole experience is over and past and I'll never think of it again.Except it's true what they say; once you pop, you can't stop... For two days now I've tried to convince myself that using LSD makes me a "dope addict" and all the other low-class, unclean, despicable things I've heard about kids that use LSD and all the other drugs; but I'm so, so, so, so, so curious, I simply can't wait to try pot, only once, I promise! I simply have to see if it's everything that it's cracked up not to be! All the things I've heard about LSD were obviously written by uninformed, ignorant people like my parents...And from there, it just gets worse... Remember I told you I had a date with Bill? Well he introduced me to torpedos on Friday and speed on Sunday. They are both like riding shooting stars through the Milky Way, only a million, trillion times better. The Speed was a little scary at first because Bill had to inject it right into my arm.She tries to stop: I don't know why I shouldn't use drugs, because they're wild and they're beautiful and they're wonderful, but I know I shouldn't, and I won't! I won't ever again. I hereby solemnly promise that I will from this very day forward live so that everyone I know can be proud of me and so that I can be proud of myself!But she's not strong willed enough, and quickly things begin to spiral... Last night Doris was really low. We've run out of pot and money and we're both hungry... Oh, to be stoned, to have someone tie me off and give me a shot of anything...The writing completely changes during the book. We start off with a proper, educated young girl with perfect grammar and a sweet tone that made me want to befriend her. But by 52% (just after the waterworks started), the writing gets ugly, there's horrible amounts of cussing, talks of baby prostitutes and of selling her body for the drugs she so desperately needs. It's grimy, horrible, dirty and disgusting. It would make even the cleanest of people stay off drugs for the rest of their lives. After every high, every crazy passage written, you get a sad, depressing passage when she hits a low. You see her struggling with herself, not understanding who she is or what she's doing. She's desperate and slowly going insane. Dear Diary, I feel awfully bitched and pissed off at everybody. I'm really confused. I've been the digger here, but now when I face a girl it's like facing a boy. I get all excited and turned-on. I want to screw with the girl, you know, and then I get all tensed-up and scared...It's a wake up call kind of book. As I mentioned before, I've known heavy drug users, people so stuck in their circle they're not sure whether they're meat or fish. When it gets to that point, it's very, very hard to get them out of it. In the end, if they don't want to save themselves, there's absolutely nothing you can do.This book should absolutely not be read by anyone who cannot handle the following triggers: drugs, rape, abuse and sex. It is a blunt and cruel diary of a girl and she doesn't skim over the facts. It's there in black and white. I've warned you.I'm still iffy about the rating, because I simply have no idea how I should rate something likes this. So, for now, I'm going to leave it as it is and will come back to it at some point.If you are interested in the story, but don't think you can hack the book, there is a 1973 movie adaptation.
This infuriating book is the most repugnant piece of reactionary propaganda that I've ever had the misfortune to read. Go Ask Alice is unnecessary proof that sex and drug stories are the best money makers; it helps when they also support a staunchly conservative, traditionalist agenda. The whole book is a fetid lie, and a poorly executed one at that.OK, now that I've calmed down a little bit, let's actually discuss this "real diary." If there ever was a real diary (which seems hardly likely) it was probably very mild compared to this oversexed and overwritten garbage. What seems most likely is that Beatrice Sparks set out to write a book that would prove that smoking a joint or two, having sex without marriage, and (gasp!) not praying all the time would lead to a tragic decline and fall, eventually leading to a premature death. Now, to be fair to Sparks, I'm sure that this literary hoax was on some level a serious effort to help kids avoid the pitfalls of drugs and promiscuous sex, etc., but the author goes about it a way that is misguided at best and morally indefensible at worst. If this is on some level a real diary (once again, extremely unlikely) the advertisement and sale of it as a lurid, trashy cautionary tale is a disturbing thought. But, the fact that it is a lie disguised as the truth is simply disgusting. It is a blatant slap in the face to all families who have suffered real drug related losses. It's the commercialization of tragedy.Next, there is the writing style and storyline (remember, it is a story) to consider. The book does tug at the heartstrings, but only in way most abusive to the reader. If there is one thing that always upsets me in fiction, it is any tragedy involving the elderly; this has always bothered me. Naturally, Sparks kills off both of the narrator's grandparents in the most tragic ways the story allows. She exploits the reader's archetypal love of grandparents for cheap heartache (is it any wonder that this was made into a TV movie of the week?). If there was any clue to this book's lack of authenticity, it's the glaringly obvious fact that the grandparents will die before book's end, something a child could see coming. The reader is supposed to accept that a girl who can't figure out how a doctor can tell if a girl is a virgin, would, a relatively short time later, be using language out of a Henry Miller novel. The attempts to sound like an innocent girl and a jaded junkie are hackneyed and incompetent. The progression is totally unrealistic, but is still clearly the progression of a novel, not a real diary. I have to hand it to Sparks, she really throws in everything, including some outrageous, barely concealed homophobia: of course the drug dealers are gay, and drugs make the narrator want to be a lesbian and similar such things. And unsurprisingly, it must be pointed out at the end that the publication of this "real diary" is a commemoration of the "thousands of drug deaths that year." I think that if parents chose to sit down with their kids and talked about drugs instead of letting them read this crap, it would be a small, but much more intelligent (and certainly more tasteful) tribute to the dead and a step towards a more educated future.Go Ask Alice was an important book for me; I can honestly say I've never run to the computer so fast to tap out a review, good or bad, before. I do understand, truly, why books like Alice exist. Parents fear for the welfare of their children and want to have preventative measures, while kids love stories packed with drugs and sex. I just wish there was a way to educate young and old without having to engage a ridiculous, exploitative forgery like Go Ask Alice.
