Go Ask Alice is a 1971 novel by Beatrice Sparks that bills itself the “real-life diary” of an anonymous teenage girl. It has sold over four million copies, was adapted as a TV movie with William Shatner, and is still in print over 40 years later. I read it when I was in the seventh grade and was absolutely terrified by the searingly honest portrayal of what (I assumed) it felt like to do drugs.
On rereading it as a slightly less credulous adult, I am amazed that even at twelve I was ever fooled by the least credible imitation of a teenage girl ever to stain a page. The entire book reads like the literary equivalent of this tweet:
HELLO FELLOW HUMAN TEENS I HEARD THE COOLEST PLACE FOR US TEENS TO HANG OUT IS Ｔｈｅ Ｃｏｌｏｓｓａｌ Ｐｉｌｌａｒ ｏｆ Ｗａｓｐ Ｅｇｇｓ LETS GO DO NOT BRING WEAPONS
— Glempner (@pisscop) May 9, 2011
“Wonderful news, Diary! We’re moving. Daddy has been invited to become the Dean of Political Science at——————. Isn’t that exciting! Maybe it will be like it was when I was younger. Maybe again he’ll teach in Europe every summer and we’ll go with him like we used to. Oh those were the fun, fun times! I’m going to start on a diet this very day. I will be a positively different person by the time we get to our new home. Not one more bite of chocolate or nary a french fried potato will pass my lips till I’ve lost ten globby pounds of lumpy lard. And I’m going to make a completely new wardrobe. Who cares about Ridiculous Roger? Confidentially, Diary, I still care.”
No teenage girl has ever referred to her ex-boyfriend as “Ridiculous Roger,” nor immediately answered her own rhetorical question.
“The movie was fun with Scott. We went out after and I ate six wonderful, delicious, mouth-watering, delectable, heavenly french fries. That was really living in itself! I don’t feel about Scott like I used to about Roger. I guess that was my one and only true love, but I’m glad it’s over.”
Do you know who talks about french fries like that? Old ladies wearing sunglasses in birthday cards they sell at car wash gift stores, and Mormon therapists who write fake diaries by imaginary fifteen-year-olds.
“I keep thinking about our teacher in gym teaching us modern dance and always saying that it will make our bodies strong and healthy for childbearing, then she harps and harps that everything must be graceful, graceful, graceful.”
No one has ever suggested that modern dance is helpful practice for childbearing; if anyone did, exactly zero adolescent girls would listen to her.
“Dear precious Diary, I am baptizing you with my tears. I know we have to leave and that one day I will even have to leave my father and mother’s home and go into a home of my own. But ever I will take you with me.”
“And go into a home of my own.” “And diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.”
“I wonder if I could go stick my finger down my throat and throw up after every meal?”
Teenagers don’t independently invent the concept of eating disorders in their journals. She would just call it bulimia.
“Lucy Martin is having a Christmas party, and I’m supposed to bring a gelatin salad.”
No.
“I met another girl walking home from school. She lives just three blocks from us and her name is Beth Baum. She’s really awfully nice. She’s kind of shy too and prefers books to people just as I do. Her father is a doctor and away from home most of the time just like Dad, and her mother nags a lot but then I guess all mothers do. If they didn’t I’d hate to see what homes and yards and even the world would look like. Oh, I do hope I won’t have to be a nagging mother, but I guess I’ll have to be, else I don’t see how anything will ever be accomplished.”
“I say, aren’t you fellow school-teen Anonymous?”
“I am! And your full name is?”
“Beth Baum. Which do you prefer, books or people?”
“Books, much as you do. To what degree does your mother nag?”
“As much as we all will, till the world burns.”
“Even so, co-human. Even so.”
“Boy, Mom would be proud of my thinking and attitude today. It’s just too bad we can’t communicate anymore. I remember being able to talk to her when I was little but it’s as though we speak a different language now and the meanings just don’t come across the right way. She means something and I take it another way or she says something and I think she’s trying to correct me or “uplift” me or preach at me and I really suspect she isn’t doing that at all, just groping and being as lost with words as am I. That’s life, I guess.”
No teenager has ever thought this fairly and objectively about her own mother. Their brains just aren’t ready for it.
“We even talk a lot about religion. The Jewish Hebrew faith is a lot different than ours. They have their meetings on Saturday and they are still looking for Christ or the Messiah to come. Beth loves her grandparents a lot and she wants me to meet them. She says they are Orthodox and eat meat off one set of plates and milk things off another set of plates. I wish I knew more about my own religion so I could tell Beth.”
“As a Jewish Hebrew, I look forward to the day when Christ or the Messiah comes, either one, both are great. Pass the milk things, please.”
“I’m going to wear my new white pants suit, and I have to go now and wash my hair and put it up.”
Not just her white pantsuit, nor even her white pant suit — her white pants suit.
“I had found the perfect and true and original language, used by Adam and Eve, but when I tried to explain, the words I used had little to do with my thinking. I was losing it, it was slipping out of my grasp, this wonderful and priceless and true thing which must be saved for posterity. I felt terrible, and finally I couldn’t talk at all and slumped back onto the floor, closed my eyes and the music began to absorb me physically. I could smell it and touch it and feel it as well as hear it. Never had anything ever been so beautiful. I was a part of every single instrument, literally a part. Each note had a character, shape and color all its very own and seemed to be entirely separate from the rest of the score so that I could consider its relationship to the whole composition, before the next note sounded. My mind possessed the wisdoms of the ages, and there were no words adequate to describe them.”
…This is barely how drugs feel. It’s a little bit like Nation of Islam, though.
“It’s been like, wow—the greatest thing that has ever happened. 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 has snorted speed maybe twice and she’s already graduated to needles. Because they’re so inexpensive and readily available.
“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 who obviously don’t know what they’re talking about; maybe pot is the same.”
At this point, we are expected to believe that even a single human being has tried the following drugs, in the following order:
- LSD
- Speed
- Benzos
- Various “uppers and downers”
- Injected speed
- Acid
- Tranquilizers
- Marijuana
Marijuana is a gateway drug, not the last drug you try after you’ve done everything else.
“All my life I’ve thought that the first time I had sex with someone it would be something special, and maybe even painful, but it turned out to be just part of the brilliant, freaky, way-out, forever pattern. I hadn’t thought about being pregnant before. Can it happen the first time? Will Bill marry me if I am or will he just think I’m an easy little dum-dum who makes it with everyone? Of course he won’t marry me, he’s only fifteen years old. I guess I’ll just have to have an abortion or something.”
“Or something.”
“I must talk to someone. I must find someone who understands about drugs and talk to them.”
No.
“We never get tired and she and I are two of the most popular girls at school, I know I look great, I’m still down at 103 pounds, and every time I get hungry or tired I just pop a Benny. We’ve got energy and vitality to spare, and clothes, like man. My hair is the greatest. I wash it in mayonnaise and it’s shining and soft enough to make anyone turn on.”
I realize we live in an anti-shampoo society, and that women nowadays love nothing more than throwing away perfectly good shampoo in favor of pushing baking powder and various kitchen solvents into their scalp, but I refuse to believe that any woman has ever washed her entire hair in pure and unadulterated mayonnaise.
