The real author was “Dr.” Beatrice Sparks, a middle-aged Mormon writer with sketchy qualifications who scored a book deal with a lie and then watched it snowball to epic proportions, all while penning nearly a dozen more “real diaries,” some supposedly written by her so-called patients, and collecting residuals. The book won accolades just as often as it was banned by libraries and school boards-making it all the more alluring to readers desperate to get their hands on the controversial text.īut if this all sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is: Go Ask Alice was a fabrication and fraud. Poor writing and plot inconsistencies didn’t make the book “bad,” but “real.” Even the harshest reviewer wouldn’t criticize the private thoughts of a dead girl.

First, it was crammed full of underage sex, hard drugs, profanity, homosexuality, and prostitution. Go Ask Alice’s half century of success wasn’t luck or a fluke, but the result of a formula that proved impenetrable. At the end of 2020, a special 50th-anniversary edition was rereleased to similar fanfare. The cautionary tale is said to have sold 3 million copies in three years, kept selling through several paperback reprints, became a TV movie, and then was adapted for the stage. Billed as a real-life diary chronicling an unnamed 15-year-old girl’s two-year descent into drugs and eventual death, it became an instant sensation. In 1971, Go Ask Alice by “Anonymous” appeared on bookshelves from seemingly nowhere and shot to the top of best-seller lists.

Beatrice sparks author