Go Ask Alice — If You Can Find Her

Recently, I was in a used bookstore looking for a copy of The Great Gatsby for my teenage daughter's honors English class, preferably one without Leonardo DiCaprio's head on it. (No luck, by the way.) I passed a table marked "Summer Reading Lists" and there I saw a very familiar paperback book.

Go Ask Alice, the real diary of a teen drug user! O!M!G! My girlfriends and I devoured that book back in high school. We read it over and over and over. We hung on every word. Through the anonymous "Alice," we experienced a subculture of illicit activities that none of us were brave enough (or stupid enough) to try in real life.

I'm always looking for books to share with my daughter and this seemed like one she needed to know about. Of course, I would read it first — just to make sure I was ready for any questions she might have. Or so I told myself. In reality, I couldn't wait to sink my teeth back into it. And, it was only $1.99! (How much do we love used bookstores? That would be a lot.) Within moments, it was mine.

As an aside, I also bought a used copy ($2.39!) of Carrie Fisher's sequel to Postcards from the Edge, her semiautobiographical novel The Best Awful. If there was a theme to my little shopping spree, I guess it was Drug Abuse Lit 101. But, I digress.

That afternoon, I happily finished the book on my nightstand (Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers, Part II, which didn't have any teen junkies in it, but did have quite a bit of snuff pinching). I settled in for an acid trip down memory lane, convinced I would finish Go Ask Alice in a single sitting. 

Mais non, mes amis! It was tough to get through it. Because despite my earlier infatuation, the truth is ... Go Ask Alice is awful.

I don't mean that it's awfully sad or awfully depressing or awfully tragic (all of which I would have confidently asserted when I was my daughter's age). I mean, the book is simply awful. How I (and apparently five million other readers) ever thought this was an actual diary from an actual teenager is beyond me. Of course, the book cover tells us so:

"The harrowing true story of a teenager's descent into the seductive world of drugs. A diary so honest you may think you know Alice — or someone like her. Read her diary. Enter her world. You'll never be able to forget Alice."

If nothing else, I can vouch for that last bit. Anyway, upon a shall-we-say more mature reading, Go Ask Alice doesn't ring true. Not at all.

Yes, as promised, "Alice" shares her deepest darkest secrets. (Isn't that part of the thrill of reading someone's diary?) Some of the issues are drawn from actual teen life: she worries about her weight, she obsesses about a boy, she wishes she could be more popular. But, there's simply no way a fifteen-year-old wrote this:

I just bought the most wonderful little single pearl pin for Mother's Christmas present. It cost me nine dollars and fifty cents, but it's worth it. It's a cultured pearl which means it's real and it looks like my Mom. Soft and shiny, but sturdy and dependable underneath so it won't dribble all over the place. Oh I hope she likes it! I want so very much for her to like it and to like me!

Say, what?

The writing gets even more flowery (and less plausible) when "Alice" describes her first LSD trip:

I looked at a magazine on the table, and I could see it in 100 dimensions. It was so beautiful I could not stand the sight of it and closed my eyes. Immediately I was floating into another sphere, another world, another state. Things rushed away from me and at me, taking my breath away like a drop in a fast elevator. I couldn't tell what was real and what was unreal. Was I the table or the book or the music, or was I part of all of them, but it didn't really matter, for whatever I was, I was wonderful.

Oh my.

Well, suffice it to say, I was a little more gullible thirty-five years ago. Or, maybe I just assumed that a real, published book that claimed to be a real diary of a real girl who died of a real overdose was ... well ... real.

Kind of the way kids feel about what they find on the Internet today. Speaking of which, it took about twenty seconds to learn that Go Ask Alice was — indeed — a work of fiction. (Gasp!) The author was a woman named Beatrice Sparks who ghost-wrote a number of similar titles: 

Annie's Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, A Pregnant Teenager

Treacherous Love: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager

Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets

Kim: Empty Inside: The Diary of ... you guessed it ... an Anonymous Teenager
  
Ms. Sparks, who passed away last year, was a therapist and a Mormon youth counselor. And, a very successful, if maybe not so credible anymore, anonymous teenager.

So, this has been an enlightening week. I'm glad that "Alice" was just a fictional girl (she doesn't have a very happy ending in the book, if you remember). Real or not, Go Ask Alice provided my younger self with hours of reading pleasure. I don't think it convinced me not to try hard drugs; I doubt I would have with or without the book (I was rather a goody-goody). But, maybe it did persuade some kids to stay safe. 'Can't really argue with that 

And, I'm still going to share it with my daughter. But, I think I'll wait until she finishes The Great Gatsby.

