Warning Note
- Author:
Peter Laurie
A new book chronicling the life and death of an American teen-age girl who became enmeshed in the drug sub-culture does not ring true to this reviewer. He suspects that the book is taking an example and using it as ‘a sort of sociological “pornoganda” ‘ and finds that it takes a hard, puritan view of life. This is a rather dreadful book. It’s diarist heroine confides :
Confidentially, diary, I still care. I guess I’ll always love him, but maybe just before we leave and I’m thin, and my skin is flawless and petal smooth and clear, and I have clothes like a fashion model he’ll ask me for another date. Shall I turn him down or stand him up, or will I?I’m afraid I will? weaken and go out with him?
Such mawkish passages recur with numbing frequency through this record of eighteen months in the life of an American, white, middle class, midwest girl who is fifteen when the book begins. Her father is the unnamed Dean of an unnamed American University; they live in a lovely Spanish style house with walls of thick dark wood and two steps down into a sunken living room. One can imagine. Her mother, an immaculate lady, but a nag, adjures her to respond to events ‘with an attitude that will determine my altitude.’
On good days she bakes orange rolls for her respectable swains; on bad ones she wears moccasins, beads and tassled leather skirts. When she says ‘man’ her father roars with rage. She must have been an irritating child.
Most diaries have a characteristic disconnectedness : for us the whole thing is in the past, we expect connections between earlier and later passages that the writer, for whom the next entry is always in the future, cannot make.
This diary is not like that. It has a story line of a consistency one meets only in novels. Alice’s parents move to a new university and a new home. She goes to a new school, is ignored, puts on weight, suffers crises of self confidence. Then she makes friends, gets a job in a little boutique where they sell hippy gear. The other assistant gives her pills for depression. She meets others who use them. She goes to a coca-cola party where half the bottles have been laced with LSD: the kids who don’t get those ‘baby-sit’ the others as they trip.
A minor pusher
She becomes a minor pusher in school to finance her experiments, and has a twinge of conscience about selling acid to nine year olds. The boy who wholesales her drugs seduces her and they have sex only when they’re both high?and then not very often. She doesn’t like this; still less when she finds he’s a homosexual, tells the police about him and runs away to California with her friend where they start a little shop of their own. The business prospers, but they are drawn into a corrupt set of minor film actors who use them as sexual toys. After a last spree, she realises that the ‘dirty sons of bitches had taken turns raping us and treating us sadistically and brutally.’ The two girls go home to an ecstatic Christmas.
She repents, and writes:
Now I can sing with the others, ‘Oh come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant’ for I am triumphant this time, really I am! But within a month she’s smoking substance again, runs away once more. No shop this time, but dirt, hunger and dope in the company of such as these: A fat girl with stringy blonde hair is getting to her knees on a green on green upon purple robe.
She’s got a guy with her and he has a ring in his nose and multi-coloured designs on his shaven head. They keep saying ‘love’ to each other. It’s beautiful to watch.
In the end she rings her parents again:
I can’t understand how they can possibly love me, but they do! They do! They do! They were glad to hear from me and know I was alright. It seems a good strategy to run away. She starts a new diary. Gran and Gramps fly in, lined with suffering?caused by her thoughtless escapades. Her mind goes wonky, but she resists the kids in school who want her to start in on drugs again. They call her Nancy Nice and Mary Pure. ‘It’s terrible not to have a friend.’
Gramps dies, but she meets Joel a serious, religious university student, working his way through college. Her father starts manoeuvres to get him a scholarship. But the kids in school resent her dropping out of the drug set and shop them to the police. They plant joints in her handbag, threaten to do the same to her father’s car. Gran dies.
Finally she’s kindly baby-sitting and eats some chocolate-covered pea-nuts lying on a table. They’re laced with acid: she plunges into a wild trip, but all the time thinking about the baby’s safety through her wild hallucinations. She comes to in a locked asylum room, tattered, hairless, lacking fingernails. Her best friend in the ward turns out to be a thirteen year old baby prostitute. She gets out and starts leading the kind of life her parents approve. She has ‘Joel and my new super straight friends, and they’ll help.’
She gives up her diary and three weeks later is dead, killed we are to assume, by a drug overdose, though this isn’t spelt out and there is notextural evidence to connect her early demise with her adventures.
I’ve sketched the plot and style of this book in some detail because it arouses my suspicions. The sequence of events is too ordered, the style of writing seems to me to be just how a teenager involved in these scenes wouldn’t describe them, but how a fairly imaginative Reader’s Digest-type right wing writer might. Look again, for example at the ‘Fat girl with stringy long blonde hair’ passage. It may have been beautiful for Alice to watch but it certainly isn’t described in a way that conveys that feeling. The style of description is designed, surely, to make Alice’s mother throw up.
When one reads it again, the sequence of events, the skeleton of the story, stands out in a way that doesn’t strike me as being the least lifelike. Consider: she gets a job in hippy shop, which leads to pills, to pushing, to sex with queers. She runs away rom home, falls into bad adult company. On her return she is tricked by her apparently respectable schoolmates into renewed drug use. She runs away again because of her parents’ nagging, but this time sinks low, doesn’t eat, doesn’t wash, agrees to bizarre sex to get her fix, doesn’t even put dates on her diary entries (which are no less full or lucid than at other times). But, even after her second return and real determination to give up drug use, she is powerless, assaulted from without and within. Her mind cracks under the abuse she’s given it, her evil little friends are determined to get her into police trouble (and with some reason). She is committed to a state mental hospital. She dies.
Hard view of life
Spelt out like this, it is a textbook story of what happens to youngsters who break out, even in the slightest detail (those moccasins), from their parents’ culture. It is a hard, puritan view of life: repent as ye may, evil deeds will catch up.
This is not to say, of course, that exactly this sequence of events may not have happened to a girl called Alice who lived and died wherever this one is supposed to have. But one sees the diary as construction?propaganda rather than even fiction?and not as the true record of another human being’s experiences in this not very pleasant world, it looses all interest. We know after the first few pages how it will run, and it is entirely unnecessary to read James Hemming’s ‘Psychologist’s Comment’ at the end. He tells us that any young person may become a drug user if allowed out of the home. Alice’s parents were at fault because they made her feel inferior and unwanted, in contrast to her younger but more lovable siblings. They had a fatally moralising attitude, no good today for dealing with the young. On the the other hand we should be neither too prim nor too slack. And so on.
Doubtless, all good stuff, but the text of the sermon is found to be spurious. Go Ask Alice is an odd mixture of relentless Jehovadom and modern liberal flim-flam, a sort of sociological ‘pornoganda’ rather than a serious and useful work.
Go ask Alice, Anonymous, published by Eyre Methuen, ?1.50 30
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.