Go Ask Alice

This book is on the Challenged Book List

Exposition: This personal account of a young girls spiral into drug addiction begins with her first diary entry. She is a typical teenager, adjusting to school, struggling with friendships, noticing boys, and concerned with finding her place in high school. It is written in a typical teenage voice that could be the voice of any teenager until she finds out the family will be moving.
Conflict: Although we don't know the girl's name the reader can relate to her excitement and fear about the upcoming move to a new school. Once there she has to begin making new friends all over again. She finds herself feeling isolated and her mood shifts between typical hormonal ups and downs of adjusting to her new situation. She returns to visit her grandparents for the summer and is introduced to drugs. Her daily entries are, at times, difficult to read. She is conflicted on so many levels. She has a love/hate relationship with drugs and at the heigth of her internal struggle she chooses to run away with another girl struggling with the same demons.
Rising Action: Once the girls are in their new city, they vow to stay away from drugs. They get jobs and find an apartment. We are really rooting for them but their lives are difficult. When they are invited to a party they jump at the chance to go and are once again inundated into the drug world. After a month our girl realizes she can't continue on this path and calls her parents who are elated to have her home again.
Falling Action: Basically our girl does a repeat performance, staying clean, finding drugs once again, and running away. After months of being on the street she once again calls home and is accepted with open arms. She vows that it will never happen again until she is slipped some bad stuff and is hospitalized.
Resolution: After getting out of the hospital she is once again comitted to staying off drugs. The last of her diary entries shows a committed, happy, young lady that is not going to let drugs rule he life. Sadly, the book notes this at the end: "The subject of this book died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary." No one knows if it was an accidental or premeditated overdose.


This was a very hard book for me to read. It was very sad. I checked several times if it was indeed considered a young adult book. Indeed it is and was actually required reading for many high school students in the 70's. Supposedly students would be "turned off" to drugs after reading this account. Literary elements such as personification of the diary is used throughout. Examples are "Oh Dear Diary, I'm sorry I've neglected you."
Annonymous. (1971). Go ask Alice: A real diary. New York: Simon & Schuster.