Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous, said the rounded font, along with three new words: A Real Diary. Inside, on the splash page, a little piece of brilliance:
Sugar and spice
And everything nice
Acid and smack
And no way back.
Thomas Midgley Jr is widely known as “the most dangerous inventor in history” — being the one who proposed adding lead to gasoline to prevent “knocking” (which led to workplace poisoning and widespread air pollution) and inventing CFCs for refrigeration (which caused the hole in the ozone layer) — but a name less generally known is Beatrice Sparks; perhaps the most dangerous author in history. As Rick Emerson explains in the fascinating Unmask Alice, Sparks’ two most famous works — Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal — would go on to have long-lasting, damaging effects on American society and bring wealth and professional esteem to a woman who was a fraud and exploiter of others’ pain (and not even a very good writer). Emerson tells a compelling story here, underpinned by thorough research and legwork, and while it may come as cold comfort to the people that Sparks hurt during her lifetime, there is some level of satisfaction in unmasking an impostor and properly defining her legacy. Recommended for all, but especially for those of us who grew up on the lies. Spoilers beyond this point. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Even before its whiplash ending, Alice was brutal, shoving your face in shit. If you made it past the drugs and teenage hookers (and neglected toddlers and gang rapes), Alice’s final meltdown was a long, shrieking nightmare.
I was a little girl in the Seventies — too young to have been exposed to the “real diary” Go Ask Alice when it was released, but I did see the TV movie (at least in part, many times over the years) and remember the dire warnings about LSD and flashbacks and poor Art Linkletter’s daughter who jumped off a roof because she thought she could fly. What I couldn’t have known (what nobody knew) was that in the immediate aftermath of Linkletter’s loss, a diary “discovered” by an unknown fifty-something wannabe author would capture the grieving celebrity’s attention, and this diary would so perfectly explain what insidious forces led to his daughter’s death because Sparks created it based on Linkletter’s own story. At a time when “the average American runaway was a white, middle-class, suburban girl who was barely fifteen”, and the evening news was filled with a horrific murder trial where, “Manson, the prosecution and defense teams agreed, had used LSD as a psychic crowbar, prying open the women’s minds and rebuilding them as monsters,” America was primed for action on what LSD was doing to their daughters. And although no drugs were found in Linkletter’s daughter’s toxicology report (although, to be fair, apparently there was no test for LSD at the time), Linkletter became an avenging angel and brought Go Ask Alice (which he published and put his endorsement on) to Washington, where Nixon was delighted to have a friendly face to put on his incipient War on Drugs. So, to be clear, Beatrice Sparks, in order to become a breakthrough author, made up a diary that the President of the United States would hold up as evidence for a program that pretended to be about drug safety but was really about getting hippies and civil rights protestors off the streets:
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black,” Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, admitted in 1994, “but by criminalizing [drugs] heavily, we could disrupt those communities . . . arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs?” asked Ehrlichman. “Of course we did.”
Unfortunately for Beatrice Sparks’ ambitions, the publishers insisted on listing the author of Go Ask Alice as “anonymous” (in order to make it more relatable to fellow teens, even Sparks’ name as an “editor” was nixed), and despite it becoming one of the best-selling YA books of all time, she received no official credit and continued to have no success in getting work published under her own name.
Unmask Alice then pivots and tells the tale of Alden Barrett; a sixteen-year-old with undiagnosed depression who ended up killing himself in 1971. Alden’s devastated mother found her son’s tortured diary and decided to give it to local author Beatrice Sparks (surely if Sparks had a hand in Go Ask Alice — which was doing such good work warning teens off drugs — there could be some good in a book that calls attention to youth mental illness), and although Sparks assured Marcella Barrett that she’d let her read anything she made of the diary before it was released, Marcella never heard back from Sparks; never heard anything at all until locals started whispering about Jay’s Journal — the thinly-disguised “true” writings of a disturbed young man who was obviously the late Alden Barrett. The biggest shocker: according to the book, Jay/Alden had been deep into witchcraft and Satanism, animal sacrifice, cattle mutilation, midnight orgies, and frenzied drug use. And while none of that was true — Sparks interspersed Alden’s actual pain-filled entries with her fantasies of graveside rituals and demonic possession — Jay’s Journals would spark the Satanic Panic of the 1980’s; ruining the lives of countless people as the FBI, police departments across America, and respected psychiatrists acting as expert witnesses assured the country that Satanism was real and rampant and seducing the youth. The worst consequences were doled out to childcare workers who were accused of using the children in their care for Satanic rituals, usually charged after narratives of abuse were implanted in the children by social workers and psychologists, as in the following case:
Dan and Fran Keller, the owners of a small day care center in Austin’s Oak Hill suburb, are accused of Satanic ritual abuse. Among the allegations: forcing children to drink blood-laced Kool-Aid, cutting out the heart of a baby, throwing children into a shark-filled swimming pool, and “using Satan’s arm as a paintbrush.” The initial accuser retracts her statement, as does the primary “eyewitness,” but it doesn’t matter. Jurors convict the Kellers, who spend twenty-two years in prison before an appeals court overturns their sentences, freeing the couple. In 2017, district attorney Margaret Moore finally declares both Dan and Fran Keller “actually innocent.”
One woman started both the War on Drugs and the Satanic Panic, and her only remorse was that neither of the “true diaries” she wrote were allowed to have her name on them. Sparks released a few other books over the following years (about teenage pregnancy, AIDS, and other social issues), and although she had been a Depression-era dropout and runaway, she eventually started referring to herself as a psychotherapist, a youth counsellor (explaining that she had access to so many diaries because they were actually based on case-notes from her nonexistent therapy practise), and her final books were allowed to be published with “Dr. Beatrice Sparks PhD” emblazoned on their covers. If her nonexistent credentials were never questioned, you have to wonder about an industry that unleashed such harm on the American public (with cultural spillover to us in Canada) without fact-checking anything at all about these books.
In most industries, this would be a shitstorm. In publishing, it’s barely an anecdote, and that’s the real warning. When obvious fraud no longer rates attention, let alone rebuke, things get ugly fast, and even good people can believe the very worst.
This was such a surprising investigative journey to me — Emerson unspools his narrative carefully and compellingly — and I have to note that this book may have ultimate impact for Gen Xers like me: I told my girls this story (to which they nodded along and gave me a respectful “wow” or two) but they don’t have the context of growing up during the early days of the War on Drugs (and having been very affected by both the story of Linkletter’s daughter and the image of “Alice” in a closet clawing at invisible spiders while she was supposed to be babysitting) or the Satanic Panic (and watching several episodes of Oprah about repressed memories where she said the only two possible answers to the question of whether or not you had been abused are “Yes or I don’t know”). I thought that Emerson was thorough and respectful in his approach to the material, and while there were some overwrought metaphors and unnecessarily smirky/sweary asides, the writing was, overall, appropriately journalistic. My mind is blown by what Beatrice Sparks wrought on the world; surely one of the most dangerous authors in history.
