I did not have an easy time of it in high school.
This should not surprise anyone. Even if I hadn't been a mouthy, overly bright, nearsighted nerd with a crush on Mr. Spock and a penchant for wearing clothes that were far more suited to an adult than a teenager, even if my father hadn't died midway through my freshman year, even if I hadn't been in the choir instead of the band, and a feminist who openly said that cheerleading was sexist and dumb, I would have been doomed. I could have been the prettiest, straightest-toothed, blondest girl in the history of Thomas Jefferson High School, and I still would have been doomed.
Doomed, I tell you. D-O-O-M-E-D. Doomed, doomed, doomed, doomed....
For you see, I had the single worst handicap that any teenager can possibly have:
My mother taught at my high school.
That's right, boys and girls and all the ships at sea. My mother, my smart, strong, long-suffering mother, was on the English faculty of TJ. She taught Track One English, remedial reading, and the year after I graduated, she took over the AP English classes from her best friend, who'd delayed her own retirement one year so she could teach me. That Lainey had done so at least in part to spare Mum from having to grade her own child's work did not occur to me until much later, but that had to have been a factor as well.
Regardless, having my mother on the faculty did not make a difficult time any easier. Oh, there were compensations - having Mum around meant that I could grab a ride home when I needed to stay late for choir practice, for one - but a lot of my classmates assumed that I was in honors classes solely because Mum had pulled strings. I even had one tell me to my face that he was certain I'd flunk out of Smith within six weeks because "of course" Mum had been calling in favors so I'd get good grades, or possibly even doing my homework herself. The superintendent's daughter was in the top classes for that very reason, and I was such a weird, unnatural little creature that clearly Mum had done the same for me.
I came within an inch of photocopying my diploma four years later and sending him the copy with "HA!" written on it right beside Jill Ker Conway's signature, but, y'know, someone had to be the adult.
Accusations that I was nothing more than a privileged brat who was riding on Mum's coattails were bad, but that was nothing compared to the bullying. Most of the other kids in the honors classes were nascent Republicans who found me bewildering at best, a dangerously warped feminist at worst, and I was rarely invited to anyone's knotty pine rumpus room for any reason, let alone having fun watching TV or doing each other's hair and nails. I was completely clueless about boys (which may be why and how the lesbian rumors started), and when I tried I was hopeless; I vividly remember a girl who was trying to be kind telling me that I would never have a boyfriend or even a date until I learned to flirt and let the boy do things for me instead of doing things for myself. The boy I actually liked had a crush on my best friend, no one else in the class either liked or (more likely, would admit to liking) the books and TV shows I did, and my love of classical music and 1930's mystery novels did me no good in a time when owning a Leo Sayer album and a book of Rod McKuen's poetry was about as classy as it got.
And then there was the girl I'll call Ms. Burnout.
The class drug pusher/tough girl/all around American bitch, who by some evil coincidence shared my first name, hated my guts for reasons that still aren't clear, and did her best to make my life a living hell. Stolen books and jewelry, rocks through our front window, abusive late night phone calls, rumors that major surgery was actually to cover a botched abortion, rocks thrown at my head after we'd gotten off the school bus, pictures of me for the year book or newspaper defaced, coins thrown at my back as I accompanied the choir on the piano - it was so bad that Mum deliberately kept me home from school on Senior Assembly Day, when I would formally receive my certificate for placing fourth nationwide in the Scholastic Writing Awards, because she didn't want my moment of triumph ruined by Ms. Burnout screaming insults when my name was called.
It was awful, and pace the well meaning folk who tell victims to ignore bullies because then they'll go away, Ms. Burnout didn't. She was very careful not to touch me or injure me in any significant way, which meant that the police couldn't touch her even though they knew very well what she was doing and were itching for a chance to throw her in juvie. Today we have stalking laws, and harassment statutes, and anti-bullying initiatives, but short of sending me away to boarding school, which I absolutely refused to do, there was nothing to do but grit my teeth, think of college, and endure.
Is it any wonder that I went to college six hundred miles away from Pittsburgh? Or that I haven't lived there since 1982? I love my hometown - anyone who's read these diaries knows that - but even now, almost forty years later, I am so petrified at the thought of running into Ms. Burnout at the local Giant Eagle that I simply can't.