“School kids are one thing and even the junior high, but today I sold ten stamps of LSD to a little kid at the grade school who was not even nine years old, I’m sure. I know that he in turn must be pushing and these kids are just too young! The thought of nine and ten year olds getting wasted is so repulsive that I’m not going over there any more! I know if they want it they’ll get it somewhere but they won’t get it from me!”
Call me old-fashioned — call me naïve — but I cannot bring myself to believe that even in the 1970s the price of LSD was so low that nine-year-olds could afford to buy it during recess.
“But just before I was too out of it to notice what was going on, I saw Sheila and that cocksucker she goes with lighting up and setting out Speed. I remember wondering why were they getting high when they had just set us out on this wonderful low, and it wasn’t until later I realized that the dirty sonsofbitches had taken turns raping us and treating us sadistically and brutally. That had been their planned strategy all along, the low-class shit eaters.”
All implausible, but the phrase “low-class shit eaters” is perhaps the least plausible of all.
“Adolescents have a very rocky insecure time. Grown-ups treat them like children and yet expect them to act like adults. They give them orders like little animals, then expect them to react like mature, and always rational, self-assured persons of legal stature. It is a difficult, lost, vacillating time.”
This is a line from a Deborah Tannen book, I am sure of it.
“I don’t know what or when or where or who it is! I only know that I am now a priestess of Satan trying to maintain after a freak-out to test how free everybody was and to take our vows.”
Right-ho.
“Another day, another blow job. The fuzz has clamped down till the town is mother dry.”
…Right-ho.
“The kids have really started hassling me. Twice today Jan banged into me in the hall and called me Nancy Nice and Mary Pure. I was walking home from the store and a carload of kids pulled up beside me and began shouting things like:
‘Well, if it isn’t easy lay, Mary Pure.’
‘No, it’s Miss Fink Mouth.’
‘Miss Super Fink Mouth. Miss Double Triple Fink Mouth.’
Surely they wouldn’t pick on me so unmercifully if it weren’t for drugs. Would they?”
Heroin dealers. Vicious, deranged, LSD-addled, homicidal heroin dealers, and the worst insults they can think of are “Mary Pure” and “Miss Double Triple Fink Mouth.”
“Anyway last spring, he and three of his buddies heard about sniffing glue and thought it sounded exciting so they bought a couple of tubes and tried it.”
No one in this book just drinks beer. Didn’t you mostly just drink beer in high school?
“I used to think I would get another diary after you are filled, or even that I would keep a diary or journal through my whole life. But now I don’t really think I will. Diaries are great when you’re young. In fact, you saved my sanity a hundred, thousand, million times. But I think when a person gets older she should be able to discuss her problems and thoughts with other people, instead of just with another part of herself as you have been to me. Don’t you agree? I hope so, for you are my dearest friend and I shall thank you always for sharing my tears and heartaches and my struggles and strifes, and my joys and happinesses. It’s all been good in its own special way, I guess. See ya.
The subject of this book died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary.
Her parents came home from a movie and found her dead. They called the police and the hospital but there was nothing anyone could do.
Was it an accidental overdose? A 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 drug deaths that year.”
I feel like that question is important, but let us leave that aside for now. I will not contest the fact that thousands of people die as a result of drug use every year, only that no human person ever fell into drug addiction by way of gelatin salad and secret LSD and the Satanic priesthood.
Tags: books, excessive credulousness, fake diaries, frauds, go ask alice, I only know that I am now a priestess of Satan, literary quotations
I’m not entirely sure the writer was even human. They were certainly not a teen with a drug addiction.
I think it might have been this guy:
Oh, I love Music Band!
*one quick Google later*….and, of course, there is an actual band called Music Band.
That was beautiful, man.
It sounds like an AI traveled backwards in time and is attempting to cobble together a memoir that passes the Turing Test.
I believed this book was real when I was a kid, but the weird thing is I totally noticed how bizarre and stilted the writing was. I just thought teens in the 60s were like that!
Beatrice Sparks did not stop there! She was a one-woman powerhouse for imagining the lives of Teens in Trouble.
…Which do you prefer, books or people?”
“Books, much as you do. To what degree does your mother nag?”
“As much as we all will, till the world burns.”
“Even so, co-human. Even so.”
I have reread this exchange six times now, for it is perfect.
I laughed so hard at “Even so, co-human. Even so.”
I came down here to say exactly this! Thank you, co-human, for assisting me in this endeavor.
Think nothing of it, co-human. Our mutual destiny prevailed.
Wow. Did she get any better at it?
Spoiler alert: no.
holy balls that’s a lot of fake journals
I know, right! Someone should write The Anonymous Journal of a Mormon Therapist Lady Researching Evil and bring this thing full circle.
You’re nominated! Go forth and enlighten us.
HOLD UP there’s a Go Ask Alice play?????
Yup. I was in it. I played Joel the harmless nerd.
OMG I read “It Happened to Nancy” and the main character (Nancy) gets [SPOILER ALERT] raped by this older guy she goes to a concert with and then gets HIV and dies. SO DON’T EVER GO TO CONCERTS WITH BOYZ, PEOPLE.
adapted as a TV movie with William Shatner
William Shatner played a teenage girl drug addict??
I don’t know why I am feigning shock, all those excerpts read pretty well in his voice
The whole William Shatner as a teenage girl drug addict movie would be worth it for the scene where he listens to a record of himself singing “LUCY… IN THE SKY… WITH… DIAMONDS!” and just, like, slips out of his grasp listening to this wonderful and priceless and true thing that must be saved for all posterity, man.
(I recommend YouTube, for anyone who hasn’t heard him singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” before. And then I recommend listening to his cover of “Common People” with Joe Jackson, because it is actually amazing-in-the-good-way.)
Why is The Speed always capitalized? Also I believe it’s spelled “Bennies” if my knowledge of drug slang from 1970-80’s era Stephen King novels is to be believed.
Ugh but what do I know, I’m off to go have an abortion or something.
Can we have a discussion of every possible meaning of “or something”??
1. I’m off to go have an abortion or [check myself into a Swiss convent for a year]
2. I’m off to go have an abortion or [eat a lot of soft cheeses and deli meats and sushi in the hopes of inducing a miscarriage]
3. I’m off to go have an abortion or [get an egg salad sandwich]
4. I’m off to go have an abortion or [sell my unborn firstborn to Satan, whose high priestess I apparently am now]
You’re missing the most obvious option (if hilariously overwrought old books/movies are to be believed)….THROWING YOURSELF DOWN THE STAIRS!!
This is gonna be my new sign off.
“I’m off to go have an abortion or something.”
— Modern Teenage Dirtbag, female.
Hilariously, I found the “have an abortion or something” construction the single most believable phrase in the book, because it so accurately reflected my complete at-a-fucking-loss-for-options swimmy disconnection when I was a teenager in a pregnancy scare. That’s as far as I got: “I guess I’ll have to figure out how to, like, have an abortion or something” before time and menses* caught up with my over-anxious mind and dismissed my fears.
