Summer Reading Response: "Go Ask Alice"

           Over the summer, I read "Go Ask Alice" by an anonymous author. This honest, sensitive, frightening story is the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old drug-user from the later 1900s. 


           From the first day one enters middle school, they begin to here stories of kids dealing drugs, smoking, and just all that abominable garbage. It's really unnerving- in a community of teenagers, it's just something that is truly wrong. However, as "Go Ask Alice" is written by a girl with firsthand experience, I got to understand a new perspective of this predicament, and through this I realized: you must always trust yourself.


           From the opening of the novel, it is clear that Alice (as we will call her), the main character, is facing some serious problems- she is not content with herself, her body, her popularity, and everything within that category. It is September, and she has just started school. "Yesterday I bought this diary because I thought at last I'd have something wonderful and great and worthwhile to say, something so personal that I wouldn't be able to share it with another living person, only myself. Now like everything else in my life, it has become so much nothing," she states on page one. And so Alice, after she is turned down by her childhood love, Roger, enters the loop that many teenage girls go through: feeling as if they're ugly and weird and wanting and craving popularity- whatever that means. "I've put on seven ugly, fat, sloppy, slobby pounds and I don't have anything I can wear. I'm beginning to look as slobby as I feel," writes Alice to her diary. I remember relating Alice's life to the stories I hear at school, characters in books that I've read, and just thinking about how much she doubts herself. "How is it possible for me to be so miserable and embarrassed and humiliated and beaten and still function, still talk and smile and concentrate?" In summary, one can see that from the beginning of her diary, Alice already has no self-confidence and appreciation.

         Towards the middle of the story, Alice's conflicts seem to rise. Her family, her Mother, Father, younger brother, and younger sister, moves, and Alice sees this as a positive oppurtunity to start over. However, when realizing that she doesn't fit in at her school, she rights to her diary on February 8th; "Well, I've gained almost fifteen pounds since we've been here, my face is a mess and my hair is so stringy and oily I'd have to wash it every night to keep it decent. Dad is never home and Mom is on my back all the time, 'Be happy, put up your hair, be positive, smile, show some spirit, be friendly,' and if they tell me I'm acting negatively and immaturely one more time I'm going to gag." This means that once again, Alice is brought down by the forces of "approval" by the community, and begins to go through the same, self-doubting cycle. However, the story takes a turn when Alice goes back to her old town during summer vacation and runs into her old friend, Jill, who invites her to a year-book signing party taking place that night. "I don't know whether I should be ashamed or elated. I only know that last night I had the most incredible experience of my life. It sounds morbid when I put it in words, but actually it was tremendous and wonderful and miraculous," Alice writes on July 10th. There are about fourteen kids at the party, and Jill brings out some coke. However, what Alice doesn't know is that ten out of the fourteen bottles  of coke had LSD, which is one of the strongest hallucinating drugs- it alters your thoughts and misconceives your perception of reality. When she wakes up the next morning, weary and confused, she promises herself she will not do it again.


       However, as the diary progresses, it becomes obvious that you can't just stop an addiction. "For two days now I've tried to convince myself that using LSD makes me a 'dope addict' and all the other low-class, unclean, despicable things I've heard about kids that use LSD and all the other drugs; but I'm so, so, so, so, so curious, I simply can't wait to try pot, only once, I promise," writes Alice on July 13th. But her instinct doesn't stop her- everyone knows drugs are "wrong," just like they know that so many things are wrong but the drive they have inside them is so intense that it overpowers common sense. Alice goes on to try torpedos, a slang term for crack and marijuana, trips on acid, and begins pushing drugs to make money so she can buy herself more. But Alice's crave for drugs are so strong that she needs to find an even better way to arrive at a state where she can provide her self with it all. Alice gets a job at a local coffee shop and makes a friend, Chris. Chris is on drugs, too, and one day they both decide to run away from school, their parents, and their lives to live the way they want to. So they pack their bags and find a small apartment in California. They both get jobs, pedal drugs and take them each night. But something drives them back home, and they realize that drugs are wrong so they try to keep a low profile and to start themselves over. But everyone at school asks Alice if she's "pushing," and it's just to much that she runs away again and keeps getting high. However, she is brought home once again, but this time, people are trying to trick her into taking drugs. Alice ends up in a mental asylum when someone puts a lot of acid in her chocolate peanuts. She goes crazy, and the police take her away. " 'I don't even feel real,' she states in late July. 'I must be somebody else. I still can't believe that this has actually happened to me. The window is filled with heavy wires, I guess that is better than bars but I still know that I am in some kind of hospital jail.' " Alice rides an extremely bumpy road; she is intensely addicted and goes to infinite measures to get what she wants. But once she is rehabilitated, of course, her parents take her home and she finally, truly, honestly realizes something. She's simply got to stop! And this time, she does. 

       "Go Ask Alice" was a powerful, intense, real story. It made me cry, feel for the characters, and really think about the pure stupidity that drugs can trigger. And I pondered a lot about the meaning of self-trust; trusting your instinct, saying no. At the end of the book, when Alice truly feels like she's healed herself, she makes a big decision. "I used to think I would get another diary after you are filled, or even that I would keep a diary or journal through my whole life. But now I don't really think I will. Diaries are great when you're young. In fact, you saved my sanity a hundred, thousand, million times. But I think when a person gets older she should be able to discuss her problems and thoughts with other people, instead of just with another part of herself as you have been to me." Three weeks after her decision not to keep a diary, the subject's parents came home from a movie and found their daughter lying dead on the floor.