If this makes me a coward, oh well. I've been called worse.
My high school experience was miserable, but thanks to familial support, a ton of books, my obsession with Star Trek, and the firm knowledge that within a few years I'd go away to college and never have to see any of my tormentors again, ever, was enough to keep me sane. I knew I was meant for bigger and better things, and if the bigger has never quite happened, the better sure has. I wouldn't trade my life now for anything short of several million dollars, Daniel Day Lewis and/or Viggo Mortenson naked on a platter calling me "Mistress" while Chris Evans, oiled and smiling shyly, serves me amusing little drinks with pieces of fruit and paper umbrellas stuck in them, and Hitler's brain in a jar, and I like it that way.
I also would never, ever go back to high school. Partly it's because, well, I'm 53 now, so why would I do that? Oh, I'd be younger, slimmer, healthier, and my family would be alive, but come on. That part of my life has passed. Besides, it's not as if I can get in a TARDIS or leap down a wormhole to go back and wave my diploma in Mr. You'll Flunk's face, or summon a group of my knightly friends from the SCA to persuade Ms. Burnout that leaving teenage me alone would be a good idea.
Also, 1970's teenage literature was pretty dreadful so it's not as if I'd even have anything decent to read. Think about it: for every Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret there were half a dozen sappy books of poetry that made Rod McKuen look like Tennyson, horrid "message books" like Bonnie Jo, Go Home, Christian polemics like The Cross and the Switchblade that somehow were still in the school library, heartwarming books about overcoming handicaps (Karen, anyone?), and books about teenagers dying young, some of which were actually assigned in class (Death Be Not Proud had me convinced for years that I had a brain tumor every time I had a headache). Teens today, raised on Harry Potter and the exploits of Katniss Everdeen, have no idea how lucky they are.
In particular, they are lucky beyond words that the works of tonight's author are not nearly as popular they once were.
Tonight I bring you only one book, but it's a doozy. Purportedly a true story, it not only was nothing of the sort, it launched the career of an author who found a publishing niche that is, to put it mildly, unique: the faked teenage confessional/warning diary. This odd little subgenre is still around - take a squint at the YA shelves at your local bookstore, especially the odd little nooks and crannies that aren't jammed with Hunger Games knockoffs - but nowhere near as popular as it was when I was trying to figure out how to avoid Ms. Burnout figuring out the combination on my locker and stealing my lunch:
Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous (Beatrice Sparks) - Beatrice Sparks, who died in 2012 at the age of 95, lived a colorful and contented life. Born into a close and loving Mormon family in an Idaho mining town, she grew up there and in California, where she married at the age of 19. She went on a Mormon mission with her husband, had four children, wrote newspaper articles and comic book scripts, and stayed healthy and fit despite a love for See's delicious chocolates. Along the way she somehow had the time study psychology at UCLA and BYU, eventually landing a job as a musical therapist at Utah State Mental Hospital after her family's move from Los Angeles to Provo, Utah. She later taught continuing education classes at BYU, although researchers have yet to find any record of the PhD she claimed on her resume in later years.
By any measure, Beatrice Sparks was living the American Dream: a happy marriage, four accomplished children, good health, and professional success as an author, teacher, and therapist. That she decided to turn her hand to writing "problem books" that would aid children and teenagers less richly blessed only makes sense, and that one of these books would the bestseller lists and become a classic of mid-century teenage fiction is hardly surprising.
That Beatrice Sparks would choose to write from the point of view of a teenager who descends into drug addiction, prostitution, and enough peer pressure to turn a riverbed into delicately stratified sandstone is another matter entirely.
Sparks later claimed that her experiences as a teacher and mental health therapist made her realize how troubled, and how desperately in need of guidance, the youth of America had become. Her own client list was full of cases of seemingly normal, well adjusted kids who would drop one tab of acid, or smoke a single join, or succumb to the siren call of premarital sex, and end up dead, addicted, pregnant, diseased, or similarly wreck their lives and break their parents' hearts. Surely something could be done? And who better than a woman who had raised her own children AND studied psychology AND written for the comics?