*As time and menses always will catch up with us all!
I totally agree. My job involves counseling a lot of teenage girls and I would not bat an eye if one of them said, “I guess I’ll have to get an abortion or something.” That is a totally accurate representation of teenage thought.
The rest is crap.
I thought about having an abortion or something the other day, but I went with a milkshake instead.
“Or something,” indeed.
I like the cut of your jib.
I have not read Go Ask Alice, but all of these excerpts sound pretty much like a somewhat sheltered middle-aged white lady’s imaginings of what it would be like to be a drug-addicted teen. I mean, gelatin salad. GELATIN SALAD. I also love how the boyfriends have total dad names – Roger, Bill (though maybe those were cool teen names in the 70s?). And has any teen ever used the word “adolescents” to describe themselves and their peers?
Any adolescent worth their salt can make a gelatin salad!
Now excuse me, I have to press my white pants suit.
PANTS SUIT
It’s a paaaantsuiiiiiiit http://youtu.be/nq33tXCB6y8
Pantsuits were very trendy in the 70s. IIRC you could still get kicked out of some stuffy places for *gasp* wearing pants. Although I suspect a teenager would be more likely to go for seriously bellbottomed jeans. With flower patches.
And mayonnaise on hair was a Thing (maybe still is). I remember our hairdresser recommended sitting around with mayo or eggs or some damn thing as a moisturizer. My mother also washed her hair with beer in the early 70s. That phase didn’t last long. Maybe she got tired of smelling like a brewery.
Childhood flashback to Body On Tap, the beer shampoo! Gaaa!
My Mormon friends gave me to believe that gelatin salads of various kinds were pretty much required at Mormon potlucks/special events (a thing which sounds like a sarcastic comment but is actually not!) Add the Mormon-gelatin-salad requirement to what seem to have been the completely revolting but unwritten American food laws of the 1950s-70s, and this gelatin salad thing comes as no surprise to me.
(Also, it may explain the washing the hair with mayonnaise thing. I mean really. Mid-century cuisine was just flush with meats and fruits suspended in gelatin and mayonnaise.)
Today’s dad is yesterday’s teen heartthrob-drug-dealer.
I’m pretty sure that’s the exact scenario of how my parents met.
This is so glorious.
Gawd. I had the same experience with this book and was terrified of drugs and parties and moving to a new town for years. I think I was in my 20s before I found out it was fictional — and holy crap, how did I not notice that the first part of the diary was written by Anne of Green Gables? “Beth is ever so nice. I imagine we’ll be getting in myriad scrapes together.” Of course, I wasn’t the brightest child. I remember reading about the girl Alice met with the false eyelashes “as long as your arm” and thinking how unwieldy that would be. Sigh…
Also, I missed this before, but I think that the real moral of the story is Never abandon your diary. It will always be bigger than you. It will always be stronger than you. Shudder.
I’m scared to go back and look, but I think I purposefully tried to write in my diary like Anne of Green Gables. I actually named my diary at one point.
Did both those things. Also wrote a diary in which I pretended I lived at boarding school and occasionally snuck back into my house to write in this particular diary.
I was a weird nine-year-old.
When I was nine I wanted NOTHING MORE than to go to boarding school with my (imaginary) twin sister.
The closest I ever got to the boarding school of my dreams was my 3-month exchange to France when I was 14. (My dad wouldn’t send me because HE went to boarding school and hated it, and he was probably wise).
I had a younger sister and never longed for a twin one.
I’ve since read Prep and decided it was probably for the best that I never achieved my boarding school dreams, but I still have a lot of imaginary nostalgia for it. Like the way I am wistful for Hogwarts.
YES. Me too. It doesn’t help that I was in my 20s when HP came out. Sigh.
SAME
I had an imaginary term sister too! Her name was mine, backwards.
Oh, I absolutely did that. Complete with writing it while sitting outside in a long skirt, under a tree.
I wrote in my diary (age ten) in imitation of the Royal Diaries series, which I consumed voraciously. I also wrote about my imaginary friends without the slightest suggestion that they were, in fact, imaginary.
MAYBE THE DIARY DID IT.
Hello, Harry Potter. My name is Tom Riddle.
It’s like the cut glass bowl in the Fitzgerald short story, a menacing semi-conscious object designed to ruin lives
I haven’t read the book, but I do remember keeping some diaries that were NOT AT ALL LIKE THAT.
I still have my teenage journals, and most of them are filled with laughable angst and terrible French and little hearts next to my name.
Yeah – there was one that I tried to write in some kind of bizarre calligraphy… It didn’t last and by like page 5 I was into my regular printing.
This book so terrified me as a youth that I had to hide it. I don’t know why I didn’t just throw it away, probably because I was afraid throwing away a book would lead me to a life of drugs.
I had to scroll down to say that “Even so, co-human, even so” just made me silent work laugh so hard that my eyes teared up and I’m pretty sure I now have eye makeup on my cheeks.
“Even so, co-human” is exactly where I also lost it in gales of laughter.
I want to change my blog tagline to “Even so, co-human.” I am still laughing about that. 🙂
Teens sure do love french fries and pants suits and abortions.
And gelatin salad. What teen doesn’t love gelatin salad?
When I was a teen, they were all I did with my time. Ate french fries, wore pants suits, got abortions.
Often all in the same day! And what a day it was.
Another day, another blow job.
or something
I go down to the malted shop for some french fried potatoes and a hamburger sandwich served fast right before I go to the abortion store. As all we teens do when we are certainly human beings and not an invasive alien species in human suits.
Already liked it, but if you are quoting MST3K with the french fried potatoes and a hamburger sandwich bit then I like your comment times a million.
I was, can we be best friends??
Seriously, I am finally finishing my undergrad degree after dropping out 15 years ago, and MST3K is pretty much the only way I have maintained my tenuous grasp on sanity these past two years. The only non-school things in my head are all MST3K related, and it is maybe a problem.
ARE WE THE SAME PERSON? I am ALSO finishing my undergrad degree this May after dropping out 10 years ago, MST3K is my lifeblood, crazy past 2 years, etc etc. If you also live in NYC I may insist we meet up.
Holy crap! I am your California doppleganger, apparently! We are kept on opposite sides of the country so that the world won’t implode or whatever happens when dopplegangers meet.
Seriously, congratulations! Going back is rad/maddening/a big fucking deal!
Congratulations to you too!!! It is a huge deal; we are some BAMFs.
But only six French fries! You wouldn’t want to corrupt a generation by allowing the protagonist in your faux-diary of drug-addled depravity to over-indulge by eating a whole serving of French fries.
I also believed this book was a real teenager’s diary for an embarrassingly long time. I’m blaming this on the fact that I was also reading a lot of Christopher Pike books and thought that teenagers were always going off to Mexico to have weekend-long parties where they’d have lots of sex and plot elaborate revenge schemes. Go Ask Alice seemed like the next logical step.
Is Beatrice Sparks related to Brenda Hampton? Because the Secret Life of the American Teenager seems like it was also created by someone with a really tenuous grasp of how humans interact with one another. I only caught a couple episodes and in one a girl thought her dad died in a plane crash because she lost her virginity.
