I don’t remember the book that well, or when exactly I realized it was made up (re-read for fun in my late teens-it seemed very
suspicious then), but one thing about this book really stands ot for me:
Remember the back cover of the book? Under the title “Go ask Alice”
it said something really melodramatic like-
“You can’t ask Alice anything anymore…”
I discovered this book in its French translation the summer of 1977 when I was in France. The title was L’Herbe bleue (literally, ‘The Blue Grass’). I guess the French would not mistake this title for a book about banjo-pickin’ music. 
Blurb on the French paperback: Historie d’une jeune droguée. In French, histoire can just mean ‘story’, not necessarily factual history. I read it with fascination because I was fond of good old Marie Jeanne, but couldn’t locate any while I was in that small town in provincial France (the “French Connection” notwithstanding). I took it as just propaganda entertainment, a novel written in diary form. There was nothing in it to even suggest that I take it as nonfiction.
I read it in 9th grade and I liked it at the time. (Although now I can see the obvious flaws).
However, one thing that struck me is that the book ADMITTED that taking drugs can be a positive experience-as she said-it’s great and wonderful to go on trips. It’s a wonderful, groovy experience, and I loved it. But it’s not worth it.
It didn’t say-oh, drugs are horrid, and you freak out and hallucinate (at least, not right away!). But that the author admitted yeah, there are cool things about drugs.
And in a way, it paralleled what happened to my aunt-years of alcohol abuse-she finally gets sober, is going to AA, turns her life around, and then-bam! She gets an infection-and because her body was still healing from years of abuse, it killed her.
Didn’t you see my post? They didn’t deal with any suppliers, and paperwork was minimal. “Teenager” does not equal “incompetent”. And the boutique sequence took place during a period when they were not tripping out of their minds. I’ve heard this complaint before, and it seems like people often confuse the Denver sequence with the SF sequence. She didn’t go from living on the streets to being a shop owner; the two events are unrelated. And she was never a shop owner; as I said, they were not in it for the long haul.
What she said.
The thing I remember most about this book is that it is the only one my mother ever told me I couldn’t read, and took away from me. I was ten when I started reading it, but she let me read it when I was 13…and I don’t remember the plot at all except the girl was a junkie. Guess it didn’t make the harmful impression she was worried it would 
When I read this book (would have been late 70s), even then there was a lot of speculation that it had been made up.
Just my 2 cents worth.
I don’t even remember the bit about them opening a store. Guess it has been a long time.
I guess I am/was shallow or something… I couldn’t get 10 pages in the book. Was boring to me…
I never bought the “true story” bit either. I guess it helped that I was in my mid-twenties when I finally got around to reading it.
I can’t remember many of the details either, but there is one that gave it away for me. Toward the end, her “friends” break into a house where she is going to be babysitting later, and they lace a cookie or something with LSD, and then Alice eats it and is back in the fold. How could they have possibly known she would eat the cookie?
The Jay’s Journal sequel is even more ridiculous. Funny how the spook he sees in that one has the same name (Raoul) as the spook James Earl Ray says he saw in Montreal. Hmmm…
It wasn’t a cookie, it was chocolate covered peanuts, which were known to be her favorite. That didn’t strike me as particularly odd, since there were cases at that time of people being dosed against their will. For instance, a member of the Manson Family dosed a potential witness. To their chagrin, she didn’t die, or even lose her sanity or memory, and testified anyway.
Also, that trip did not get her “back in the fold”. It got her into a mental hospital, which made her even less inclined to rejoin “the fold”. Shortly before this incident, the other kids had threatened to “stash some shit in her old man’s car.” “Oh, I’d better warn dad to lock his car!” she twitters. People were just a LOT more trusting back then.
I’m still not saying definitively “This is true”, just that it has to be judged by the standards of the late ‘60s, not those of today. Someone asked why her parents didn’t notice anything. Perhaps because in those days, drug paranoia was unfocused. Parents weren’t being urged to check their kids’ rooms or be aware of their behavior patterns. They still thought you had to go to an opium den to get high, and if their daughter was leaving the house with other kids who were clean and combed and supposedly going to a football game, nothing bad would happen, right? It’s mentioned a couple of times that these kids don’t drink, because their parents have a hawk’s eye on the liquor cabinet, while leaving their prescription drugs unguarded.
I know there is a copy of Go ASk Alice floating around here somewhere, and it had not occurred to me that it might be a hoax.
I feel silly now for not questionning the book, ordinarily i know bettter.
I swallowed the story whole when I was in junior high school, I am ashamed to confess.
The New York Times mentions that the book is fiction here.
The editor of the book was Beatrice Sparks, who later edited/wrote/who cares other anonymous diaries:
Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager’s Life on the Streets (Avon, 1996) YA
Annie’s Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, a Pregnant Teenager (Flare, 1998) YA :eek: :eek: :eek:
The writer/forger of Go Ask Alice appears to be Linda Glovach. In 1998 she wrote Beauty Queen, a story “about a girl who flees her alcoholic mother, becomes a stripper and dies of heroin addiction.” Ages 12 and up.