Thus is was that Beatrice Sparks went through her case files, found a diary that one of the girls had kept, and sat down to whip the raw text into a publishable form.
The resulting book, written in the first person, claimed to be the actual diary of Sparks' fifteen year old patient, suitably edited so as to conceal the diarist's identity. And at first the diary seems quite normal: the diarist, intelligent and perceptive, writes about normal teenage concerns: boys, clothes, diets, school, clashes with her parents, and fitting in with the cool girls. Complications arise when her father accepts a job in another town, and the diarist, lonely and confused, can't fit in with her new classmates, but at least at first, Sparks manages to keep up the illusion that this might, just might, be a real girl's story.
Unfortunately for everyone but people who like bad books, gradually more and more clues appear that this not only isn't by a teenager, it's by someone who's more intent Sending a Message than telling a good story. I mean, come on - even the smartest, most articular teen isn't going to sling around words like "gregarious" and "impregnable" around in a diary (I didn't use words like that in my fanfiction, and I was an order of magnitude more articulate than the alleged narrator of this book). And what teenage girl is going to write something private like a diary and barely touch on gossip, cliques, other boys, fashion, music, movies, or day to day life?
Worst of all, in what universe is a fifteen year old going to spend four whole pages of text (or at least a dozen or so pages in one of those little leatherette diaries teenage girls used to keep) to her first acid trip and a couple of paragraphs to breaking up with her boyfriend?
Despite such notable failures to maintain the illusion that a fifteen year old who was not directly related to Beatrice Sparks had been anywhere near the manuscript, Sparks was able to get the book into print. The book, which was touted as an actual, genuine diary by a teenage girl and not a middle aged psychologist's idea of an actual, genuine diary by a teenage girl, came out in 1971 and has never been out of print.
It's called Go Ask Alice. You may well have heard of it.
I didn't read it at the time - I was too busy reading Nero Wolfe and watching Wonder Woman and The Man From Atlantis - but hoo boy, did my classmates devour this book! The girls in particular seemed mesmerized by the diarist's story, which included such delights as being slipped LSD in a glass of soda (strictly forbidden to Mormons, even though the LDS Church owns stock in a couple of soda companies), date rape, a pregnancy scare, prescription drugs, non-prescription drugs, underage girls dating college boys (who not only use them as drug mules, but turn out to be a gay couple, oh horrors!), heroin, more date rape, prostitution, peer pressure by alleged friends to take more drugs (classy!), sleeping on the streets, a compassionate priest straight out of The Cross and the Switchblade, and similar tasty delights. The diarist spirals downwards, the tragedies that befall her escalate until one expects Bonnie Tyler or possibly Meat Loaf to provide the overblown soundtrack, and by the time she finally ends up in a mental health asylum to get clean and sober, the reader wouldn't be surprised if a sparkly vampire or two showed up.
Best of all is the ending. The diarist, free of drugs, starts dating a nice boy and communicating with her parents. She writes that she is so happy that she's going to discontinue the diary...and just when it looks like we have a happy ending, hoorah hooray, calloo callay! there's a little epilogue that reads as follows:
The subject of this diary died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary.
Her parents came home from a movie and found her dead. They called the police and the hospital but there was nothing anyone could do.
Was it an accidental overdose? A premeditated overdose? No one knows, and in some ways that question isn't important. What must be of concern is that she died, and that she was only one of thousands of drug deaths that year.
.
Uh. Yeah. Isn't that great?
That this preposterous book, which supposedly only covered two years (but oh what busy and overwrought years they were!), hit the bestseller lists is perhaps not a surprise; after all, this was the era of masterworks like Valley of the Dolls, so a novel about the drug-induced fall of an innocent teenage girl was probably inevitable. That anyone over the age of eighteen actually believed that this was based on a true story, let alone was the diary of a real teenager, is much harder to swallow.
Beatrice Sparks, indignant that anyone would question the veracity of Anonymous' work, didn't help matters when she started making the talk show rounds promoting Go Ask Alice as a tale that every teenager should read. She claimed to be merely the book's editor, but a search at the Copyright Office showed her listed as the book's author, not its editor. There was also no sign that she had obtained the necessary releases from the dead girl's parents giving her the literary rights to the diary, nor was she the alleged author's executrix or administratrix.
