Oh my God. This was made up? This was MADE UP? I thought this was a real girl. I THOUGHT THIS COULD HAPPEN TO ME. I thought this was real?
Okay, but how made up was this? “Edited” made up or “fiction” made up?
HER NAME WASN’T EVEN ALICE?
I think I heard about this once, maybe. I think maybe I heard about this a while back, but it just got absorbed into my consciousness through some sort of awareness osmosis. I didn’t learn and understand what it meant.
Did everyone else know about this? Why wasn’t there a huge story, when this came out? Why wasn’t this a Shattered Glass-style scandal?
“It’s a good thing most people bleed on the inside or this would be a gory, blood-smeared earth.” I can’t believe that girl isn’t dead. I can’t believe she wasn’t even real. The ending was so scary. She died, but she isn’t even dead.
Oh my God, does this mean that LSD doesn’t stay in your spinal fluid for years, just waiting for the chance to seep out and suddenly send your staid, respectable 42-year-old self tripping into a poison Candyland? Was that a lie?
Oh my God, there’s a list of list of misconceptions about illegal drugs on Wikipedia. I mean, of course there is, but thank God.
Was The Face on the Milk Carton fiction?
WHY WOULD SHE LIE ABOUT THIS I THOUGHT IT WAS REAL, I WAS SO SCARED THE FIRST TIME I SMOKED WEED. I was cold to so many cool girls with bicep tattoos because I was afraid of being seduced into a life of topless heroin bartending. I could have had more cool friends with bicep tattoos.
They made Go Ask Alice into a movie?
I have to see this movie.
More like Go Ask Alice Why She’s Such A Liar, BEATRICE.
Has everyone done cocaine but me? Is anyone else lying about using cocaine because some people act like it’s super normal to have done it a bunch? It’s not that normal, right?
Regina Morrow tried cocaine and she died. That happens. That’s real. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it happens to some people.
[Reads entire list of misconceptions] Oh my God, I don’t know anything about drugs. Literally everyone is stuffing their faces full of drugs all the time and I’ve never noticed. Is someone near me on drugs right now? How would I even know? I don’t know anything about drugs.
Paul F. Tompkins did a whole standup routine about how fake this book is. Everyone in the whole world knew before I did. Everyone else in the world knew and they’re doing cocaine and I don’t even know it and they’re laughing at me.
It’s way too late to do more drugs now. That ship has sailed.
I’m so glad those kids weren’t real. They were horrible. They kept slipping not-Alice LSD when she wasn’t looking in her soda and her peanut butter sandwiches and I was so scared of them and now there’s nothing to be scared of anymore.
She wrote other fake journals? How could she get away with this? Why isn’t she…sued, or in jail, or something?
I have to read these other fake journals.
Tags: beatrice sparks, books, drugs, go ask alice, lies, mormons
O_o X_x
Here is the Paul F. Tompkins routine in question, which I was listening to just yesterday. “Freak wharf!” has, of course, joined our household lexicon, as a term of affection.
As soon as I saw the headline, I started to type “paul f tompkins” into my url bar to watch that bit, but my browser suggested up that video of him singing Skyfall first, so I ended up watching that instead. NO REGRETS.
There are no regrets with Paul F. Tompkins, unless you already feel queasy when you listen to the bar rag story.
This is basically me. This is me. Everyone else actually has been doing cool things, but now I am 27 and it is Too Late to be That Person.
Everybody knew the whole time, and had cool tattoos. and I slide in the door with a party hat like HEEEEEYYYY and everyone is asleep.
There’s always time. I was a late bloomer, but here I am at 37 having made all the wrong choices!!!
Alice being fake was briefly traumatizing for me, however Beatrice Sparks is fascinating. she was a counseling psychologist with sketchy/nonexistant credentials. one of her other fake diary novels was called “It Happened to Nancy” and it was about a girl who goes to a Garth Brooks concert and has an asthma attack which leads her to getting raped and contracting HIV. what the fuck, B? she seems like the type of person who would both lead witch hunts in New England and executive direct crisis pregnancy centers, respective of era.
What the hell? What kind of horrible person writes stuff like that?
{And I say that as someone who’s read many of the fine works of VC Andrews. VC wrote some fuuuuucked up shit but the moralizing bs Sparks wrote is far worse in my book.}
I remember reading about her around the same time that I picked up Go Ask Alice (I believe I’d seen a forum somewhere talking about Sparks & the fakeness), and she was involved with a scare-them-straight kind of religious organization? So she didn’t really care about anything but using her influence as a (sketchy) psychologist to reveal a real life diary (fictional novel) to make people behave the way she wants them to.
yikes. what I’ve read said she was a Mormon youth counselor, which is unfortunate.
IT HAPPENED TO NANCY. That’s the one I was traumatized by. And then traumatized again when I found out it was fake.
I definitely thought that LSD spinal retention thing was true until just now.
