Go Ask Alice

Go Ask Alice Anonymous

Go Ask Alice is the diary of a young 15 year old drug abuser. At the beginning of the book, "Alice" is a typical, insecure, middle class teenager that only thinks with boys, diets, and popularity. She never taught of getting into drugs. This girl had a lot of self esteem, and was very happy. Her life changes for the worse when her family moves to a new town and she finds herself less popular and more isolated than ever before. That is why she buys this diary to express herself with personal taughts. She becomes unhappy in the new town, she is overjoyed to be allowed to return to the old town to spend the summer with her grandparents. During this stay she is invited to a party by an old acquaintance; there she unwittingly ingests LSD that had been added to random bottles of Coca Cola and distributed to the party guests as a game. The other guests had mistakenly assumed Alice was aware of what the "game" entailed. After this, she seeks drugs deliberately, and rapidly proceeds to marijuana, amphetamines, and casual sex. A pregnancy scare and the return to her new town encourage her to turn away from drugs; however she soon falls in with the drug crowd where finally she finds acceptance. She starts dating a drug dealer and sells drugs to grade-schoolers for him. After realizing he was using her, she turns him in to the police and runs away from home with her new friend Chris, moving to San Francisco. After being given heroin and then being raped by Chris' boss, Shelia and her boyfriend, she and Chris return home.

She is welcomed back warmly by her family, but finds herself ostracized by the community and has difficulty keeping her resolve to avoid drugs. She soon weakens and, while high, runs away again. She spends time living on the streets, a period during which her diary is not dated and entries were purportedly recorded on scraps of paper or paper napkins. She finds herself having sexual relations with strangers and loses track of everything. When she returns home she vows to stay completely off drugs, and succeeds. However, she is again ostracized by her former friends who continue to label her a police informant, and is ignored by the "square" kids. While babysitting, Alice is drugged without her knowledge. She has a violent, bad trip, during which a neighbor locks her in the closet, where she badly injures herself trying to claw her way out, and is committed to a psychiatric hospital. After being released she returns home, is finally happy and over her drug addiction. She starts a new romance with a student, Joel, at her father's university. She gets her life back on track and finally makes the decision to stop keeping a diary.

An epilogue informs readers that three weeks after the last entry the diarist died of an overdose. The book's epilogue ponders if it had been an accidental or premeditated overdose, before deciding that it was just one