«Алисадан сұра» романының тарихы мен мәні

1971 novel by Beatrice Sparks
the book

Go Ask Alice is a 1971 book about a teenage girl who develops a drug addiction at age 15 and runs away from home on a journey of self destructive escapism. Attributed to "Anonymous", the book is in diary form, and was originally presented as being the edited actual diary of the unnamed teenage protagonist. Questions about the book's authenticity and true authorship began to arise in the late 1970s, and Beatrice Sparks is now generally viewed as the author of the found manuscript–styled fictional document. Sparks went on to write numerous other books purporting to be real diaries of troubled teenagers. Some sources have also named Linda Glovach as a co author of the book. Go Ask Alice has also ranked among the most frequently challenged books for several decades due to its use of profanity and explicit references to sex and rape, as well as drugs. The book was adapted into the 1973 television film Go Ask Alice, starring Jamie Smith Jackson and William Shatner.

The title was taken from a line in the 1967 Grace Slick penned Jefferson Airplane song "White Rabbit" ("go ask Alice/ when she's ten feet tall"); the lyrics in turn reference scenes in Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, in which the title character Alice eats and drinks various substances, including a mushroom, that make her grow larger or smaller. Slick's song is understood as using Carroll's story as a metaphor for a drug experience.

In 1968, a 15 year old girl begins keeping a diary, in which she records her thoughts and concerns about issues such as crushes, weight loss, sexuality, social acceptance, and relating to her parents. The dates and locations mentioned in the book place its events as occurring between 1968 and 1970 in California, Colorado, Oregon, and New York City. The two towns in which the diarist's family reside during the story are unidentified, the only indications being that universities are situated in both. The diarist's father, a college professor, accepts a dean position at a new college, requiring the family to relocate. The diarist has difficulty adjusting to her new school, but soon becomes best friends with a girl named Beth. When Beth leaves for summer camp, the diarist returns to her hometown, where she meets an old school acquaintance, who invites her to a party where glasses of cola—some of which are laced with LSD—are served. The diarist unwittingly ingests LSD and has an intense and pleasurable trip. Over the following days the diarist socializes with the other teens from the party, willingly uses more drugs, and loses her virginity while on acid. In an episode where the diarist describes having sex with a drug dealer, she quotes an onlooker's remark indicating that her name may be Carla. Although a girl named Alice appears very briefly in the book, she is not the diarist, but a fellow runaway whom the diarist meets on the street in Coos Bay, Oregon. Despite the lack of any evidence in the book that the diarist's name is Alice, the covers of various editions have suggested that her name is Alice by including blurb text such as "This is Alice's true story" and "You can't ask Alice anything anymore. But you can do something—read her diary." Reviewers and commentators have also frequently referred to the anonymous diarist as "Alice",

In the 1973 television film based on the book, the protagonist played by Jamie Smith Jackson is named "Alice". Sparks later claimed that the book was based on a real diary she received from a real teenage girl,

With the help of Art Linkletter, a popular talk show host for whom Sparks had worked as a ghostwriter, the manuscript was passed on to Linkletter's literary agent, who sold it to Prentice Hall. also helped publicize the book. Even before its publication, Go Ask Alice had racked up large advance orders of 18,000 copies. and an international bestseller, being translated into 16 languages. Alleen Pace Nilsen has called it "the book that came closest to being a YA phenomenon" of its time, although saying it was "never as famous as [the later] Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games series". The 1973 television film based on the book heightened reader interest, Go Ask Alice has been cited as establishing both the commercial potential of young adult fiction in general, and the genre of young adult anti drug novels, It was also recommended by Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and The Christian Science Monitor, Some reviews focused on the realism of the book's material, without further addressing the literary merit of the book. According to Nilsen and Lauren Adams, the book was not subjected to the regular forms of literary criticism because it was presumed to be the real diary of a dead teenager. However, starting in the 1990s, the book began to draw criticism for its heavy handedness, melodramatic style and inauthenticity, in view of the growing evidence that it was fiction rather than a real teenager's diary (see Authorship and veracity controversies). Reviewing the book again for The New York Times in 1998, Marc Oppenheimer called it "poorly written", "laughably written", and "incredible", although some other writers have pointed to the material as being plausible or even appealing to young readers. The book has been criticized for equating homosexuality with "degradation", illness, sin, and guilt.

Although school boards and committees reached varying conclusions about whether Go Ask Alice had literary value, or vicariously experienced the thrills of her rebellious behavior. Go Ask Alice has also been used in curricula dealing with mood swings and death.

Although Go Ask Alice has been credited to an anonymous author since its publication, and was originally promoted as the real, albeit edited, diary of a real teenage girl, over time the book has come to be regarded by researchers as a fake memoir written by Beatrice Sparks, The paperback edition first published in 1972 by Avon Books contained the words "A Real Diary" on the front cover just above the title, and the same words were included on the front covers of some later editions. or as an edited or slightly fictionalized version of her authentic diary. Some sources claimed that the girl's parents had arranged for her diary to be published after her death. was also credited at that time with having edited the book; a later source refers to Roberts as having "consulted" on the book.) According to Caitlin White, when Sparks' name became public, some researchers discovered that copyright records listed Sparks as the sole author—not editor—of the book, raising questions about whether she had written it herself. In an article by Nilsen, based in part on interviews with Sparks and published in the October 1979 issue of School Library Journal, Sparks said that she had received the diaries that became Go Ask Alice from a girl she had befriended at a youth conference. The girl allegedly gave Sparks her diaries in order to help Sparks understand the experiences of young drug users and to prevent her parents from reading them. According to Sparks, the girl later died, although not of an overdose. Sparks said she had then transcribed the diaries, destroying parts of them in the process (with the remaining portions locked in the publisher's vault and unavailable for review by Nilsen or other investigators), and added various fictional elements, including the overdose death. Although Sparks did not confirm or deny the allegations that the diarist's parents had threatened a lawsuit, she did say that in order to get a release from the parents, she had only sought to use the diaries as a "basis to which she would add other incidents and thoughts gleaned from similar case studies," according to Nilsen. Mikkelson also noted that in the decades since the book's publication, no one who knew the diarist had ever been tracked down by a reporter or otherwise spoken about or identified the diarist. Later, the family of real life teenage suicide Alden Barrett contended that Jay's Journal used 21 entries from Barrett's real diary that the family had given to Sparks, but that the other 191 entries in the published book had been fictionalized or fabricated by Sparks, and that Barrett had not been involved with the occult or "devil worship". Sparks went on to produce numerous other books presented as diaries of anonymous troubled teens (including Annie's Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, a Pregnant Teenager and It Happened to Nancy: By an Anonymous Teenager) or edited transcripts of therapy sessions with teens (including Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets). Some commentators have noted that these books use writing styles similar to Go Ask Alice also stated that Glovach was "a co author of Go Ask Alice".

Stand up comedian Paul F. Tompkins' 2009 comedy album Freak Wharf contains a track titled "Go Ask Alice" in which he derides the book as "the phoniest of balonies" and jokingly suggests it was authored by the writing staff of the police drama series Dragnet. The album title comes from a passage in the book in which the diarist refers to a mental hospital as a "freak wharf". American band Ice Nine Kills drew inspiration from the book for their song "Alice" on the 2015 album Every Trick in the Book. Musical artist Melanie Martinez based her unreleased track, "Birthing Addicts", on the book in 2011. The song was originally written for an extra credit assignment at Melanie's school. It was meant to be on her unreleased EP, Take Me to the Moon, but was scrapped upon completion.