{"id":120549,"date":"2018-01-22T09:00:11","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T14:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120549"},"modified":"2023-09-19T11:49:59","modified_gmt":"2023-09-19T15:49:59","slug":"queer-reading-go-ask-alice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/22\/queer-reading-go-ask-alice\/","title":{"rendered":"A Queer Reading of Go Ask Alice <\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Reading Go Ask Alice<\/em>\u2014the so-called real diary, first published in 1971, of an anonymous girl who took drugs and died\u2014is an experience so widely shared that there\u2019s little point personalizing it. Everyone who encounters Go Ask Alice<\/em> goes through the same four stages:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Titillated horror, for the young reader, at the book\u2019s dramatic depictions of drug use.<\/li>\n
  2. Creeping suspicion, as the reader ages past adolescence, that there\u2019s something fishy about the diarist\u2019s life-destroying addiction to LSD and marijuana, not to mention the very premise that a diary kept by a homeless drug addict and \u201crecorded on single sheets of paper, paper bags, etc.\u201d was perfectly preserved for posthumous publication.<\/li>\n
  3. Revelation, for the adult reader, that Go Ask Alice <\/em>is not, in fact, a \u201creal diary\u201d but a fictional hoax written by a Mormon youth counselor named Beatrice Sparks whose other books included Jay\u2019s Journal<\/em> (the \u201creal diary\u201d of an anonymous boy who got involved in Satanism and died) and It Happened to Nancy<\/em> (the \u201creal diary\u201d of an anonymous girl who got date-raped, caught AIDS, and died).<\/li>\n
  4. Howling hilarity upon rereading the book in this context.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    By now, the Go Ask Alice<\/em> reader\u2019s narrative is a comic genre unto itself. (For the best examples, see Paul F. Tompkins<\/a> and Mallory Ortberg<\/a>.) I will now add my own to the pile, if only to establish my credentials as the world\u2019s foremost authority on Go Ask Alice<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    The year was 1999. I was in the sixth grade, weeks away from turning twelve, and I made the mistake of bringing along only one book\u2014that book being, of course, Go Ask Alice<\/em>\u2014on a two-week father-daughter boat trip to the Gal\u00e1pagos Islands. Picture that ship\u2019s bunk: just me, my father, perhaps a pelican swooping past the porthole, and Go Ask Alice<\/em>. The prose, even by sixth-grade standards, was not challenging, and within mere hours I\u2019d read it to the end. I stared for a while at the final page (\u201cEpilogue: The subject of this book died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary\u201d). Then, helplessly, I turned back to the first page (\u201cEditor\u2019s Note: Go Ask Alice<\/em> is based on the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old drug user\u201d) and reread the whole thing from the beginning. What else could I do?<\/p>\n

    It was not summer or Christmas or even spring break; it was February, and I was missing two weeks of school. I\u2019d awkwardly cleared the situation with my teachers, all of whom were supportive (\u201cHave a fantastic<\/em>\u00a0time! I\u2019m so jealous!\u201d my sweet English teacher wrote on my homework packet), and not one of whom dared to ask me the obvious question: Why?<\/p>\n

    This question troubled me, but I was hesitant to raise it with my parents. They\u2019d been acting so strange lately\u2014rarely appearing in the same room together, sometimes ignoring or snapping at me, other times confiding in me as though I were the world\u2019s littlest marriage counselor. When they sat me down and told me they had something serious to discuss with me, I braced myself for the obvious. Instead, they presented me with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play hooky from school and tour the Gal\u00e1pagos Islands\u2014just my father and me!\u2014while my mother and brother stayed home in New York. Wouldn\u2019t I like that? \u201cYou love animals,\u201d they kept reminding me, and I felt it would be churlish to clarify that I loved wolves<\/em>, which were not to be found in any volcanic archipelago. I had little interest in island ecology. I didn\u2019t even mind going to school.<\/p>\n

    Still, I fully understood that certain parental questions had an implicit correct answer, and that \u201cWould you like to skip school for two weeks and tour the Gal\u00e1pagos Islands in a boat with your father?\u201d was one such question. I answered it correctly, and off we went\u2014in such haste, as I recall it, that I forgot to pack any reading material other than Go Ask Alice<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    And so I read Go Ask Alice<\/em>, and then I read it again, and again, and again. In my memory,\u00a0Go Ask Alice<\/em> is sulfurous and igneous. Go Ask Alice<\/em> prickles with red Sally Lightfoot crabs on a sunbaked black moonscape. Go Ask Alice<\/em> reeks of a thousand sea lions, writhing and moaning in an orgiastic heap. To read Go Ask Alice<\/em> is to be sunburned and seasick and shitting my wet suit because I\u2019ve picked up some sort of pants-shitting parasite that will linger in my intestines for a full month after my return to New York.<\/p>\n

    This is all to say that I essentially have Go Ask Alice<\/em> memorized. I am not proud of this achievement; if anything, I resent it, because Go Ask Alice<\/em> is a truly terrible book\u2014aesthetically, pedagogically, morally. The writing is tin eared (\u201cLike here I am in Denver\u201d) and riotously unconvincing as the voice of a teenage girl (\u201cI\u2019m afraid to live and afraid to die, just like the old Negro spiritual. I wonder what their hang-up was?\u201d). As antidrug propaganda, it\u2019s so misinformed as to defeat its own purpose (\u201cAnyone who says pot and acid are not addicting is a damn, stupid, raving idiot, unenlightened fool!\u201d). The plot takes too long to get going, ends too abruptly, and has enough holes to trigger a trypophobe. In short, Go Ask Alice<\/em> is bad in just about every way it\u2019s possible for a book to be bad, and much has been written to this effect.<\/p>\n

