Go Ask Alice

An influential voice for 1970s youth, Beatrice Sparks (1917-2012) is more recently known for her dishonesty, unanswered questions, and fallacious assertions about sex and drugs. She was commonly referred to as a serial hoaxer. Her true biography is shrouded in mystery, primarily because Sparks frequently changed the names of her alma mater, professional titles, and roles in writing her books. Born in rural Idaho, Sparks worked in a restaurant with her single mother after dropping out of high school to help support her siblings. She married a man of Morman faith from Texas, and the couple’s wealth grew substantially after they invested in oil. While caring for a younger sister and three children, Sparks worked for a multilevel marketing company, falsely promoting high sales returns on records touting family values and parenting advice. There, Sparks met Art Linkletter, primarily known for the television show “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” After Linkletter’s daughter died by suicide, he started a campaign against teen substance use that aligned with President Nixon’s war on drugs. Sparks sent Linkletter an early draft of Go Ask Alice. Letters indicate that Sparks initially hoped to receive credit for the diary; however, her publisher convinced Sparks to refer to the author as “Anonymous” to avoid compromising the work’s authenticity. After witnessing several successful years of sales, Sparks eventually revealed herself as the book’s editor. She began touring and interviewing, accepting partial credit for the work.

For her entire life, Sparks maintained that she worked on Go Ask Alice only in an editorial capacity, inspired by an original diary written by one girl. At times, Sparks mentioned another editor who contributed to the work, and occasionally she asserted that she’d pulled information from several diaries. However, when Sparks’s following “editorial projects” were published, literary analysts noticed commonalities in writing style and tone among the books. Jay’s Journal, another alleged anonymous diary by Sparks, is a cautionary tale about teen involvement in witchcraft. This work was credited with contributing to the rise of the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s (a collection of devil worship conspiracy theories and false accusations surrounding teens playing Dungeons and Dragons, using drugs, and rebelling against authority), and the family of Alden Barrett, on whom the protagonist, Jay, was based, discounted Sparks’s work as fiction. Although Barrett’s mother initially contacted Sparks about sharing his diary after Barrett died by suicide, she later revealed that Jay’s Journal represented only about 10% of the original diary. Barrett never claimed to be involved in witchcraft; instead, he experimented with substances and didn’t align with his family’s Mormon beliefs. Although fraudulent, Sparks’s work expanded the young adult genre in commercial publishing by broadening notions of what was acceptable for adolescents to read, allowing them to access much more adult themes and grimmer material than what was previously available in young adult literature. The underlying themes within her writing and her frank and foreboding tone speak to the many conflicts adolescents face universally.