What do You think about Go Ask Alice (2006)?
I first read this book in sixth grade. When I tell people this, they usually look at me in an appalled fashion, and ask if my parents knew I was reading it. And I tell them, yes, my mother knew, before I was even finished with the first entry. I had/ have a tendency to talk openly with my mother, especially upon the topic of books. When she saw that I was reading it, she looked at me a moment, then said something along the lines of: "Rachel, if you weren't such a mature reader/person, I would tell you not to read that book." And so, I read it, and felt deeply moved. But what does this have to do with GO ASK ALICE? Everything. Though I suggest that Everyone read this book, I do agree with my mother, that for certain reasons, the reader must be mature enough to digest this true story of a girl, and not mock it or pull its lines to pieces with sayings such as: "like this would happen" or "whatever". They must look within the depths of this girl's words, and try to understand what she was feeling as she wrote them. Through drugs, befriending a BP, rape, and horrible circumstances that make you see things differently, this girl pours out her soul to her diary, and eventually, to the world. In conclusion, I feel that I should make it known that it is not most important to reflect soaly (sp?) upon the book in any review, but the impact that it has upon the individual. A year after having first read GO ASK ALICE, I was stunned to find that somebody, perhaps the school library, had white-outed many of the words, either curse words, or one's not 'deemed fit' for the student to read. And I couldn't help but wonder, if they are going to alter the story in such a fashion, why not just pull the books off the shelf intirely, because with things 'censored' out, what use is the book then, without its full impact and meaning?
—Rachel
This book has it all: Teen sex, preteen whores, gay and lesbian sex (not looked upon favorably), drug usage of all types, rape, hippies, communes, hitchhiking, lecherous bohemians, wild parties, drug pushing to 9-year-old grade-school kids, Berkeley burnouts, surreal drug dreams, lots of imagery involving death and maggots, teen vengeance and peer/herd cruelty and vicious rumor-mongering, babies in peril, cats spun in washing machines, girls in an insane asylum, menstruation and teen pregnancy issues, glue sniffing, body image woes and purging, and references to fucking as "balling," a term which fell out of usage to that effect approximately in the fall of 1974.And for all of that - FOR ALL OF THAT! - the book is a BORE!I mean, what can you say? We all know this thing is a fake; and passages such as the one where her dad cites statistics on VD and suicide and other social ills and somehow she manages to remember and write them down verbatim hours later in the "diary" kind of give the thing away.I like the attempt at "authentic" touches, eg.: "Everyone knows that sex and shit* go together," with the asterisked "shit" referenced at the page bottom as "*drugs" just in case the shocked adults aren't hip to the diarist's youthful lingo.The writing style goes from the goo-goo-ga-ga golly gee-willikers level to the usage of more sophisticated words such as "nary" and "woebegone" at the drop of a hat.I am wondering how, when our diarist heroine was in the gutter and writing her diary entries on paper bags and such, she managed to maintain the clarity of mind to actually stow away these inconvenient pages to get them pasted back into the diary. And, presuming that she kept the diary with her (since she had it with her on all her travels, based on the dates and locales) -- and based on the fact that the diary is said to have not been filled -- why she would need to use scraps of other kinds of paper at all. (Methinks the REAL author has trapped herself in her own dramatic license... The Hercule Poirot in me, folks.)The boffo bleak abrupt ending is probably what takes the wind out of most readers' sails. The book is a cautionary exploitation classic in the grand tradition -- with Gramps and Granmamma and gingerbread men and Christmas trees and God and Holy Matrimony and virginity always imperiled by the lurking dark menace ever at hand. It's one of those books where LSD and pot are put on the same level to create guilt by association, as in the sentence: "Anyone who says pot and acid are not addicting are foolish!" In fact, our woebegone gal tries all the hard substances first, but it's pot that throws her over the edge. Riiiiigghhttt...I'm giving the thing two stars for sociological interest and for at least being a fast-enough read to not have wasted too much of my life.
—Evan
I couldn't even finish this book. I found it a real boring drag, even though it's only a novella. I tried so hard to get through it, I kept thinking surely it must get better... but it didn't. I couldn't stand the narrator, I felt no connection with her and despised most of her views. My eyes skipped through paragraphs in a desperate bid to get past extremely boring parts... only to find they continued throughout the book.It wasn't a very good diary, you didn't seem to get a proper look inside the person's head and you couldn't sympathise with them. Every time something went wrong, I wanted to strangle the girl for being so damn pathetic... staying in bed for days because she lost her virginity - seriously, grow up.I didn't come away feeling that I gained anything or experienced a good story, the supposed message about drugs was mixed. I know the allure of this book comes from the fact that it's a true story and someone's actual diary, well maybe they should have discarded the original and made one up because, true or not, this girl and her endless self-pity just made me sick.I suppose there's always the possibility that the ending would have stolen my heart for being so incredible, but I honestly don't feel any regret at never finding out.
—Emily May