I never read any of these types of books when I was young. But if it makes you feel better, I thought the Princess Bride was a true story for a long, long time.
Ha! My older sister believed Goldman’s the Princess Bride was actually an abridged version of a book by S. Morgenstern until a couple years ago. She was like “I keep trying to find the original, but no one has it!” and I had to say “Okay, I’m about to disappoint you and laugh at you at the same time.”
I totally fell for that, too! And I was like embarrassingly old, probably 14 or 15 or something.
Oh, you’re fine. My sister was 33. It was the same year I had to tell her that Minnie and Micky Mouse were not brother and sister. Tough times.
Honestly I don’t feel like this is that embarrassing? Most people read Princess Bride pretty young and it SAYS there’s an original. Why wouldn’t you believe it? I was told before I read it that there wasn’t an original, but otherwise I’m sure I would have believed it.
Oh, I don’t think it’s embarrassing in and of itself. My sister was embarrassed because A. she first read it when she was around 19 and B. She did not find out that S. Morgenstern was fictional during all the time she spent on the internet trying to find his version of the book. I think she was mostly disappointed in her google skills.
I was older than your sister but at least my experience was pre-Google. That WOULD be tough to bear.
I READ THE BOOK WHEN I WAS 20 AND I BELIEVED IT
There could be a post titled “Lines From The Princess Bride That, In Hindsight, Should Have Tipped Me Off That It Was Not Really An Abridged Version Of A Real Book By S. Morgenstern,” but in my case surprisingly enough it was not the fact that the countries Florin and Guilder are constantly described as if they are real historical countries, which seemed moderately plausible (my geographical education was not what it should have been), but rather the scenes in the introduction where the narrator contemplates adultery and the mashed-potato scene with his son, that tipped me off. I suddenly went, “Wait, why would he write all these terrible things about his family right here where they can READ them?” Yes, somehow, THAT’S what strained my credulity to the breaking point…
I think that the only reason why I got the joke of the Princess Bride book was because I had just struggled through a valiant attempt at reading Les Miserables and the Parisian Sewer Systems defeated me on page 400.
Did you write to the publisher to get the full, unabridged Buttercup/Westley sex scene, as Goldman encouraged? No? Just me, then. Ok.
You were not alone in this, I promise.
Did you know YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO THAT STILL EVEN NOW TODAY RIGHT NOW OH YES YES YES DO IT.
Totally. The best part of the whole shenanigan. I have no shame about this.
“…reading a lot of Christopher Pike books and thought that teenagers were always going off to Mexico to have weekend-long parties where they’d have lots of sex and plot elaborate revenge schemes.”
You must have read the Christopher Pike masterpiece “Gimme a Kiss”. In which, funnily enough, a hilariously ‘raunchy’ diary is a major plot point. That book has everything: STDs, laughing gas, faked drowning, and, of course, REVENGE.
Oh, I read them all! I think my favorite WTF Christopher Pike plot twist was when the villain siblings were revealed to be part of a race of secret immortal super-intelligent incestuous dinosaurs. I may have stopped reading his books after that one because you really can’t top that.
I’ve never read that one and now I need to search it out! I think my favourite was the one where the ghost girl is trying to save her brother from his birth sister who’s trying to kill him because she’s in love with him, or… something? I can’t really remember much of it now, aside from the fact that diabetes was a major plot point and there was a disappointing sequel.
umm same here and i logged in here for the first time just to say that weekend was one of my christopher pike JAMS, much as you do! i guess we were the same gullible book nerds who loved long physical descriptions of teen protagonists.
Yeah, I’m really glad Pike described everyone so obsessively that it’s 19 years later and I can still remember that Shani wore a purple shirt and tight white pants even though I can’t remember how geometry works.
YESSSS I loved Weekend.
Raid cocktails! Elaborate schemes involving snakes and recording equipment! Unexpected British twins! A boyfriend from the barrio.
Oh God, I have vivid memories of every girl I knew reading this in fifth grade/middle school, and seeing this I’m grateful eleven year-old men didn’t bother to even try reading it.
I really want french fries now, though.
I’m there.
I will not be stopping at six.
I just had some and did not stop at six.
“or something”
“I wish I knew more about my own religion so I could tell Beth.”
That is actually the fakest line. Parents, tell your kids more about your strong Christian faith, then they won’t lsdacidfatpimplesdeathjew.
I was raised in an agnostic, non-religious family, and when I was about nine, I was hanging out with my best friend (a Christian) in her community pool and talking about religion.
Her: “Are you a Christian?”
Me, thinking: “I don’t know, how would I know?”
Her: “Do you believe in God?”
Me, now confused: “I guess so.”
Her: “Then you’re a Christian!”
Our closest family friends were Orthodox Jewish and talked about God all the time at Shabbos dinner so it sounded a little fishy to me, but I accepted it. LITTLE DID I KNOW that it was not so simple.
I am trying very hard to be generous to my nine-year-old self and not feel shame for how dumb and needlessly confident she was, but it’s not really working.
Listen, you were great, don’t worry.
<3<3<3
Wait are LSD and Acid the same thing because I always thought so and then TWICE this week people referred to them as different and I’m so confused.
Wikipedia says they’re one in the same!
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide
This also fits in to my idea that we need to stop calling things “dope,” because I’ve heard it used for both pot and heroin and those are very different.
Team Clarity In Drug Street Names
In high school one of my friends honestly believed that another name for pot was crack, and did not understand why we got so upset when she told us that during her study abroad in Europe her host family smoked crack all the time. Apparently it is very European to smoke crack to relax.
OMG.
They are the same; I was so confused when I was reading it because I thought it was a joke and I was missing it. Possibly because of all the acid I did as a teenager…
Those people are…
I am really struggling because I do not believe in calling people “dumb” when they are just misinformed, but MAN THOSE PEOPLE SEEM DUMB.
“Another day, another blow job.”
LOL. I read this book when I was, like, 12. I certainly didn’t know the real meaning, but I can’t remember being confused about it either. I wonder what I thought a blow-job was?
I had this exact same thought!
If I were releasing a new edition of this book, “Another day, another blow job” would be the tagline I put on the back.
Miss Double Triple Fink Mouth — what insult are they going for here?
Miss Sextuple Fink Mouth.
At least it wasn’t Miss Double Fink Mouth to the Third Power.
I think it had something to do with that time she ate SIX WHOLE FRENCH FRIES.
Exactly. Do Bennies and Speed and get abortions all you want, girlfriend, but BOW YOUR HEAD IN SHAME for eating six fries.
My theory is that Miss Double Triple Fink Mouth is an unfortunate relative of Gussie Fink-Nottle, perhaps with a similar affinity for newts or other amphibians. The very antithesis of a homicidal heroin dealer, and thus the name most likely to strike fear and shame into their hearts.
You know, like when you order a coffee at Tim Hortons and you want two cream and three sugar. She is a milky over-sweetened Fink Mouth. I am positive this was the intended meaning.
Holy shit, I will be referring to all forms of amphetemine as “The Speed” from now on. “the Speed” is a million times more hilarious than “the Google”.