Is is any wonder that by 1979 critics were openly wondering just how much of Go Ask Alice was true, and how much was the product of Beatrice Sparks' comics-honed imagination? That Sparks couldn't produce the actual diary (it was supposedly locked away in the publisher's vault), only a partial transcript, didn't help.
Even less helpful was that Go Ask Alice was only the first in a string of similarly structured, similarly voiced "diaries" by similarly unlucky teenagers. Each of these books dealt with a different problem, each showed the disasters that arose when the alleged narrator strayed from the straight and narrow to explore the temptations and delights of the world, and most had an ending that was, to put it mildly, downbeat.
The occult (Jay's Journal)...AIDS (It Happened to Nancy: By an Anonymous Teenager)...homelessness (Almost Lost: the True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets)...pregnancy (Annie's Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, a Pregnant Teenager)....rape by a teacher (Treacherous Love: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager)...eating disorders (Kim : Empty Inside: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager)...the horrors of foster care (Finding Katie: The Diary of Anonymous, A Teenager in Foster Care)...granted that Beatrice Sparks had worked with troubled kids, but seriously, this is about as unending a litany of tragedy, tears, and Teenage Angst as it's possible to imagine. Sparks even wrote scripts for a TV show called "The Kalamity Kids," which thank God and the angels never went beyond a pilot so awful it barely even made it onto YouTube.
Most of these books appeared, sold, and sank into the morass of teenage literature with little note. Oh, occasionally someone would dredge up the questions about Go ask Alice (just how did a teenager with such an eventful, drug-filled life have the time to write a diary at all?), but otherwise Sparks wrote her books, Anonymous got the credit, and kids with a melodramatic bent snapped them right up.
The one exception was Jay's Journal, a follow up to Go Ask Alice which was based on an actual, genuine, teenage boy's diary (for real this time!). The boy, sixteen year old Utah native Alden Barrett, had committed suicide in 1971, and Sparks used about two dozen entries from his diary (about a tenth of the actual text) plus interviews with family and friends to tell his story. Unfortunately for her (and truth, and the memory of Alden Barrett), Sparks attributed his death to a completely fictional obsession with the occult, plus a generous sprinkling of cattle mutilations that lead to a police investigation even though Alden Barrett had never mutilated a cow in his life.
The Barrett family, outraged, disowned the book and wrote their own account of Alden's life. Sparks, no fool, either stopped basing her books on real diaries or took greater pains to conceal the source material, and kept on writing. Her last book, Finding Katie, was published in 2005, only seven years before her death, and how an eighty-eight year old Mormon great-grandmother attempted to get into the headspace of a teenage foster girl is something that is probably best not known.
Go Ask Alice is still very much in print, and still controversial. Evidence surfaced about fifteen years ago that someone other than Beatrice Sparks might have "edited" it (a woman named Linda Glovach might be the other culprit author), and thanks to the explicit references to drugs, sex, rape, and similar joys of teenage life, the book regularly is challenged or banned as being unsuitable for teenagers. No one seems to care whether it's true or not, only if it's entertaining, and despite its numerous flaws, the answer to this seems a resounding yes; there are currently around 4 million copies in print (all still claiming to be by "Anonymous" rather than Beatrice Sparks), and there's no sign that the book will be any less popular ten years from now than it is today. There was even a TV movie starring William Shatner, Andy Griffith, and Ruth Roman (none of them played the diarist, who was portrayed by Jamie Smith-Jackson, future star of Satan's School for Girls), and yes, it's available on DVD).
As for the real identity of the diarist...despite forty years, an authorship controversy, millions of copies, and the Jay's Journal controversy, no one has come forward claiming to have known her, been related to her, or to any knowledge of a single incident in Go Ask Alice. The original diary remains locked in the vaults of Prentice-Hall, the publisher, and not a single person claims to have read it, seen it, transcribed it, or copy edited it.
Gee. I wonder why?
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So, my friends...did you read Go Ask Alice when you were in high school? Take drugs? Drink soda? Did any of your friends? Have you read any of Beatrice Sparks' other works? Have you ever even heard of her until tonight? It's cold and snowy here at the Last Homely Shack, so pull up a chair and share....
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