Wait, if you have asthma, you can’t go to concerts? Did she just hate Garth Brooks? What is the MORAL of that cautionary tale?
it was published in the early 90’s. which explains the overlapping themes (scare tactics) of date rape and “pure” or “innocent” straight white people getting HIV. I think she was going for a “be careful, trust doesn’t guarantee safety” thing, but Sparks completely misses the mark despite (probably?) good intentions. it’s more fun to think of it as deep hatred for Garth Brooks though.
Perhaps this is a good time to admit my own lies. I haven’t read Go Ask Alice at all. I’ve been pretending for years. The closest I ever got was writing the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” in my super embarrassing sophomore poetry notebook.
I’ve also never read Lord of the Flies, Jane Eyre, or Brave New World. I was lying about that, too.
If it helps, Jane Eyre is looooaaaads better when you know it’s a proto-feminist novel about a young woman attempting to escape the shackles of patriarchy and misogyny. I think all of Charlotte Brontë’s stuff is about that – Villette is like a more mature, longer Jane Eyre where she takes more risks and is even more feminist. (The ending is pretty great. She wanted to kill off the male love interest, remove any potential romantic match, but her editor/publisher wouldn’t let her, so she sent them off to the sunset at sea, promising death or whatever, but not ending with a marriage like everyone tried to make her do.)
But….*spoilers!!* didn’t M. Paul die on a ship coming back from whatever exotic locale separated Lucy and him only moments after they had finally hooked up? And wasn’t it revealed on like, the last page?
Nor I. It was on all the recommended reading lists and I was just like … “nope!”
“Sybil” is also largely fiction.
Sybil being fake blew my mind! I’ve known about Alice for a while but Sybil… oy. We watched it in psych class in high school and it gave me nightmares (I remember kittens in a barn being freaky??).
WAIT WHAT
It’s fake on 2 levels. Most of the remembered traumas are not possible and were the result of implanted memories/leading from the psychiatrist she was seeing. Which isn’t to stay “Sybil” wasn’t ill– she was, sick and miserable. But the extreme medical drug use (which she became addicted to) and implanted memories certainly didn’t help. And then the actual book was written (or co-written) with an author who made up additional stuff… not just for this book but in magazine articles she wrote, too.
In the 1990s, a whole lot of people “recovered” memories of abuse (including ritual satanic abuse) and it was a huge fad. Remember the Satanism Scares? Sybil was a bit of a fore-runner of that.
Some people use this as fuel to claim that MPD/DID don’t exist, which seems silly, but also means that a lot of folks with MPD/DID are really hostile to discussions of Sybil because discrediting her diagnosis directly results in people trying to discredit THEM as well.
Don’t accept any fungus-based teas from no shady Druids at the henging is all we’re saying okay.
I gotta say. Go Ask Alice may be fake, and I knew that when I first read it, but I still found it super traumatizing. Actually, you know that morphine withdrawal section in To Kill a Mockingbird? That was my first drugs-in-books trauma. I can’t read or watch movies or tv or anything about people on drugs and not being in full control of their faculties because omg panic attack. (Somehow, though, LSD doesn’t trigger that response?)
This is why I never do drugs. DARE also helped with the omgno trauma as a child. That and being on strong anti-anxiety meds as a teenager that basically made me feel drunk (Clonopin whoooo), and Effexor withdrawal that made me crawl on the floor because I couldn’t stand up because I hadn’t taken my pill that morning and I wasn’t sure if my body knew how to support itself while standing. (I don’t much like to get drunk, also.)
Weirdly enough, I’ve seen the entire Tulsa series by Larry Clark of young adults 1963-1971 doing amphetamines in Oklahoma and whatnot, and it’s pretty graphic and dark and grim and shit, but mostly I was just struck by how beautiful and human it is. I’d think it’d send me into nightmares also! It’s not even THAT sanitized (this is why it was so shocking in 1973).
Ugh, all of my friends were out in our twenties having crazy adventures with drugs and boys and rock and roll while I was, I don’t know, at home listening to Court and Spark and watching Labyrinth. And now I am 31 and it’s much to late to go through an indulgent drugs and bad decisions phase, and I feel left out, damn it.
I’m a born square, I guess.
We can be born squares together. My parents always talk about how I was the most boring teenager — I’ve promised to go wild and crazy since then if they really want me to, but apparently it’s not the same when you’re 28 and offering to do it.
That’s okay, most of my friends are squares like me and the one friend who is not just convinces me that I’m really not at all the right person for crazy adventures with drugs and boys and rock and roll.
Sometimes I regret not getting a tattoo, then my best friend calls up with all the gory details about her latest tattoo laser removal session and I remember why I didn’t get one. Sometimes being square is a ok.
Um, am I the only one that thought we were talking about the advice column on Columbia U’s website?
http://goaskalice.columbia.edu/
Yes.
Yes.
