Go Ask Alice is a controversial 1971 work credited to Beatrice Sparks who claimed that the book was the true diary of one of her troubled, drug-addicted female patients. In the first pages of the book the protagonist, who is never named, is presented as a typical teenager, concerned with her appearance, school, and boys. Soon, though, the girl is introduced to LSD at a party and her journey into the drug world begins. Both sober and straight episodes for the girl follow and the reader is taken along for the wild ride that her life becomes. The story culminates in the girl getting off the drug roller coaster only to overdose and die three weeks after writing her final diary entry.
Go Ask Alice was one of my favorite books as both a preteen and as a teenager and continues to be one of my favorite stories to this day. Although I realize that the book was probably not the diary of one of Beatrice Sparks’ patients but the work of Beatrice Sparks, herself, Go Ask Alice is still a story that sucks you in and makes you hold your breath until it is done. The logic of two sixteen year old girls opening their own store or the rationality of the main character holding on to scraps of paper and keeping her diary intact during her cross country trials seem irrelevant while you read it and become caught up in the train wreck that is the protagonist’s life.
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