Go Ask Alice

Literary fiction

First published: 1972
Print length: 185 pagesAladdin Paperbacks, 1998

Description

Go Ask Alice is presented as the fictional diary of a fifteen-year-old girl whose concerns include romance, body image, sexuality, acceptance, and family relationships. After her family relocates, she struggles at a new school before making a close friend. At a party, she unknowingly takes LSD and is drawn into further drug use and risky relationships. Her friendship with Chris develops alongside continued drug use and involvement with college-age dealers. After the girls report those dealers and flee to San Francisco, repeated attempts to stop using drugs fail, contributing to legal trouble, conflict with her parents, and eventual flight from home.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Direct · Spare

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Dark · Intimate · Melancholic · Unsettling

Structure

Episodic · Linear

Focus

Character · Relationships · Voice

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 2 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AddictionBelongingComing of ageFamilyIdentityIsolation

About Beatrice Sparks

Beatrice Sparks was an American writer whose career centered on books presented as the edited diaries of adolescents in crisis. Works including Go Ask Alice, It Happened to Nancy, Jay’s Journal, and Annie’s Baby use intimate first-person records and editorial framing to turn drug use, sexual violence, AIDS, occult fears, and teenage pregnancy into cautionary narratives. The prose is typically direct and conversational, with fragmentary entries creating immediacy and the impression of unfiltered testimony. That claim to authenticity became the defining controversy of Sparks’s body of work. Although she often positioned herself as the discoverer or editor of genuine documents, U.S. Copyright Office records identify her as the sole author of all but two of the books. Later researchers argued that most were fabricated; Jay’s Journal substantially altered and expanded a real teenager’s diary. Sparks’s work is notable for its sustained focus on adolescent vulnerability and social anxiety, and for the way its cautionary force depended on a documentary status that was repeatedly challenged.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Aladdin Paperbacks
Language: English
ISBN: 9780689817854

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