I like The Facebook myself.
this post is perfect.
also, isn’t Go Ask Alice the source of the infamous “drug-addled babysitter bakes baby, puts turkey in bassinet” urban legend?
HA, no, that’s an independent urban legend, though I would not be surprised if Beatrice Sparks was also responsible (though Snopes.com claims it is a tale of “unclassifiable veracity,” chills!). Go Ask Alice IS the source of the idea that teens would indiscriminantly put LSD in Cokes at a party to see who gets dosed, instead of squabbling and hoarding their drugs like actual teens.
God this book was TERRIFYING when I was 11. I read it like 4 times and did a school report on LSD.
This is hilarious and now I want french fries.
We had to read It Happened to Nancy in HEALTH CLASS when I was in junior high. It is literally the coach from Mean Girls in book form. Nancy has sex, gets AIDS, and dies. I absolutely thought it was the gospel truth, and feel like I need to break out my copy to see how ridiculous it seems to me now.
I read this one! Nancy is actually RAPED by this older boy with whom she attends a concert. What a dumb idiot! Don’t you know not to go to concerts with older boys named Colin?!
“Don’t go to concerts with older boys. You WILL get raped and you WILL contract HIV/AIDS and you WILL die.”
Also you will have to carry your used tampons in your purse wrapped up in seven Ziploc bags so as not to infect other people at school with your gross HIV blood.
IIRC, Nancy started showing symptoms of AIDS about a week after the rape.
Hearing that it was required reading in school makes me want to bite something.
That was from the era of lurid afternoon specials about how Harry Highschool got aids from Sally Homecoming Queen in Smallville Kansas. This is all so preposterous now that we know aids simply isn’t out there amongst heterosexuals the way TV imagined and unless this “Colin” was having receptive unprotected anal intercourse in New York Gay Leatherbars or sharing needles in 80s heroin “shooting galleries” in the Bronx this “story” simply doesn’t have a shred of plausibility to it.
This is legit one of my absolute favourite ever posts on the Toast. HOW DID I NOT SEE THIS AS A TEEN? I was so freaked out!
But also, I read that awful Caroline Cooney book about the girl whose mom joined a cult or something and was kidnapped? The Face on the Milk Carton. And I was CONVINCED that upon going to college I would be brainwashed into joining a cult. (I read all her books and consequently terrified myself.)
Caroline Cooney was my favorite . Those books were legit. Did you read the one about the spoiled teen who has a jetliner crash in her backyard? I always wondered if I could be that brave…
FLIGHT #116 IS DOWN YES
Did you read Emergency ROom????
No? Which one was that?!
Man, I’m so glad you remember Flight 116 – that book was really intense
It took place in an Emergency Room (shocking) and it was basically just….a bunch of sad stories about people suffering? It was constant gunshot wounds and overdoses and dying babies and stuff. I was very disillusioned when my cousins started to become nurses and do ER rotations and I learned that there was wayyyy more “My leg hurts” and “I have a rash!!!” in the ER than, like…..spurting blood wounds.
it also opens with someone getting shot while walking to the mall, presented in a way that (in retrospect) is practically a parody of What Happens When White Girls Venture into the Wrong Neighborhood.
I totally owned that & Flight 116 Is Down–I may still own them, in fact, but if so they’re safely at my parents’ house, free from judging eyes.
I remember the motorcycle accident in that book really stuck with me. I LOVED Caroline Cooney and I read every one of her books I could get my hands on. There was a creepy one about psychic twins too, and one about an American girl in England whose brother is blown up by a terrorist bomb, where it turns out later the terrorist was her nice Muslim friend (surprise!!).
YES! I loved that whole series – I feel like she was kidnapped by some lady in a cult from her real family and raised by the cult lady’s parents. So dramatic!
Yes – she was kidnapped by a cult member, who then took her to her own parents and told them that the girl was her daughter, and while she knew that she could never escape the cult, she wanted her daughter to be able to. They didn’t realise this was a total lie, and so changed their name and lived in semi-hiding for the next ten years or so in case the cult took the child back.
Yuuup, so first she finds out that her parents are actually her grandparents and her mom’s in a cult, AND THEN finds out that in fact she was kidnapped and has a completely different family that has been looking for her for years. Those books were crazy.
YES I loved the Milk Carton books. Janie, Janye, Jane. Also I think the cult was the Hare Krishnas.
I read ALL the Caroline Cooney books, including one about girls going to prom that was written in, like, 1987 and it was bizarre and hilarious.
The prom book (books? I’m sure it was a series of some sort) is great. I read lots of Caroline B Cooney books growing up, and the whole prom thing just made me assume that America was a completely alien and bizarre country.
Oh those books about the dances, I loved those! I was so disappointed when I finally went to a school dance and it was really boring and I didn’t suddenly become one of the Cool Kids because of my awesome dress. There were four of them: Saturday Night, Last Dance, New Year’s Eve, Summer Nights — and I still think they were very clever in showing people’s lives through snapshots of single evenings, so the reader had to put together what had happened in between the dances to understand the arcs.
My absolute favourite book of hers though is Among Friends, which is all told through teen diaries and is just love. I almost would not read it again in case it turned out to be awful, that book was so important to me when I was a teenager.
I remember her name and the cover of the one that was my favourite but I am buggered if I can remember either its title or the plot! I know there was a blonde girl in rolled-up blue jeans on the cover with her jacket slung rakishly over her shoulder. Some of it may have taken place in France, but that’s all I’ve got.
I think the one I remember one most is about the girl whose brother was killed by a terrorist. WTF were these books. http://www.amazon.com/The-Terrorist-Caroline-B-Co…
There are some mocking recaps of Caroline B. Cooney books here, including The Terrorist: http://dibblyfresh1.blogspot.co.uk/p/archives-boo… Thank you, internet.
I’m going to be reading these all night now!
The only thing I remember about that book was that the girl fantasized about naming her future children Denim and Lace.
I think about that detail all the time!
I remember loving The Face on the Milk Carton and reading the others, but not much about any of them anymore. Was there not a Caroline Cooney book about reckless driving and the cover had a dark road with one of the “curves ahead” signs right in the middle?
Just y’alls reminder that there was a Face on the Milk Carton made for TV movie with KELLI MARTIN, post-Life Goes on and pre-ER!!! (Young me really liked Kelli.)
Driver’s Ed? I’m not sure whether it’s great or awful.
Driver’s Ed! Yes!
Driver’s Ed was about stealing road signs! The characters stole a stop sign and then someone was killed in an accident at that intersection.
Was that the one where some dirtbag teens stole a stop sign and then SOMEBODY DIED because of it?
YES!!!
Reading shit like this is why I was the most pathologically straight laced teenager in the history of teenagers. Until I turned 16 and moved out with my boyfriend, natch.
In a similar vein to these books I was obsessed with Robert Hawks’ “This Stranger, My Father” where a girl thinks her life is normal but her father gets arrested for having been a spy decades earlier and they go on the run. I loved it and thought that that was a 100% legit thing that could/would happen. As a 13 year old I was prepared should that sort thing happen to me.
