Go Ask Alice | Go Ask Alice

I read the book, Go Ask Alice, a non-fiction diary by an anonymous author. This book was published by Avon Books in 1971, and has 318 pages.

Go Ask Alice targets mostly the teenage audience because Alice's problems are as relevant today as in the 1960's. She teaches readers about will power and the adolescent cliché of not knowing who she is, which in turn helps readers understand the struggles of the emotionally confused, teen majority.

The book begins with a 15-year-old girl who is struggling with her family, her appearance and her social life. When the family is forced to move due to her father's job, Alice decides that she is going to change. The move doesn't help her. She becomes an emotional wreck and soon finds herself deep in a world of hardcore drugs, drinking, and sex. Alice experiments with everything trying to avoid being an outcast, which leads her deeper into the world of parties.

Alice and her friend Chris flee to San Francisco to get away from everything and to be on their own with their own freedom, but eventually, after opening a shop on the street, becoming tangled in the druggie crowd, and being raped, Alice calls home and returns there. Her drug use is off and on, and she seems to want to change but always finds herself a slave the drugs and the lifestyle that she so guiltily lives.

Alice meets a boy from her Father's college and shares a very close relationship with him and is happy to renew her family life, but when she takes an accidental trip due to acid on chocolate covered peanuts that she innocently indulges in, she ends up in an insane asylum. When Alice gets out, she decides that keeping a diary is no longer necessary, so she stops writing. Three weeks after the last entry, Alice dies due to what many people believe to be a drug overdose.

I really enjoyed this book because it was very interesting to see how other teenage girls decide to handle their problems. This book helped me in some of my mindsets as far as the decisions that I might be forced to make in the future go. I think that any teenager who is interested in how the real world is, should defiantly read this book. I would recommend Go Ask Alice to anyone who wants a true story of someone who had to discover the hard way what society is saturated with.