I had to watch the movie in high school. IN ENGLISH CLASS. Precious Book Time was taken up with watching a bunch of too-old looking teens have tons of sex on hideous 70s furniture and use tons of slang (rebels!!)–
And then William Shatner appears.
I just couldn’t figure out why Alice’s friends were wasting all of their LSD by “slipping it” to her.
REGINA MORROW. Talk about formative deaths in the history of literature. It was extra sad because she’d had that surgery to make her not-deaf and she made my Actual Favorite SVH Character Not Joking, Bruce Patman, way more bearable for a while. Sweet Valley was always killing off good characters; I’m still mad about Olivia the newspaperwoman.
“Was The Face on the Milk Carton fiction?” Bahahahahahaha.
I first read the book when I was ten. My takeaway was, “Drugs make you thin – gotta find me some drugs.” Also, I really wanted to smell the jello three houses away – that seemed like a a really cool superpower!
I first read the book when I was 13, when everything about the adult (even “young adult”) world seems fake, so I don’t think I ever gave the matter much thought. Years later I saw that the book even has some homophobia to go with its anti-drug hysteria, when Alice, as a runaway, catches her boyfriend in bed with another guy (at least I think that’s from “Go Ask Alice”. Am I wrong?) She’s not exactly all hippie “love is love” about it. Also for the record I’ve never tried cocaine, but that’s because I am a big weirdo.
No, that’s definitely in GAA, she catches her boyfriend with another dude and flips out and uses a lot of very dated slang to put him down. I read that book a dozen times in high school, for whatever reason, it seemed SO DEEP to me, probably because she went out into the world to do drugs while I was writing mary sue fanfiction about Anne McCaffrey characters.
(Also, I have tried cocaine and I think I don’t need anything that makes me even more anxious.)
I also never read this because I was a people-pleasing nerd who would never have thought of trying drugs (also my parents would have killed me, dug up my body, and killed me again if they found out). Mostly I don’t regret not having a crazy rebellious teenage phase- it was what it was- but I have to say as a mostly responsible adult I now have a real hankering to try weed at least once. (In a safe, controlled environment where I won’t be arrested for doing so.)
May I suggest visiting Washington or Colorado next year.
I am quietly considering that as a future trip. Visit friends, climb the Rockies, and take an afternoon to get toasted.
Mallory let’s hang out and do drugs. They get better with age.
Mallory go do a bunch of drugs right now so you can come back with hilariously strident but wrong opinions about which ones suck.
Drug Trolling with Mallory: All Weed is Garbage
Oh no she’d be much more baroquely wrong than that. IDK like mushrooms are worse than ketamine because they’re full of dirt or something?
Roots is pretty much fictional too, did you know that? But it feels true.
I’ve never even see cocaine in real life even though I lived in Montreal! Montreal is run on cocaine isn’t it? (Sorry Montreal jk jk jk about your lovely non-drug filled non-corrupt city)
I’m like the most sheltered person. Is how I feel about drugs.
I work in a bookstore and the other day a 13-ish looking girl came in asking for it. Not only did I have to break it to her that we didn’t have it, I had to a) bite my lip so hard to try and not tell her it was fake and b) bite it again when she came back asking where “other books by Anonymous” would be shelved. Also, I was surprised it is still A Thing with the Youths!
I DIVED HAPPILY INTO THIS COMMENT THREAD EXPECTING JUICY DRUG USE CONFESSIONS
I AM VERY DISAPPOINTED
hi haley what drugs have you done
Oh you know like, the cool ones
the cool cool drugs
*coughs*
*examines fingernails*
*wanders away*
I JUST GOT HERE AND WHAT
My juicy drug confessions: one time I was at Osheaga and this girl I didn’t know who was there alone offered me some weed, and declined. I was like 24. The end, that is the history of my non-drug use. Oh ALSO I just found out what the fuck “molly” is like two weeks ago, and stop fucking calling it that guys.
(what is Molly?)
Esctasy/MDMA
I had to ask a member of my book club what molly is.
(HI K.)
I lived in Santa Cruz for 4 years and then attended a graduate writing program, yet I’m entirely drug free. (Makes ya wonder what makes my brain / impulses so different from my siblings.) (Probably I read GAA and they didn’t.) (Mom, are you reading this comment? Do you love me best? Validate me, Mom!)
I’m so blase about peer pressure (“just say no! no one ever minded if I said no!”) (“Sure, we went caving all the time! Then they’d find the mushrooms and I’d guide us home!”) and yet… I think self-selecting as an introvert who will just stay home and read means the real pressure-y peers weren’t on my horizon. (“Did you invite Mel?” “Uh, no. Am I supposed to? Would she… like to come?”)
I’m a big square who at 34 just had pot cookies for the first time in January (or not at all since that is illegal in my state!) and it was the greatest thing ever, even though it gave me a headache
Should I even mention Michelle Remembers? Does anybody even remember Michelle Remembers?
Should I even mention Michelle Remembers? Does anybody even remember Michelle Remembers?