One of my favorite songs of all time, for some reason.
61, read it, saw the movie.
Total fiction.
Grew up in the '80s and '90s, heard of it, never read it since I had the impression it would be both depressing and preachy. Sounds like I was probably right to avoid it.
Damn. We’re still not talking about the right stuff. It’s Unca, you know.
I’ve always wondered if the song and the book were related. Since it was mentioned I’d like to say that I LOVED Dawn, Portrait of a Teenaged Runaway. Alexander was dreamy. However, I didn’t lime Alexander, The Other Side of Dawn at all.
Iwas a tweener at the ti m e and quite fickle.
ETA: To clarify, I mean The Jefferson Airplane song.
Go Bulldogs!
I’m 50, and all the girls I knew read it. Along with “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret”.
I’m 46. I was in junior high school (what is now called ‘middle school’ for you young’uns) in the early 80s. We were shown the TV movie in “Health” class during the section on drug use. I think the book was considered too risqué. The TV movie was toned down a bit (no swear words), so that was OK to show.
The movie was horribly dated by that time. (In fact, it was probably pretty dated by the time the TV movie first aired.) It was one of those things that nerdy adults showed us, thinking they’d scare us away from using drugs. Instead, it probably prompted more teen drug use out of sheer rebellion over the fact that kids had this stupid, obviously fake drek shoved down our throats. The book was something we’d read aloud and laugh about while we smoked weed.
One particularly troublesome aspect that doesn’t often get discussed is the awful homophobia in the book. According to the book, homosexuality is the worst, most degenerative side effect of drug addiction. There are two very clear instances of this - Early on in the book, ‘Alice’ (the narrator) and her best friend are the respective girlfriends of two pushers. ‘Alice’ and her friend discover that their boyfriend/dealers are gay lovers who are just using them to push drugs to high schoolers. Finally, in the “shocking, horrifying” conclusion - as ‘Alice’ is bottoming out - she writes about how she is having lesbian thoughts of her own! She wants a girl she knows to ‘touch her’ like she touches her boyfriend. It happens as the climax of the story and is depicted as the frightening nadir: there is absolutely nothing more horrible or disgusting than being attracted to someone of your sex. (Of course, as soon as she gets clean she goes right back to dating men.)
And for what it’s worth, I have been in recovery for 13 years. I actually DID have a pretty serious crystal habit for a time. I think the whole depiction of addiction in the book is insultingly simplistic. I would never, never, NEVER recommend this book to anyone as any kind of reference about what it’s like to be an addict.
I am about the age of Don Draper. We were shown the movie in Junior high.
Graduated high school in 1981 - never read this, though I do recall seeing it in bookstores some years later. The book all my classmates were passing around under the table during my high school years was ‘Flowers in the Attic’ - because INCEST. I wasn’t allowed to read it at home, but I managed to read it anyhow; my after school job was at the local library, so I read anything I wanted during my breaks on the job. Nancy Friday’s books were also very popular with the high school crowd for the naughty and explicit factor…I think the people I knew would have thought that ‘Go Ask Alice’ was boring in comparison.
I’m 54. I read this as a young teen. I was a gullible young’un. I totally believed it was real. Coming across it in my more experimental years, my thoughts were “What a load of horse shit.”
I remember the late 60s being a time off extreme drug paranoia.
I’m sure they are.
The title of the book is taken from the song. It’s acknowledged on the copyright page.
I’m 54. I never read it, but it made the rounds when I was in 6th grade, and the kids who read it swore it was an actual authentic diary.
If you want the real stuff, track down Phoebe Gloeckner’s Diary of a Teenage Girl. I haven’t seen the movie, but the book cut pretty close to the bone.
Yes. Interesting, by the way, that the song–with its positive view of “feed[ing] your head”–is still well-thought of, while the book is seen as being nothing but a trite artifact of its time.
The biggest issue, as I remember this playing out at the time, is that Beatrice Sparks backpedaled so slowly in such an irritating way … first it was an actual diary that she was given access to, then she said it wasn’t a diary so much as her written transcript of things that were said to her verbally by a young girl, then (as people continued to investigate and push her for more information) it was more of an amalgam of things several teens had said to her. By then, she had no credibility at all. Completely fiction is the final outcome.
Now it is billed as fiction, as described on the Snopes page (mentioned above by another poster) but that explanation was not in the original editions of the book.
It’s interesting that for many folks who came of age within a decade of me, the book was popular (if illicit) reading; yet others, just like my wife, never heard of it at all. I think you definitely had to have read it by the time you were a young teen to take it seriously - otherwise it’s just too obviously hokey and false-sounding.
I did learn while reading about it (on Wikipedia?) that the Jefferson Airplane song (obviously) alludes to Alice in Wonderland, and the book title is taken from the song, but nowhere does the book indicate that the narrator’s name is actually Alice.
I’m 47–same.
As far as I know, ‘Go Ask Alice’ is a health column from Columbia University that provides decent health advice to college students. You should go look at it.
Born in the mid '80s. Yes, I’ve heard of it. It sticks out in my mind because it was the only book I ever picked up at the public library as a child that my mother asked me to put back. She did not believe in censoring what I read, but I found it in the YA section one day when I was maybe 10 or 11 and when she saw it on the way to the checkout counter, she told me that she wouldn’t stop me if I really, really wanted to read it, but that she’d read it years ago and didn’t think it was appropriate or accessible for me yet and wished I’d wait. Never having been told anything like this before, I put it back.
I did read it a few years later in my mid-teens and agreed with her about its appropriateness. I don’t remember much of it now except that it was pretty depressing.