    But there\u2019s one aspect of the book that I\u2019ve never seen discussed, perhaps because no one else has the text memorized from beginning to end: its unnamed narrator is bisexual and closeted.<\/p>\n

    It\u2019s easy to misremember the book\u2019s gay content, if one remembers it at all, as pure homophobia. The narrator catches her drug-dealer boyfriend in bed with another man, calls him \u201crepulsive\u201d and \u201ca low class queer,\u201d and subsequently reflects: \u201cI had condemned Richie for being a frigging homo, but maybe I should have given even that mother a break. With the shit he was on every day, it\u2019s no wonder he was out of control.\u201d Later, she meets a fellow drug addict, of whom she reports: \u201cAn older teenage girl tuned her in and turned her on drugs, then took her the homo route.\u201d There\u2019s an easy joke in here about how drugs will turn you gay, and on the surface this does seem to be one of the warnings of what is, after all, a Mormon tract from 1971.<\/p>\n

    A closer reading, however\u2014and I am nothing if not a close reader of Go Ask Alice<\/em>\u2014reveals that the narrator actually spends the entire diary consumed with anxiety that she herself might be queer, even before she starts using drugs. In one of the early entries meant to establish the all-American normalcy of our heroine before her fateful first encounter with LSD, the narrator contemplates her best friend:<\/p>\n

    Beth and I have only two more days together. Our parting is almost like looking forward to a death. It seems that I have known her always, for she understands me. I must admit that there were even times when her mother arranged dates for her that I was jealous of the boys. I hope it\u2019s not strange for a girl to feel that way about another girl. Oh I hope not! Is it possible that I am in love with her? Oh, that\u2019s dumb even for me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Beth never reappears in the text (let me reiterate: this book is terrible<\/em>), but as the narrator descends into drug addiction, her attraction to women\u2014and her distress over it\u2014only intensifies, culminating in an entry supposedly written during a \u201cbummer\u201d acid trip:<\/p>\n

    Now when I face a girl it\u2019s like facing a boy. I get all excited and turned-on. I want to screw with the girl, you know, and then I get all tensed-up and scared. I feel goddamned good in a way and goddamned bad in a way. I want to get married and have a family, but I\u2019m afraid … Sometimes I want one of the girls to kiss me. I want her to touch me, to have her sleep under me, but then I feel terrible. I get guilty and it makes me sick. Then I think of my mother. I think of screaming at her and telling her to make room for me because I\u2019m coming home and I feel like a man.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    And even toward the end of the book, when the narrator is in recovery from drug addiction, she struggles with her feelings for Babbie, another girl at the rehab center:<\/p>\n

    Tonight Babbie went down to the day-room to watch TV and I am jealous. Will I wind up a hard butch angry at some child who has given her affection to an old woman with a package of cigarettes to share with her?<\/p>\n

    This can\u2019t be! It can\u2019t be happening to me!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    In a text littered with turns of phrase like \u201cOh those were the fun, fun times!\u201d and \u201cThe fuzz has clamped down till the town is mother dry,\u201d the narrator\u2019s horror at her own sexuality\u2014the violent intensity of her shame and self-disgust\u2014stands out as uniquely visceral. It feels personal\u2014it feels human<\/em>\u2014in a way that the rest of the book never does. It makes me wonder about Beatrice Sparks herself.<\/p>\n

    It\u2019s also genuinely painful for me to read, even now\u2014especially when I consider that Go Ask Alice<\/em> was surely my first literary encounter with same-sex desire. You can see its influence, both stylistic and ideological, in an entry from my own seventh-grade diary, dated April 27, 2000:<\/p>\n

    What if I turn out to be lesbian? Everyone hates me. I wonder why I\u2019m the only person in my grade who never wears a skirt? At the rate I\u2019m going I\u2019ll probably grow up to be some solitary gay freak … Am I oversexed? Am I bisexual? Am I suicidal?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    (\u201cOversexed\u201d is the giveaway here: I sound like a time traveler from 1971.)<\/p>\n

    At the time, though, I don\u2019t think I made the connection. It certainly didn\u2019t occur to me any more than it occurred to her that the narrator of Go Ask Alice<\/em> was bisexual. The diary format allows for her moments of sexual self-insight to remain contained and unexamined, and she moves on from each one as if awakening from a harmless nightmare. Within the universe of the book, these moments don\u2019t matter or add up to anything; none of it is worth acknowledging, let alone discussing. Like most of history\u2019s fictional lesbians, the narrator of Go Ask Alice<\/em> dies at the end\u2014by her own hand, it\u2019s suggested\u2014and the question of her sexuality dies with her.<\/p>\n

    But it continues to haunt me. Why did the author introduce it at all? Why?<\/em><\/p>\n

    When I think of how this book has lingered within me like a pants-shitting parasite, the whole thing becomes a lot less funny, and to this day I have trouble laughing at Go Ask Alice<\/em>. Sometimes, in fact, the very title sends me into a raw, childlike rage. Sometimes I think about Go Ask Alice <\/em>and find myself eleven years old again, bobbing in the Pacific, staring out the porthole, sunburned and seasick and seething with the question: Why?<\/em> Why do adults lie to children? (This is a real diary. Marijuana is dangerously addictive. It\u2019s sick and wrong to feel that way about another girl\u2014but if you ignore it, it doesn\u2019t mean anything. This trip will be fun. We\u2019re not getting a divorce. Everything is fine.) Why won\u2019t they tell the truth?<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    James Frankie Thomas is the author of <\/em>The Showrunner, which received special mention in the <\/em>2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in <\/em>The Toast, The Hairpin, and <\/em>Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Reading Go Ask Alice\u2014the so-called real diary, first published in 1971, of an anonymous girl who took drugs and died\u2014is an experience so widely shared that there\u2019s little point personalizing it. 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