Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries
by Rick Emerson (BenBella, $27)
When Go Ask Alice was published, in 1971, it “struck with all the potent intimacy of a late-night confession,” said William Tipper in The Wall Street Journal. Purportedly the diary of a middle-class California girl who had become a drug addict at 15 and died just as she appeared to have escaped her downward spiral, the book became a publishing phenomenon and has never stopped terrifying parents and titillating teens. But is the diary real, or was it the invention of the middle-aged Mormon writer who eventually claimed responsibility for having ushered it into print? With Unmask Alice, author Rick Emerson aims to resolve the mystery, and though he can’t prove that the diary was wholly fabricated, “he leaves the reader in little doubt.”
Go Ask Alice is a wild book, said Casey Cep in The New Yorker. In tracking its protagonist’s rapid descent from adolescent boredom to acid trips, prostitution, institutionalization, and death at 17, it “reads like a collaboration by Dr. Phil, Darren Aronofsky, and McGruff the Crime Dog.” Beatrice Sparks, who had presented the manuscript to its New York City publisher, didn’t publicly reveal her role until the late 1970s, when she put out two more books ostensibly based on teen confessions. Emerson indicts Sparks and her methods with a “Torquemada-like zeal,” presenting her as a swindler who triggered unjustified moral panics, first about drug use and later about Satanism. Judging by what we learn of her, though, “she comes across as a true believer, both in evil and in her capacity to combat it by scaring teenagers straight.”
But Unmask Alice is more than the story of a woman who “let her ambition run away with her,” said Rebecca Onion in Slate. The myths spread by Sparks’ moralizing “did real damage,” starting with a family whose son’s suicide was tied by Sparks, without evidence, to Satanic worship. Whatever the intent behind Go Ask Alice and her other books, “Sparks’ responsibility for today’s culture of moral panic around the lives of teenagers and kids isn’t small.”