Go Ask Alice

Go Ask Alice
Annoymous

So Andrew gave me this book. He picked it up for some reason, and when he was done he passed it on. Last night I was looking for something easy and distracting while I was cleaning my room (which for me is neither easy nor distracting) and I picked this up off my bookshelf. I know that some people will veiw it as some sort of blasphmey that even as a coompulsive reader in my tween and early teen years I'd never read it... but I hadn't. What are you going to do? Now I have.

Anyway. The point of this book is pretty clear. She's a pretty normal teenage girl who gets into drugs, has a hard time leaving them behind, finds herself in a number of regrettable situations, and ends up dead. Drugs are bad. I think that we can all understand this.

The thing is, I'm not sure that this girl is a particularly great example of the whole "drugs are bad" motif. Her story has a lot of things in it that are not quite typical of your teenage drug addict, and the message would be anything but encouraging for a kid who had tried drugs but was trying to stop.

First of all, she doesn't make a consious choice to take drugs the first time. Instead, she is given a coke laced with LSD at a party and that starts her down the path to destruction. Somehow, I'm not sure that the warning "don't take coke's from kids you only kind of know" is not the same kind of warning as "don't take drugs." And while I suppose that the message might be something along the lines of "just trying drugs can set you off in the wrong direction." And clearly she makes a number of (VERY) bad choices in the period that follows this first experience, that little bit of trickery made me feel bad for her.

Second, her descriptions of the experience of drug use are enough to make even a psychopharmacology nerd a little curious. Even though she clearly states about a million times toward the end of her diary that the experience isn't worth it, I'm not sure the descriptions of complete and utter bliss and drug induced euphoria would be particularly helpful in the hands of especially curious preteens. I suppose here the message that trying it once can mess you up is justified... since she makes being high sound pretty damn great. Too bad that one LSD trip leads inexorably to scratching your own face off and premature death.

Finally, at the end of the diary she seems to be well on the path to recovery. She's made new friends that aren't into drugs. She's got herself a responsible college boyfriend who is not into drugs and who has a relationship with her parents as well as with her. All of the last journal entries are those of a hopeful young woman who has left a dangerous and destructive past behind her.

And then in the epilogue, she's dead.

What happened? I mean really. I don't think that this is the message that you want to give to young people. "You'll be on the right track, you'll make new friends and make every effort to start a new life, but really there's no hope. Just when it seems that you are on the path to a full recovery and a useful life, your parents will find you dead when they get home from the movies!"

This is not helpful. Especially not helpful for any child that had tried drugs, as in "Well, now that I've tried drugs, I might as well not waste the effort to get off them, I'm screwed anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself!"

But I suppose the anti-drug message lives on. The way things turn out for her while she's on drugs is clearly not the life that people would wish for, her later resistance of some extraordinarily intense peer pressure is admirable, and her description of her "bad trip" and it's aftereffects are enough to scare the living daylights out of some of those previously discribed especially curious preteens. I suppose.

I think that the real problem with this book is that it seems too forced. Too constructed.

Young girl starts diary about how hard it is not to be accepted, and 20 pages in, she's a drug addict rolling her way straight towards death. Repeated use triggered by neatly spaced traumatic life events. Tries to clean up, fails, faces increadible peer pressure and has a bad trip, but parents always love her. Nice boy that she meets accepts her and even *kisses* her! Doesn't care that she's a former addict, or when she goes crazy, or when she's institutionalized. People that don't use drugs are good and loving. Drugs are bad.


It reads like not terribly well created propoganda. (Which according to the reviews on Amazon it just might be.) I even looked back at some of my journalling from around the same age that this girl is supposed to be. They read more like the journals of a 10 year old than a 16 year old. (And no, I am not just hyper-mature, I assure you.) To me that reeks of adult that has no recollection of what it was like to be 15 or 16. Maybe.

I suppose if I had read it in middle school it would be different. The reviews on Amazon are clearly clustered into jeers from jaded adults and raves from teen readers to whom it seemed honest and dramatic and real. Perhaps if I had read this in maddle school this would be one of those essays about returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking.


But I don't think that I would give this to my 13 year old to read, because it is a single minded message about destruction with the utter absence of hope, and if you believe, as I do, that addiction is an illness, than what we need is stories imbued with some element of hope.



***************************************************

Four other notes about reading, books and Barnes and Noble:



1.) On a re-reading childhood favorites note: Madeline L'Engle died this past weekend. I certainly hope that I don't have to write the "returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking" essay about any of those books, since I am certainly going to have to return to them once I finish my little ten book run... or maybe during the ten book run. Kids books make a great little distraction sometimes, and the library will have those. I do own them all, even if they are up in an attic somewhere, so I have no reason to visit Barnes and Noble for this rereading project.

2.) This book doesn't count towards the 10 that I have to read before I return to my wanton bookbuying ways. a.) Because it's not on the list that I made when I made the resolution and b.) because I read it so fast and it was so little that counting it would feel like cheating.

3.) Barnes and Nobel sent me an e-mail on Friday in which they explained that they are going to send me a book for *free.* Apparently, they have this book club thing, and because I signed up for one in the past they have me pegged as a reader type. They are clearly trying to create some buzz around a new author by sending out a bunch of advance reading copies of her book and getting us to talk about them. While this does mean that there is a new book on its way to me in the mail... it does not count as a trip to Barnes and Noble because I neither visited the store or gave them money in exchange for it.

and 4.) We stopped at a Barnes and Noble for coffee last week (since it was the nearest coffee selling place to where we were), and I didn't buy ANYTHING. (Well, execpt coffee, but that doesn't count.) GO ME!