Go Ask Alice | Through the Shattered Lens

“Another day, another blow job,” writes the anonymous author of Go Ask Alice.

It’s only been a few months since she first dropped acid and smoked weed for the first time and the narrator has already run away from home and turned to prostitution to support her raging drug habit. First published in 1971 and continuously in print since then, Go Ask Alice is presented as being the narrator’s journal, found amongst her belongings after she died of a drug overdose. (Despite popular belief, the narrator is not named Alice. Her name is never actually mentioned in the journal.) That one line — “Another day, another blow job” — pretty much sums up Go Ask Alice. It’s very dramatic. Depending on who is reading it, it’s very shocking. And it’s so perfectly quotable that it’s hard to believe that someone just scrawled it down in a journal.

Of course, some of that’s because Go Ask Alice isn’t actually a diary. Though it’s never been officially confirmed, most researchers believe that it was actually written by Beatrice Sparks, a therapist who originally presented herself as being the diary’s editor. Sparks later went on to “edit” several other anonymous diaries, all written by teenagers who had gotten involved with things like Satanism, eating disorders, and gang violence.

Even if I hadn’t read (on, I’ll admit it, Wikipedia) that Go Ask Alice was not actually written by a 15 year-old girl, it would be obvious just from some of what it is written in the diary. I reread it a few weeks ago and the thing that immediately jumped out at me was that the narrator apparently didn’t write much about anything that didn’t have to do with drugs. There’s none of the banal stuff that you would typically expect to find in someone’s personal journal. The narrator doesn’t mention television or movies or music or books. She barely even talks about the boy she likes, other than to mention that he exists and she’s not sure if he likes her back. Instead, she pretty much goes straight from drinking a coke that’s been dosed with acid to running away to Berkeley. She spend several hundred words meticulously detailing an acid trip but she tells us very little about anyone that she goes to school with. (And I have to say that, for someone who has just taken acid for the first time, she’s remarkably coherent and detailed when it comes to writing about her trip.) She also includes a lot of statistics about how how many people her age are estimated to have experimented with drugs, which doesn’t doesn’t seem like the usual behavior of a 15 year-old addict. It’s not something that I would have done at 15 and, trust me, I was a very smart 15 year-old. (It’s vaguely like something you would expect to hear in an old sitcom. “Can you believe it? That child’s 15 years old and already hooked on speed.” “Oh, honey, it’s not that unusual. I was reading an article that said 40% of children under the age of 16 have tried some sort of narcotic substance.”)

Another thing that I found to be interesting about Go Ask Alice is how generous everyone was with their drugs. Even after the narrator goes through rehab, her classmates still walk up to her and casually drop drugs in front of her. Maybe it’s a generational thing but my experience in high school was the exact opposite. At my high school, the few people who regularly had drugs tended to be pretty stingy with them. They certainly weren’t going to waste any just to play a joke on someone. (Indeed, I’ve never been able to relate to people who claim that people pressured them into trying drugs because, at my high school, everyone was too greedy to share. “You want a hit off this joint? This is mine, get your own!”) But I guess that maybe in 1971, drugs were cheaper and people just had a more generous spirit.

Anyway, Go Ask Alice is a quick read and it fulfills the number one rule of successful propaganda: it takes it story to the worst possible conclusion, even though a less dramatic conclusion would have been more realistic and perhaps more effective. From the minute you start reading the diary, you know that the diarist is going to end up dead of a drug overdose because that’s the type of story that Go Ask Alice is. Over the course of a year, our narrator goes from being sweet and innocent to being dead because stories like this don’t work unless the narrator dies at the end. Simply having the narrator write, “I did a lot of drugs and I wish I hadn’t but now I’m going try to rebuild my life,” just does’t carry the same punch as, “A week later, the writer of this diary was found dead of an overdose.” Go Ask Alice understands the importance of embracing the melodrama and it does so fully. As a result, it’s not as convincing as a realistic look at drug abuse would have been but it’s considerably more entertaining.

Go Ask Alice was a huge success when it was first published. They even turned it into a movie, which can currently be viewed on YouTube and Prime. Somewhat inevitably, William Shatner’s in it. The movie is actually better than the book but you should read the book as well, if just to see what frightened your grandparents back in the day.

Earlier today, I took a look at The People Next Door, a film about a family torn apart by the discovery that their teenage daughter is taking drugs. For all of that film’s melodrama and over-the-top moments, it still worked. It may have felt like it was taking place on a plane of heightened reality but it still felt real nonetheless. Among the many films in the drugs-in-the-suburbs genre, that general feeling of reality made The People Next Door unique. Far more typical of the genre is the 1973 made-for-TV movie, Go Ask Alice.

Go Ask Alice is based on a YA book that’s been in print for 43 years now. (I can still remember spending an afternoon reading it in a Barnes and Noble when I was 14 years old.) The book claims to be the diary of a teenage girl who ended up getting addicted to drugs and sex. She runs away from home for a bit and, even when she does manage to stop using drugs, her friends still insist on secretly slipping her acid. She goes crazy and ends up spending some time in a mental asylum. Eventually, she’s released and moves to a new town with her family. She ends the diary saying that she’s looking forward to the future and then, in the afterward, we’re told that she died three weeks later of an overdose and this diary has been published so that we can all learn from her story.

Now, oddly enough, when Go Ask Alice was originally published, it was apparently sold as being an authentic diary of an anonymous teenage girl who had been a patient of the book’s “editor”, Dr. Beatrice Sparks. However, if you actually read the book, it’s pretty obvious that, while Dr. Sparks may have indeed used some of her patients’ real-life experiences, Go Ask Alice is in no way authentic. Instead, it’s a classic example of the type of cautionary tale in which a character makes one mistake (in this case, the girl drinks a soda that’s been spiked with LSD) and, immediately afterwards, everything bad thing that possibly could happen does happen. The purpose of the book is to shock and titillate, to make us wonder how this girl can go from being the sweet optimist who bought a diary because she feels that she finally has something to say to being so jaded that she casually says stuff like, “Another day, another blowjob.” And, of course, the answer is that she didn’t because the whole thing is totally made up.

But that still didn’t stop anyone from making a movie out of the book and informing us, at the start of the movie, that the story we are about to watch is true and only the names and certain details have been changed to protect everyone’s privacy. Our diarist (who is now definitely named Alice) is played by a young actress named Jamie Smith-Jackson, who is sympathetic and pretty. Alice’s mother (Ruth Roman) is too repressed and uptight to provide any guidance to her rapidly maturing daughter. Meanwhile, Alice’s father is played by William Shatner, so we know he’s not going to be able to do any good either.

Much as in the original book, Alice goes to one party, drinks on LSD-spiked soda, and her life is never the same. Soon, she’s spending all of her time doing drugs and, as she informs us, having a “monthly pregnancy scare.” She’s no longer hanging out with her smart, nerdy friends. Instead, she spends all of her time with a bunch of petty criminals who recruit Alice to help deliver drugs to the students at the junior high. (“I push at the elementary school!” one junior high kid snarls). Eventually, Alice runs away from home and lives on the streets. Fortunately, she runs into a liberal Catholic priest (played by Andy Griffith and yes, you read that right) and starts trying to get her life straight…

Go Ask Alice is no The People Next Door but it’s no Reefer Madness either. What it gets wrong about teenage drug use, it gets right about just how confusing and alienating it can be to be 15 years old. At the same time, I’d be lying if I said that this film did not have some camp appeal. How can it not when it features not only Andy Griffith talking tough but also William Shatner with a bushy mustache?

And guess what?

You can watch it below!