I am almost sad I never read this book, but now I feel like I have everything I need from it.
“Marijuana is a gateway drug, not the last drug you try after you’ve done everything else.”
This is killing me, I just picture an older sister sooooo exasperated at her younger sister who just can’t seem to do *anything* right.
GOD MEGAN YOU DONT EVEN KNOW HOW TO DO DRUGS RIGHT GET OUT OF MY ROOOOOM!
Yep, brings me back to my high school days, which were all shooting speed and worshipping Satan and having abortions. Or something. Ah yes, the universal high school experience that all of us Miss Fink Mouths can relate to. As I recall, my high school quote was “Another day, another blow job.” Who wants to sniff glue and sell LSD to nine-year-olds later, as we teens are wont to do?
*shooting the Speed
Damnit, I’ve inadvertently revealed that I never shot the Speed at all by using the incorrect terminology! Embarrassing, Alex, reeeeal embarrassing.
Am I the only one who forgot to check the author when I picked up the book and was then very disappointed to discover that it was not part of Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice series?
I did not have this experience; however, I do love that series.I just read two of the last ones; I now have only two to go and am feeling bereft.
Anastasia Krupnik series by Lois Lowry will help if you have not read them already.
Ooh! I loved Anastasia Krupnik…off to go find the Alice series!
Sadly, I have. I love those too, though.
Actually…no. And now I’ve just had a flashback to the YA section in the basement of the Borders by my mom’s office where I was hiding so I wouldn’t get caught reading-without-paying and also very, very confused about exactly what i was reading.
Oh my gosh you know I didn’t realize this book was a lie until I was already graduated from college? Like I guess I thought it was just dated and that it was totally normal for teens in the 60s and 70s to talk like that and eat gelatin salad and sample the speed in between their abortions and blow jobs. Like it was a cultural thing I missed out on or something.
Me too!! Also it was in America — I mean they can drive cars to school there so maybe they were mainlining speed and selling acid to kids? American stuff.
I never read this as a kid (in the 90s), but I’m quite sure I would have believed that that’s how everyone (teens included) talked back then!
Yes, just like that, I am not sure when I figured it out, but I read it in the 80s and well, the past was weird! In Judy Blume books people ate lamb chops which as far as I could tell were food that no longer existed, so maybe this was just what people were like back then!
On the subject of ridiculous young adult books, does anyone remember one about a rich teen who was given a Porsche, and something something she had to go work in an old folks’ home and skip summer at the country club? This has been bugging me for years and I have no Google-fu 🙁
Go ask the brilliant ladies at Smart Bitches Trashy Books, their Help A Bitch Out columns are amazing.
Wait, are you dissing Deborah Tannen?! 🙂
(I really like “You’re Wearing That: Mothers and Daughters in Conversation.” That woman preaches TRUTH, yo.)
but how many blowjobs can she give at once with that super quintuple fink mouth
like this is a marketable skill, is it not
Lady, I smoked with teenage dirtbags. Teenage dirtbags were friends of mine. You are no teenage dirtbag.
Is “benny” her word for Benzos? Because if benzos are making you LESS tired, I think you might be taking them wrong.
On the mayo front, I seem to recall seeing things in Seventeen for conditioning your hair with eggs or mayo. So I believe it.
Benzedrine, I believe.
Benzedrine, an amphetamine.
Being more or less on the bottom of the social spectrum in middle and high school, I read this book and just figured that the other kids were out having a whole heck of a lot more fun than I was.
By eating SIX WHOLE FRENCH FRIES, you mean?
I think I knew this was a lie (by the last time I reread it, anyway), but loved it anyway? I was voracious for stories where horrible things happened to teenagers. Also, I think I read it for the first time in 4th grade or so, so I didn’t have a lot of reality to compare it to.
I…I think I would have called my ex-boyfriend Ridiculous Roger in my journal in high school. I was completely prone to giving the boys I liked nicknames of various kinds, and usually they were far sillier than Ridiculous Roger. But even now I kind of like it. It has a ring, you know?
To their credit, none of my schools ever assigned this book, but I read it in a night school class (where I was making up for Ds in Language Arts! Amazing that I never ended up on The Speed.) I recall being vaguely chilled by it, and never much questioning that it might not be a real diary, but it also didn’t make much of an impression on me in general. I do remember the anti-drug films we watched in youth group at church though. I borrowed an anecdote from one for a Red Ribbon Week essay once when I couldn’t think of anything inspirational or original to say about why we shouldn’t do drugs. I distinctly recall stealing the quote “It was just a little angel dust!” without really knowing what angel dust was. That essay…well, it did not win any awards.
Paul F. Tompkins does a bit about this (“Freak Wharf”) that I love, love, love. And I was way too much of a wimp to read this when it was making the rounds in middle school. Like as scared of this book as I was of being made to watch a Friday the 13th movie. Who thought I would ever be nostalgic to be terrified of a book?
“B-b-b-but these people were normal! Meaning white, like you or me!”
THE FREAK WHARF!
Freak Wharf!
Can this be the part where I tell you that I’m [kind of distantly related] to PFT, and I am pretty sure I read the exact same book because it was hidden in my grandmother’s storage room? And that I didn’t realize how fake it was until I heard his Freak Wharf bit on it?
“I guess I’ll just have to have an abortion or something.”
Fly into the sun, Alice. Fly into the sun.
“Another day, another blow job. The fuzz has clamped down till the town is mother dry.”
Not to accidentally compliment the writing or anything, but this reads like Naked Lunch.
So what *is* gelatin salad?
Fruit suspended in jello. Associated with matronly midwestern ladies and church socials. Can be simple, or, when taken to extremes, merge into Jello Art. First became popular in the 1920s when packaged flavored gelatin became available and affordable. Since cooks no longer had to boil down their own calves-foot jelly, this was viewed as a godsend. Adorable little fruit and jello salads became The Thing for Ladies Who Lunch. Also, candlestick salad. (Google it.)
In my house, if it was made with grated carrots and/or cabbage in a base of lime Jello, it was called a jelly/Jello salad, and it was eaten with the main course, but only by adults. My brother and I refused to touch it. We were foodie savants, really 😉
If it was any other flavour, and there was fruit in it, we just called it “Jello.” It was understood and accepted that my mom couldn’t bear to serve us a dessert that didn’t contain fruit. And, yes, my brother and I ate that happily.
Maybe this distinction is a Canadian thing? Or maybe my family’s just weird.
We just called that ‘fruit in jelly’!
Now I want jelly.
Let me expand your mind. http://www.midcenturymenu.com/category/hello-jell…
AAAAAAAAHHHH! My eyes, they are bleeeeding! They all look terrifying.
I’ve never read this book before, so I’m not sure what’s funnier about this article–Mallory’s commentary or the actual text from the book.
I only know that now I am a priestess of Satan.
Obsessed with this book. I love the part where she runs away to San Francisco and opens up a bead(?) shop with her hippie friend. It actually didn’t sound like a half bad lifestyle. If I remember correctly, she’s also ultimately brought back to her parents because of a priest she befriends. Definitely didn’t realize what a big religious component this book had.
