Go Ask Alice - thoughts?

[shaylux]

Hi!
I'm a Writing student doing a project on Go Ask Alice. I'm really interested in what people who have read the book think about it. I would love any opinions on the content, and if the author deciding to publish it anonymously/finding out that it wasn't written by an 'Alice' changed your opinions on it. Thanks!

Hello!
I read it in 1986, when I was a late teen. I read it on the back of Moi, Christiane F, and am only slightly shamed now to say that my whole group of friends and I belonged to that sort of group of students who romanticised the dope and the drugs but never really went that far.
I don't think discovering that Alice never really existed detracts from it tbh. If anything, it's a very clever technique for getting the message across.

We read it at school in the 80s, and honestly, my main impression of it was nothing to do with drugs, which weren't easily available to us at the time, but how different this fictional US 15 year old's life was to mine and my schoolmates. I mean, this was a rough school, with a lot of drinking and young pregnancies, but all those lavish parties, dating college students, running away to start your own jewellery shop -- was completely alien. The drugs were the least interesting part, for teenage me.

I think elements of it have the weird vividness you get from badly-written novels, because the fiction isn't subsuming. One of the things the protagonist seemed weirdly obsessed with was using tampons rather than towels.

I read it as a teen and reread it in my 20s after finding out its history. (I was a young enough teen when I read it to not notice the glaring indications that it’s a fake.)
I now find it completely unethical that it was ever published as a true story. I would give it to my kids to read only after a discussion of who wrote it and why.

I’m old and from memory read it in the 70’s. It’s really just a ‘don’t do drugs’ book. Several years later it was established that it wasn’t written by Alice per se but by a psychologist and is a composite of their teenage patients at the time so I don’t really see how they takes away from the validity?

I believe it was realistic for the time but don’t see how teenagers these days would relate. It was written late 60’s I think and took a few years to publish. It was the flower power era. Drugs were the thing. And free love. It was a very different time. The reason for using drugs was also very different back then - more take drugs to ‘expand your mind and become at one with the universe’ philosophy as opposed to now where young people would use drugs as coping mechanisms due to troubles in their lives.

I’m guessing you have been tasked with writing an essay for your course and are after us to do your thinking for you?

I read this about 20 years ago. My impression was that it was very American and therefore just a story to me, as it was so far from my British, rural upbringing. It was also very obviously old fashioned. I recall a comment about ‘Alice’ being shown how to iron her hair. No one did this in the early 90s! (Although my mum did in the 60s). The drugs talked about were not ones I had generally heard of and the story reminded me very much of the footage from Woodstock/Glastonbury festivals in the 60s. No one in the book really seemed to have jobs and just seemed to party all the time although I don’t recall that much sex in it, and the relationships seemed pretty flat too, which I thought was unrealistic.
The fact it was written by anon Didn’t bother me. I just thought it was done for effect. I knew there was no way someone that was such a waster would have bothered writing a book!
It was entertaining but not relevant to my own life and experiences at all. I never bothered to look up what it was all about or who actually wrote it.

I read it as a teenager and remember thinking it was manipulative anti drugs propaganda even then

I was just thinking of this book the other day! I'm 49 and I think I read it when I was around 10/11- around my Judy Blume phase.
Even as a kid, I was a bit like, "She's a runaway. How'd they find all these bits of her diary scattered about and make a book of it?" I pretty much always believed it was a hoax. That didn't bother me. I couldn't put it down. I found it totally fascinating, sad, scary, dark, depressing. I also found it really weird that she washed her hair with mayonnaise.

Well I have just ordered it on the back of this post! Never heard of it before!

I read it as a teen. Loved it, mostly because it was so alien to my own experiences. Just couldn't comprehend how she could do all that without someone checking up on her or caring etc. Just so different to my life in a boring part of the UK. Had to look up or guess at so many words. I wouldn't say I identified with the characters, I thought I wouldn't have made the same decisions but then also was never in those scenarios. An odd one as usually I prefer characters I can identify with but I kept coming back to this book. It's years since I read it but I loved the description of the boutique. Was always suspicious of the claim of it being non-fiction though!

I'm remembering sonrty else, maybe a false memory- but wasn't she already doing really hard stuff and THEN "progressed" to dope? There was something really odd in the escalation of the choice of poison.

God, yes, I remember the hair ironing and the hair mayonnaise! Honestly, it was absolutely those (to me deeply weird) details that stayed with me, and not the whole Heavy-Handed Anti-Drugs Message.

I read it donkeys years ago. Same as a PP said - during the Judy Blume phase !! I loved all the teen angst books of that era. Even though I wasn't a girl living in suburban New Jersey I could relate to Judy Blume etc because they were about similar issues in my life - friendships, puberty, arguing with parents etc.
Go Ask Alice though I don't remember having any impact on me much at all. It was probably so unrelated to my life it might as well been a 'fantasy' novel. I vaguely remember it was poorly written so not a type of book you would "wow this is awesome" to your mates.
I don't know if I ever thought it was 'real' though. I probably just thought it was fiction.

I just finished this book! Is it really not real?!

There is also a made-for-TV movie version that came out in the 1970s.

I read it in the 1980s and it seemed dated even then, but it was scary to me as a teenager and at the time I didn't realise it wasn't real. Not that it stopped me experimenting with drugs, but maybe that's because the experience of Alice seemed so far removed from my own upbringing in rural England. 1960s California was another world, so while it was scary, it was like a horror film is scary - not real IYKWIM?

How odd. I was just thinking about this book the other day, too.
I read it in the seventies and remember thinking that the American young people had very little in common with the hippy crowd I hung around with in the UK.
I found it vaguely interesting but didn't relate to it much, as it seemed to be less about the counterculture than about abuse.