Play Book Tag discussion

I am very angry with this book and the publishers of this book and the "author" of this book.

I saw a 50 year anniversary addition of Go Ask Alice at Wal-Mart. I had never heard of this book so I picked it up and was shocked to learn that this is a diary of a teenage girl and her battle with drug addiction. I wanted to get this book and one day, have my children read this book. I was slightly offended that I had never even heard of this diary.

So I bought the book, which I rarely do, and started reading. But something didn't seem right. Something didn't ring true. So I started Googling the book and low and behold, this is almost assuredly not a true diary of a teenage girl and her battle with drug addiction.

Beatrice Sparks claims this is an edited version of the diary but her second book, which claims to be a diary of a boy's journey with the occult, was found out to have only 21 authentic entries and the other 191 were fiction.

This book seems to be a someone's attempt to scare children away from drugs with dangers of addiction, vindictive addicts, rape, homosexuality at the same time, trying to remind teenagers that their parents aren't so bad and the world away from your family is much worse than you will ever have at home.

I am all for teaching children the danger of drugs and the wrong crowd. I thought this would be a good way to teach my children these lessons, but I am not okay with teaching them through lies.

This book should be marketed as fiction and stopped being published with the author "unknown"

author was anonymous ... there's a distinction

Nicole D. wrote: "author was anonymous ... there's a distinction"

I am sorry, anonymous is what I meant. They put anonymous and a little blurb that this is a real diary but the overwhelming evidence points to it being largely, if not entirely fictionalized by Beatrice Sparks.

I read this years ago under the same pretense and was hugely disappointed. Like you said, it is meant to scare kids away from drugs by grossly misrepresenting these experiences. Kinda gross puritanical bullshit I can't abide by --- marijuana is a gateway drug! ** eyeroll ** Except if I remember correctly she is dosed with acid her first drug experience...?

It's the "Refer Madness" of books.

IF YOU DO DRUGS YOU WILL DIE!
#booksummaryin7words

Meli wrote: "I read this years ago under the same pretense and was hugely disappointed. Like you said, it is meant to scare kids away from drugs by grossly misrepresenting these experiences. Kinda gross puritan..."

You are correct that she is unknowingly given chocolates laced with LSD.

This book is so off base from any book I have ever read about real drug abuse.

I read this book in 7th grade, at the time I did think it was a real diary and found out later that it wasn’t. I don’t think that changes the experience or makes it less useful as a cautionary tale. We “lie” to our kids all the time with Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy, etc. I tell my 5 year old if she doesn’t brush her teeth that sugar bugs will make homes in her teeth and they will fall out…as a result, she brushes her teeth. All the experiences in that book, except the homophobia, are valid in their own way.

Alishia wrote: "I read this book in 7th grade, at the time I did think it was a real diary and found out later that it wasn’t. I don’t think that changes the experience or makes it less useful as a cautionary tale..."

Thank-you for your point of view. I hope this tell helped you to stay away from drugs.

I understand your point that most people lie to their little kids all the time. I try my best not to. My kids have never believed in Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy or any other fairy tale.

Also, lying to little kids is different than lying to teenagers. I feel most teens today would be able to see through this book.

Hi Jason,

I can’t say that this book really helped or hurt in anyway for me. I was very into sports and that was always my deterrent, I never wanted to miss out on that in exchange for experimenting with something.

I don’t see the mythology of Santa or anything similar as lying, there is a short window in our lives where we are truly innocent and could believe in magic. I just want my kids to feel that innocence as long as they can. That being said, we all parent our own ways and that’s totally okay that your beliefs differ from mine, I fully respect that.

I don’t know that this book is relevant anymore unless you have the younger teenagers read it, the middle schoolers. I feel like when I read it, I did so out of curiosity…what was sex like? What are drugs like? I don’t remember feeling Afraid for the girl, just more sad for her. I think it’s a great way to open a dialogue. Recently the shows adapted from the book, 13 Reasons Why, did this for many of my friends with kids a little older. It opened up a dialogue on rape, and bullying, and all kinds of various other things. Sometimes these books just need to be looked at a cautionary tales and nothing more. Many movies “based on true events” have a small sliver of truth and that’s all. This is no different.

You make good points. You are right about movies and based on true stories.

I guess the part that bothers me most is how it's marketed. It's marked as a real diary and I guess I felt hoodwinked. I felt lied to.

I love this group because we can all read the same thing and have different perceptions, emotions, amd experiences with a book.

I will admit I was a little bummed but I brushed it off ;)

This book has been around a very long time, I think by now most people know it’s not real. I know if my daughter brought this to me I would let her know right away it was not real, but still an interesting story :)

@Alishia - Those are valid points, and I don't totally disagree. I think where we differ might be that I don't think this book is compelling, realistic or particularly successful (for me personally as a reader) as a cautionary tale. It feels like a middle aged woman with no experience with drugs in her youth wrote it, which I think checks.

I think 13 Reasons Why is portraying teen experiences (at least in the first season) in a much more realistic way by comparison to this book. A movie like Kids is a more true look into the dangers of unprotected sex... but of course both that show and movie came out much later.

What is insidious about this to me is the decision to fake a diary. Its purposefully deceitful, but unnecessarily so whereas the other examples we are talking about even represented as fiction can still successfully tackle these issues.

You can certainly be honest with children about the dangers of drugs or unprotected sex. This book was meant to be sensational by its "anonymous" tag and if it was just published as fiction it probably wouldn't have been able to enjoy the success its had or endured.

To clarify, I don't think it would be harmful to let a kid read it, I just think there is literature that does it better and more authentically.

I am also prone to reject this hardline, puritanical perspective (drugs are always bad, sex before marriage is bad), so I had a pretty adverse reaction to its message (lol).