Pants Suit and the Milk Things. Watch for our forthcoming album.
Everything about this post is perfect except “bulimia” didn’t come into common parlance until the late 70s/ early eighties. Eating disorders existed before then, of course, but not as “eating disorders”. I will refrain from saying when exactly I found out “Go Ask Alice” was fake, but I will say it was from “The Toast”.
Yeeeeah, I hate to be put in the position of defending even a single thing about the abomination that is Go Ask Alice, but I definitely recall running into more than one middle-school girl who spontaneously invented the notion of self-inflicted purging in the absence of any cultural concept of bulimia.
This must be generational; even in the early 80s, not everyone knew what bulimia was, but I knew several different girls at several different schools who thought this was a fuckin’ genius move that no one had ever considered before.
It makes me very happy to know that parents, teachers, and students all know about eating disorders now; at the time, it was hard to get any handle on how to even talk about this as a problem.
I’m pretty sure I remember Gilda Radner talking about the 70s and the fantastic “throw-up diet” that she and Laraine Newman “invented.” For sure I remember girls throwing up to lose weight in high school (’73 to ’77) but never heard of bulimia until much later. Or anorexia, for that matter.
I dimly recall an after-school special or health film about eating disorders in which the girls take up bulimia because of reading about ancient Romans — corrupted by history class!
The first clue that this is fiction: NO ONE ever calls it “gelatin salad”
It’s so sad when you grow up and realize that very few people ever try to push their drugs on you because they would much rather keep them for themselves!
Right? And the cheap pot you bought isn’t secretly “laced,” because the drug dealer is going to want you to pay extra for that benefit.
Seriously, anyone can feel free to try and get me addicted to pot tonight!
Seriously, I thought I would be offered way more free drugs by total strangers.
I was offered a regular cigarette *once* in my entire high school career, by a girl who was not a delinquent (she graduated as school Valedictorian the following year) and who, when I said “no thanks,” did not push the issue. Mind blown.
Oh this post is so good and so timely for me as I recently re-read this book. By recently I mean I downloaded it on my kindle two weeks ago after Amazon recommended it to me based on my purchase of “And I Don’t Want to Live This Life”. ( I’m currently into revisiting the books of my youth, I guess. ) When I read it in middle school it scared the crap out of me – NEVER occurred to me that it was not someone’s actual diary and I was terrified of anyone in my school who was a known or rumored user of anything.
semi-related: I wrote a scholarship essay about jello salad and won it, so I will always have a place in my heart for gelatin salad. <3
I won’t lie — I would kind of like to read this essay.
Double-down on that: I won’t lie, I think you could prob’ly pitch it as a story here. I would read it like this [insert emoticon of me leaning toward laptop with my chin on both fists, rapt].
Aww! This was when I was 17 so it’s not very Toast worthy! It was a college essay with the prompt, “Is America more like a melting pot or a salad bowl?” I said neither, it’s like Jello salad and threw in some good folksy Midwestern-ness.
MANDATORY.
“The person in this diary was a regular person. MEANING WHITE, LIKE YOU AND ME!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk_-u0wejk8
“A WHITE PERSON on drugs? B-b-b-b-b-but I’M WHITE!”
Euphegenia Doubletriplefinkmouth, dear. I specialize in the education and entertainment of children. I’m a hip old granny who can hip-hop, bebop, dance til ya drop and yo yo, take a wicked toke of smack.
I have washed my hair in mayonaise before BUT IT WAS TO GET RID OF LICE. (True story.) It was gross.
are you saying that it did not turn anyone on
I definitely remember mayonnaise deep-conditioning being one of the common home beauty treatments recommended in magazines, along with beer shampoo or egg-yolk conditioner.
I used to do the mayo deep conditioner years ago. I’d slather it on before bed, put a plastic bag over it and actually sleep that way. I have no idea how it didn’t come off in the middle of the night and yeah, it smelled gross.
When I was in high school I was involved in theater, and my mom kept asking “subtle” questions about huffing.
I don’t think the term “straight edge” existed yet, and if it did it hadn’t reached my shitty little midwestern small town, but my friends and I were pretty smugly straight edge. It did not make SENSE that she’d keep asking about drug use until I realized that when she’d been in high school she’d also been in theater… and a lot of her friends (and her? IDK) just got high constantly huffing.
Most of my friends who are from similar small towns who were NOT corked up goody two shoes spent most of their high school time drunk and stoned… but on normal stuff, not like LSD and injectable anything. Who does IV drugs before doing pot? Seriously?
Paul F Tompkins’s Go Ask Alice bit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk_-u0wejk8
It seems like 21st Century teens are just as dumb, judging from the goodreads reviews.
She kept thinking in her head that he wasn’t a rapist, But the truth is he was a rapist for raping her… She find a friends called Courage and Red Alert. They are both animals one is a cat while the other is a dog. Everything is fine until one day Red Alert dies in his sleep. R.I.P Red Alert. 3 weeks later Nancy died in her sleep. There will never be another Nancy but Nancy herself.
What no one seems to have taken in to consideration is that this book was written 40 years ago–we can not use our ideas of what this girl would have said/done based on today’s teens. The world of teenagers was very different back then. My mother absolutely took a gelitin mold to her friends party today there are many 50-60 year old men that have the name Roger or Bill– there were not a lot of Justin’s and Josh’s back then.
Totally agree
Mallory Ortberg, I love you. When you’re not making me literally guffaw with your own brilliant and crazy stuff, you are making me guffaw by sharing crazy gems written by others.
Never, ever read it, but I’m pretty sure “Another day, another blowjob” is the best line ever written in any book ever.
the end is just way too convenient anyway? Like the very last entry was thanking the diary and wrapping it all up and saying goodbye and there’s no way it would be that tidy
This makes me feel way better about my childhood self, because I was the most straight-edge, easily frightened child you could imagine, but I never for a second thought this book was true. I think the tip-off was that she starts keeping a diary and almost immediately starts doing drugs, and then she conveniently dies once the diary is the length of a young-adult novel.
Supports the theory that the diary did it.
That diary was a jerk. It threw its writer under the bus for a good story. Twice.
“School kids are one thing and even the junior high, but today I sold ten stamps of LSD to a little kid at the grade school who was not even nine years old, I’m sure. I know that he in turn must be pushing and these kids are just too young! The thought of nine and ten year olds getting wasted is so repulsive that I’m not going over there any more! I know if they want it they’ll get it somewhere but they won’t get it from me!”
If you’re so shocked by the idea of kids that age doing drugs, why did you even think the grade school would be a good place to try selling them? Logic fail.
She’s on drugs? I don’t think she’s supposed to be logical….and she’s a teenager.
when I read this for the first time in middle school the #1 most horrifying thing about it to me was the part where she talks about washing her hair with mayo. I was like, pot, LSD, sex, whatever.. you did WHAT to your hair, that is DISGUSTING
The mayonnaise for shampoo? Head lice. That’s all.
Yes, just like that, I am not sure when I figured it out, but I read it in the 80s and well, the past was weird! In Judy Blume books people ate lamb chops which as far as I could tell were food that no longer existed, so maybe this was just what people were like back then!
