Review: Unmask Alice

Like any self-respecting Gen-X girl, I read Go Ask Alice. Like a lot of teenage girls, I wasn't above consuming entertainment that leaned hard on tragedy and melodrama. Also, and this can't be overstated, if it was a banned book, I was more than likely going to read it. Which just goes to perfectly illustrate what book banners willfully refuse to grasp. Go Ask Alice is a laughably terrible book that should have faded into obscurity decades ago. It didn't for two reasons: Book banners and because people would rather look for a boogeyman to blame "the problem with kid's today" then dig deeper into what actually might be bothering them. 

Which brings us to Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson. This largely tells the story of Beatrice Sparks a evangelical Mormon wife and mother who had a hardscrabble upbringing and put the hustle in hustler. Seriously, you'd admire her moxie if she wasn't such a trash human being who lies like a rug and leaves ruined lives in her wake, all to feed her own sense of hubris. Do I believe in Hell? I'm not sure. But gods forgive me, if there is one, I hope this woman is roasting. 

Sparks was trying to make her way hustling as a writer. This was back in the era when you could bang out a few hundred words here and there and maybe make a few bucks. Nobody could accuse Sparks of lacking ambition, she took jobs for free and fabricated credentials along the way, that of course nobody ever checked into, despite her habit of contradicting herself. Through a series of happenstance she falls into the orbit of Art Linkletter, one of the most trusted and "family friendly" entertainers of his day. In 1969, his daughter, Diane, commits suicide by jumping out a window - and the claim is that she was high on LSD and/or experiencing a "flashback" at the time. In his grief, Linkletter gets his wagon hitched to Nixon's War on Drugs, and for parents, already confused and slightly terrified by dirty hippies and the counter-culture movement, LSD became a convenient boogeyman to hitch their wagon to. Enter Sparks with the diary of a young woman she claims she counseled (by this point Spark was passing herself off as a counsellor heading down the road to eventually concoct a PhD and putting Dr. in front of her name). 

Go Ask Alice takes off like a rocket, and Sparks is seething. Like an idiot, even though she didn't want to, her name is nowhere on the book. Young Adult as a genre barely existed and her agent and publisher believed (rightly so) that young people wouldn't read the true diary of a young drug addicted girl if a grown-up's name was slapped on the front cover. So even though Alice was a success, it just made Sparks hungrier for her moment in the sun. Enter: Jay's Journal. 

I did know about the Satanic Panic of course - mainly through the very high profile cases of the McMartin Preschool Trial and West Memphis Three. What I didn't know is you can trace back the entire Satanic Panic nonsense to Sparks "editing" Jay's Journal. Jay was a real life Utah boy named Alden Barrett who committed suicide at 16. Emerson spends quite a bit of time laying out Alden's story by talking with his family, friends, and reading a self-published book written by his younger brother. Alden was exceptionally bright but also troubled. Then bake in he's growing up in conservative Utah where everybody is expected to toe the line and after he blows out the candles on his 18th birthday cake, he'll likely be dumped into the jungles of Vietnam to fight a hopelessly unwinnable war. After his death his parents are naturally bereft, and that's when they find his journal. Needing her son's death not to be in vain, thinking that maybe his journal could help other lost and confused young people, his mother gives his diary to the woman who helped so many others by "editing" Go Ask Alice. And that's when Hell is unleashed for this family.

Sparks changes some names and places, but does such a shit job of it that it doesn't take long for people in the Barrett's small town to fit the pieces together. The worst of it is that while Sparks does lift some whole passages out of Alden's journal, she infuses what people now think of as "his diary" with a bunch of Satanic Devil Worship BS that is completely fabricated out of whole cloth. Alden was conflicted about the religious beliefs of his family and his Utah small town, he excelled at debate and like most teenagers questioned absolutely everything, but a devil worshipping Satanist who was sacrificing animals and taking part in bizarre midnight rituals? Hardly. 

Jay's Journal landed at a time when teen suicide was on the rise, and human beings, if nothing else, prefer pat, easy answers. It's more desirable than the truth, which is often layered, complicated and messy. Why are teens killing themselves? It couldn't possibly be mental illness, questioning of identity, misogyny, prejudice, social and political anxiety (the Cold War was a trip y'all). No, it's SATANISM! It's heavy metal music! It's Dungeons & Dragons! That's what's wrong with the kids today. Satan is coming for your children! Patently absurd of course, but humans love themselves a witch hunt.  We can laugh about the rubes believing in Satanic cults coming for children but look around you. Nothing has changed. Are today's kids alright?  Probably not. But what I do know Jan is their problems aren't because your public library has Gender Queer on the shelf. 

Nobody is going to confuse this book with a piece of hard-hitting investigative journalism. Emerson slips in a few F-Bombs and there are portions where he simply cannot hide his sarcasm. If anything I found him restrained. The Jay's Journal portion of this book would have had me writing IN ALL CAPS WITH MUTLIPLE EXCLAMATION POINTS OMG!!!!!  But he does his homework. I have to imagine he gave Newspapers.com a serious workout, citing multiple newspaper stories that are truly mind-boggling, and it's obvious he talked to a fair number of people touched by Sparks' vile WTFery, and when he doesn't talk to them (usually folks associated with the publishing industry - color me not shocked) he states plainly that he didn't talk to them (usually in the form of "despite my numerous requests for an interview....").  

Which leads me to my last point. As a librarian currently in charge of overseeing a book budget, trying to keep physical shelves full and being price gorged into oblivion for eBooks and downloadable audiobooks, let's just say the publishing industry gets another black eye to add to their expanding collection, chasing a buck while not doing the literal bare minimum of fact-checking (seriously, a garden trowel would have uncovered most of her blatant lies) into Sparks' fabricated credentials. Which just goes to show that it's the same as it ever was. 

A rollercoaster of emotions, gripping and engrossing. Best book I've read so far this year.

Final Grade = A