‘Go Ask Alice’ Is a Lie. But Bookstores Won’t Stop Selling It.

Watching that documentary about it and the horrendous sequel that uses and distorts the story of a real kid who committed suicide makes me SICK

unmask alice is an incredibly well written and researched book- it’s really worth a read/listen !

Smh at anyone other than Sarah Marshall writing about this 😂

The different experiences people have with this book fascinates me. My mom read it when it came out and was still believed to be ostensibly real. She read it because she wasn’t supposed to – she was a suburban kid who had to sneak reading Nancy Drew novels so Go Ask Alice was something definitely not approved in her household and it was sort of an initial introduction to a world she only vaguely knew existed. She gave it to me to read in middle school, because she had found it vaguely thrilling as a book she snuck reading and I remember being like “wtf is this”? So I had her reread it and obviously her experience as a parent in the 90s reading it was wildly different. I can’t imagine ever giving it to a kid to read now, 30 some odd years later.

i was obsessed with this book as a child for some reason. that, and that one about the girl who discovers she was kidnapped by seeing herself on the side of a milk carton. even as a kid, i knew that go ask alice couldn’t be real. it just…did not click.

We know it’s fiction now, it’s a popular fictional diary about drugs. Why should bookstores not sell it?

I was aware of this book (I think from You’re Wrong About) but I actually read it for the first time earlier this year, immediately followed by relistening to the YWA episodes and Unmask Alice, and now I’m kind of obsessed with it. The gay stuff is what’s really interesting to me, and tbh I don’t think Beatrice recognized quite how gay it was when she wrote it. It’s such a fascinating look into one particular era and one woman’s specific thoughts/fears/cultural hangups

For some reason, my strongest memory of this book is Alice renting a storefront or apartment & she wants to turn it into a teen hangout. I think she described it as having peppermint candy stripes & shag carpeting. That’s when I realized the book was fake.

One of many reasons I greatly appreciate Torey Hayden, one of her books [Ghost Girl](https://www.torey-hayden.com/books/ghost-girl/) could have easily been shoehorned into Satanic Panic. She refused and went back and forth with her editors until they agreed to a long epilogue as a compromise. I haven’t read this one, and Torey’s website is down (possibly defunct) so I’m going from memory.

Torey never had any confirmation of what the girl was going through, short of knowing she and her sisters had been taken from their parents. Her best guess was that the family was involved in a pedophile ring. The girl knew how to pack up and set up video filming equipment. This was the 1970s when the technology was new, Torey a self described “geek” was using it to film and rewatch her teaching to find areas of improvement. The girl was able to set the equipment up and make a video asking for help in a short enough time that no one saw her do it. Her parents denied having any hobby that would have given her the kind of practice needed to know how to use it. There were other signs, talking about another child who never seemed to exist, talking about threats of ghosts and monsters. Signs of a child being abused and threatened to never tell.

The website mentioned that Torey found the girl years later. She was working on a doctorate but didn’t like talking about her childhood.

I swear I listened to a podcast about this exact thing and breaking down how messed up it was, and then it was found out to be fake. 🤯

Wow

I loved this book but knew it was absolutely fake.

We had to read this in 6 th grade as part of DARE. All it did was really make 12 year old me super excited to try drugs and I did the first chance I got.

Read it in middle school around 1980, as did every other girl. We all assumed it was nonfiction.

Many of them also believed Flowers in the Attic to be nonfiction. (I made myself even less popular by pointing out that the cover literally said it was fiction….)

I think I read this in grade 8 English lol

I read this at 12 or 13 and knew it was not legit, it was so insane.

“Another day, another blowjob.”

I love the book because of the back story to it. Maybe it’s because I like reading books that had a significant impact on culture/classics. But yes. It’s not actually a true story. Oh well.

I had that book. I might still have it somewhere. I think people making up fake diaries is fine; but they should definitely be marketed as fiction. To do otherwise is disingenuous. Somebody owes me my money back.

Who the fuck is Alice? IYKYK

I’ve never heard of this book before in my life. Wow.