Oh those books about the dances, I loved those! I was so disappointed when I finally went to a school dance and it was really boring and I didn't suddenly become one of the Cool Kids because of my awesome dress. There were four of them: Saturday Night, Last Dance, New Year's Eve, Summer Nights — and I still think they were very clever in showing people's lives through snapshots of single evenings, so the reader had to put together what had happened in between the dances to understand the arcs.
My absolute favourite book of hers though is Among Friends, which is all told through teen diaries and is just love. I almost would not read it again in case it turned out to be awful, that book was so important to me when I was a teenager.
“Another day, another blowjob” should have been the title – ! Also the real title sucks.
Man, I read this book but the only part I remember at all is the selling acid to the nine year old kid! Ten hits! WTF! I don’t remember if I thought it was real or not – probably I did. I was very intrigued at the idea of an anonymous author. Then again someone really did give acid to a friend of mine in seventh grade (not quite the same, but does challenge the order of things).
Supports the theory that the diary did it.
That diary was a jerk. It threw its writer under the bus for a good story. Twice.
From wikipedia:
“An unnamed 15-year old begins keeping a diary. With a sensitive, observant style, she records her thoughts and concerns about issues such as crushes, weight loss, sexuality, social acceptance, and difficulty relating to her parents”
With a SENSITIVE, OBSERVANT STYLE (emphasis added)
I think we know who wrote this summary.
“…I’m supposed to bring a gelatin salad.”
“No.”
Actually, “Yes”, especially if the author is indeed Mormon. Jello salad is a staple of Mormon potluck cuisine!
“Another day, another blowjob”; introducing (modestly) the isomorphism between a line-up of cocks and the flow of time. -_-
A Mormon writing a self-serving book, making a mint out of it, and claiming that they were only the editor someone else’ work and published it out of the goodness of their heart to help save people. Where have I heard that story before? #snark
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Ask_Alice
I’m just surprised she didn’t take cocaine, seeing as it was apopular drug in the 1970’s and probably late 1960’s. I’ve read this book at 12 and wasn’t frightened by it at all.
The Great Cocaine Flood ran from 1977 to 1994. In the 60s, pharmaceuticals were far more popular.
I know this is old but I just found out Go Ask Alice was fake. I read it in high school. No, it didn’t scare me. I thought it sounded unlikely but still the thought never occurred to me that it was pretty much all made up. So I read it again. Yeah, a couple of girls in their teens are going to open a business. Notice no one ever used alcohol in that? Or that she was hopelessly addicted to stuff that isn’t addictive, like marijuana and LSD, but she used speed and heroine without a problem. And the list goes on. I feel so used.
I had a college roommate who had this book and was in awe of it. I borrowed and read in and it just seemed like something an adult “square” wrote about how they imagined kids to be. Even as a naive 19 year old I suspected this was the work of prudish anti drug folks of an earlier generation from the girl it pretends to be. Now that I found out it was written by an old bluehair Mormon who specialized in a whole line of fake “diaries” of dead kids who strayed from the straight and narrow I am thrilled to know I was correct in my suspicions and my “Bull$h!t Detector” is working properly. I hear she even wrote a more preposterous one where a handful of real diary entries by a suicide victim was “spiced up” with 90% fake material full of fictional “Satanic Cult” crap right out of a 80s Geraldo special.
I just really need to say about the “Teenagers don’t independently invent the concept of eating disorders in their journals. She would just call it bulimia.”
that is not true. I have an ED and have written in my journal so many times about shoving my fingers down my throat. No, you don’t ‘just call it bulimia’ and many other girls have done the same. Without even knowing what an eating disorder is girls write/say things like that. Many of my friends have and so did Marya Hornbacher in her book Wasted: A memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia.
Strike One: What 15-year-old knows and cares what Dean of Political Science means? Realistic version: “Dad got a job at a college somewhere I won’t know anyone, help, maybe I can walk back here somehow.” Strike Two: “nor nary a french fried potato…” That’s when I knew it was you, Montgomery Burns. No one else has ever talked that way. Strike Three: “I wish I knew more about my own religion so I could tell Beth.” Uh-huh. I sure wish I could bring up a divide between me and my new, only friend at dinner so we could sit there not knowing how to talk about the abstractions yet, just knowing there’s something we don’t have in common. Cause I’m 15.
I give it another chance. Strike Four: “Pot, only once, I promise!” After that it’s back to downers and shooting meth and lots and lots of acid, because I would never be a stoner, you know me better than that. Strike Five: “special, and maybe even painful, but it turned out to be just part of the brilliant, freaky, way-out, forever pattern” Written by someone who is either still a virgin, or lost it at the age of 25 or later, and was on more than one drug at the time, definitely not acid. And definitely, definitely not under comparable circumstances to this kid’s. Taken advantage of by someone other than her BF, while incapacitated? That’s the kind of event kids take more drugs to wipe out of their minds so they can sleep again in life ever, not the kind of thing that gets them deeper into dope because of the way-out patterns. Strike Six: “My hair is the greatest.” Not on The Speed, it ain’t. OK< one more chance. Maybe a kid who is part extraterrestrial wrote it. On with it then: Strike Seven: “today I sold ten stamps of LSD to a little kid at the grade school who was not even nine years old, I’m sure. I know that he in turn must be pushing” Oh. So, in a town where eight-and-a-half-year-olds are pushing, there is no one who knows about drugs to talk to. No one else has ever found this apparent sewer of drug dealing and drink-dosing stressful or sought help getting clean. Just you. Sure thing, “kid”. Strike Eight: “treating us sadistically and brutally. That had been their planned strategy all along” Sadistically? If they were going for that they would have given you acid and speed, instead of anesthetizing you. Strategy? For what ultimate devious plan? Strike Nine: “It is a difficult, lost, vacillating time” Excuse me, but I had one of the biggest vocabularies in my metro area and I didn’t know what vacillating meant in high school. Well, one more chance. Strike Ten: “priestess of Satan trying to maintain after a freak-out to test how free everybody was and to take our vows” What does this even mean? Does this child now have actual followers, and if so, how did that happen? Strike Eleven: “The fuzz has clamped down till the town is mother dry…[.] Surely they wouldn’t pick on me so unmercifully” Why does she have two totally different voices depending on what town she is in? How is this the same person talking? And Strike Twelve: “sniffing glue and thought it sounded exciting so they bought a couple of tubes” Who buys the first huff? The first time with solvents is almost always an accident, or someone sharing when there is nothing else to do. And if they thought it sounded “exciting” I think I found this town’s problem. Have they ever… watched paint dry? I can get house paint. And after that if we dare, my aunt has a lawn. Want to watch grass grow? Glue isn’t exciting, it’s a last-ditch attempt to cope with extreme boredom, and you start by sniffing your fingers while making a model dinosaur or something. This was definitely written by someone who was never young in her life.
It’s so funny because so many of the things you pointed out as proof it was fake, many of those things I totally did, said, experienced as a young, middle class drug user. I obviously know it was fake but maybe the author wasn’t that far off lol