When he forces her to push LSD to grade schoolers, she drops out and runs away to San Francisco. The drugs are great (“like riding shooting stars through the Milky Way, only a million, trillion times better”), but life is complicated: her Gramps has a heart attack, her Gran falls apart, she has sex (sublunary, apparently, compared with drugs, merely “like lightning and rainbows and springtime”) and worries that she’s pregnant, then realizes that her dealer is sleeping not only with her but also with his roommate (“I am out peddling drugs for a low class queer,” she exclaims). I only know that last night I had the most incredible experience of my life.” It turns out that the things she has “heard about LSD were obviously written by uninformed, ignorant people like my parents who obviously don’t know what they’re talking about.”Īfter acid, the narrator tries marijuana and shoots speed, then starts popping dexies and bennies when she gets tired. “Dear Diary,” she writes on the morning after, “I don’t know whether I should be ashamed or elated. But then she goes to an autograph party, where, instead of passing around yearbooks, the partygoers pass around Cokes, some of which are spiked with acid. She washes her hair with mayonnaise she makes gelatine salad. The narrator gets mad at her parents for making her move, at her siblings for adjusting more quickly than she does, at her teachers for being boring, and at herself for being bored. The narrator frets over diets and dates wishes she could “melt into the blaaaa-ness of the universe” when a boy stands her up and describes high school as “the loneliest, coldest place in the world.” She’s from a middle-class, overtly Christian, ostensibly good family, with two younger siblings, a stay-at-home mother, and an academic father whose work takes the family to another state.Īlmost a year passes before anything really happens.
She is not named Alice the book’s title, chosen by a savvy publishing employee, comes indirectly from a reference in the diary to “Alice in Wonderland” and more directly from the lyrics of the Jefferson Airplane song “White Rabbit.” Early entries dutifully record the nothing-everythings of teen-age life. The diary, according to its unnamed editors, was “a highly personal and specific chronicle” that they thought might “provide insights into the increasingly complicated world in which we live.” When “Go Ask Alice” was published, in 1971, the author listed on the cover was “Anonymous.” The first page featured a preface of sorts, an authenticating framework as elaborate as those written by Mary Shelley and Joseph Conrad, explaining that what followed was “based on the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old,” though names and dates had been changed. “Go Ask Alice,” the supposedly real diary of a teen-age drug addict, was really the work of a straitlaced stay-at-home mom. Although her book on womanhood was a flop, she went on to sell millions of copies of another book, one that even today does not acknowledge her authorship, going into printing after printing without so much as a pseudonym for its author. But, wherever she studied and whatever her qualifications, Sparks was destined to become best known for being unknown. Such an understanding seems to have been elusive for Sparks, who was then calling herself a lecturer, although she would soon enough identify as a therapist and occasionally as a counsellor or a social worker or even an adolescent psychologist, substituting the University of Utah or the University of California, Los Angeles, for her alma mater, or declining to say where she had trained. “Happiness comes from within,” Sparks promised, “and it begins with an understanding of who and what you really are!” A Mormon housewife, Sparks was the author of a book called “Key to Happiness,” which offered advice on grooming, comportment, voice, and self-discipline for high-school and college-aged girls her seminar dispensed that same advice on Wednesdays on the campus of Brigham Young University, a school from which she’d later claim to have earned a doctorate, sometimes in psychiatry, other times in psychology or human behavior. If you had twenty dollars and a few hours to spare during the fall of 1970, you could learn about “The Art of Womanhood” from Mrs.
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