January 24th
After you've had it, there isn't even life without drugs...
It started when she was served a soft drink laced with LSD in a dangerous party game. Within months, she was hooked, trapped in a downward spiral that took her from her comfortable home and loving family to the mean streets of an unforgiving city. It was a journey that would rob her of her innocence, her youth-and ultimately her life.
Read her diary,
Enter her world.
You will never forget her.
Go Ask Alice was published in 1971, and is supposedly based on the actual diary of a fifteen year old drug user. I highly doubt that's true. I didn't even make it 1/3 of the way into the novel before I stopped to go look it up on wikipedia. The wording, descriptions, and attitude just did not ring true to things a fifteen year old would say.
It's a scary story though, full of danger, pain, regret, and mistakes. If anyone ever actually went through the things Anonymous was said to have went through, my heart would go out to them. I don't believe this book to be a true story though, especially since the editor (who holds the copyright) listed it as a work of fiction on the copyright page.
The same editor also edited (more than likely wrote) Jay's Journal (smart boy becomes a Satanist), Treacherous Love: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager (girl taken advantage of by a teacher), Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets, Annie's Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, a Pregnant Teenager and It Happened to Nancy: By an Anonymous Teenager (she's dying of AIDS).
Forgetting about the probability that Go Ask Alice was written by an adult, I can see why parents freaked out. There were drugs (using and selling...even to nine year olds), rape, prostitution, running away, harassment, and more. Anonymous was yet again slipped drugs and ended up clawing most of her face and fingers off, and getting committed. Probably not material most conservative parents want their high schoolers seeing.
One of the biggest reasons I believe this to be fiction is this: Here's the Epilogue from the last page - "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." Anonymous had finally been released from the mental hospital. She was happy and healthy, getting along with her parents and even had a boy she hoped to marry. She chose not to keep another diary so that she would talk to others about her problems. With the way that she was so unflinchingly honest in her diary throughout the book, why would she stop it for no reason? She would have continued to write her troubles in the diary. It was a lifeline for her.
Her stopping diary entries is not true to the way Anonymous had been the entire book. Also, doesn't the epilogue, especially the last two sentences, sound like something from an after school special on how drugs are bad? After all, if Anonymous had gotten out of the drug lifestyle, changed her life, and lived happily ever after...after all she'd been through...why would teens avoid drugs? They'd know they could party hard now, and fix it later. Anonymous dying just served to further the editor's agenda.
In my opinion, this book is a sensationally false work of fiction parading itself as true. I guess it's about as true as the anonymous diaries of the satan-worshipping kid, AIDS girl, teacher's pet, pregnant girl, and homeless kid. A disappointment.
Source 1, Source 2.
1 comments:
You reaction to this book was exactly like my reaction. Halfway through the book I Googled it, which is something I never do because I couldn't believe that a 15 year old would talk that way. Just didn't make sense.
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