Tweenage Wasteland — Then and Now

Here's how it always starts.

"When I was your age ... blah blah blah." (Insert idealized memory that makes each of us sound like a character from some Laura Ingalls Wilder novel.) "Milk was a nickel." "We didn't have computers or cell phones or paper clips or diet soda." "I walked six miles to school in the snow, uphill, both ways."

Every generation romances its own past and despairs for the future.

And, with today's tweens and teens growing up in the digital age, there really are some great differences. I mean "great" as in unusually or comparatively large in size or dimensions, not necessarily as in wonderful, first-rate, very good. (Whatever did we do before dictionary.com? Oh, right, we used a big fat book!) Media has radically changed and, consequently, tween and teen media consumption has as well.

At a glance, it seems as though everything is different. We've jumped from Leave it to Beaver to The Jetsons. But are 14 year old girls in 2011 really so different from their ancient ancestors of ... say ... 1976?

Sometimes I wonder.

Here are some typical tween traits one might have observed then and now:

Blind Brand Loyalty

The very very first words of one of my very very favorite Elton John songs: "Blue jean baby, L.A. lady ..." Blue jeans were and are important. The right ones mean you get it. The wrong ones? Well, you might as well find a seat at the lunchtime loser table. (And sit down fast so no one can see the stitching on your backside pockets, the tell-tale sign that your mother found those disgraceful denims at some discount store rather than Abercrombie or Hollister.) As a harried working mother in the middle of middle age, I want to say "Jeans are jeans!" But, as a one-time tween, I know better. Back then, nothing came between me and my Calvins.

Fancy Footwear

The shoes to choose these days are suddenly Converse All-Stars. Not to be confused with Converse One Stars. As my tween daughter logically put it, "Why would you want only one star?" Your average tweenage girl needs several pairs — paint-splattered, plaid, two-toned. To my unknowing eyes, they look like any other canvas athletic shoes and they cost more. But, I remember needing (not wanting, mind you, but needing) Adidas sneakers in the 70s. Trust me, they weren't giving those little stripes away.

Long-Haired Teen Idols

Welcome to the generation gap. I do not have Bieber Fever. Let's face it; it would be kind of disturbing if I did. He's 32 years my junior and the idea of his baby baby-face, singing "Baby, baby, baby, oh like baby, baby, baby, no like baby, baby, baby, oh, I thought you'd always be mine," is more than slightly ridiculous. He does have good hair though. In fact, it reminds me of someone from way back when ... hmmmmm. And they called it puppy love?

Parental Under-appreciation

Remember when you first had a baby and you swore you would never say those things? You know the ones I mean, "Because I said so." "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" Well, in the last several months, I have become my own worst cliché. "Look at all the things I do for you," I whine. "You don't appreciate me." For the record, my daughter does not appreciate me. However, my daughter does appreciate me as much as any other fourteen year old girls appreciate their mothers. And, I'm sorry to admit it, but my daughter appreciates me as much as I appreciated my own mother. (Sorry, Mom.)

A Flair for the Dramatic

Tween tragedies are nothing new. Remember, Juliet herself was "not yet fourteen." These girls are starring in a Technicolor (or maybe in 2011 I'd better say, a high-definition) movie of their own life. Like any sweeping saga, it has funny moments, romance, twists of fate and grand passions. Best friends come and go. Feelings are hurt. The highs are high, the lows are low. When my husband shakes his head in helpless wonder, I reassure him that our daughter, like Gloria Gaynor back in my generation, will survive.

Music or Noise?

Was there any haven on Earth more precious and personal than your bedroom when you had your stereo on? Music marks the personal journey from child to adult. The soundtrack of my own tweens and teens was fairly eclectic. It included Fleetwood Mac, The Who, Carly Simon, Elton, The Eagles, as well as decidedly uncool but absolutely top of their particular games: John Denver and Barry Manilow. Eventually I moved into new wave with Blondie, Elvis Costello and the B-52s. Whenever I am tempted to diss my daughter's discs, I have to remind myself that I consumed an awful lot of "noise" in my day.

I guess the purpose of this little trip down memory lane (and, I didn't even mention my Dorothy Hamill haircut — oops, I just did — actually, now that I think about it, it looked a lot like Justin Bieber's) is to suggest that tweens today are not so very different from the tweens of yesteryear. We may not agree with their fads but we owe it them to admit that we had our own.

The more tweens change, the more they stay the same.