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.

[1][2] 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.

[9] 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.

[12] The title was taken from a line in the 1967 Grace Slick-penned Jefferson Airplane song "White Rabbit"[7][13] ("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.

[14][15] 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.

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.

[12] The manuscript that later became Go Ask Alice was initially prepared for publication by Beatrice Sparks, a Mormon youth counselor then in her early 50s, who had previously done various forms of writing.

Sparks had reportedly noted that the general public at that time lacked knowledge about youth drug abuse, and she likely had both educational and moral motives for publishing the book.

[35] 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".

[23][24][35][41] 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.

[9] In a 1995 Village Voice column for Banned Books Week, Nat Hentoff described it as "an extraordinarily powerful account of what it's actually like to get hooked on drugs" that "doesn't preach".

[42] 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).

[35] The portrayal of the diarist's drug use, progressing from unwittingly ingesting LSD to injecting speed within a few days, and making a similar quick transition from her first use of marijuana to heroin, has been deemed unrealistic.

[6][38][46] Although school boards and committees reached varying conclusions about whether Go Ask Alice had literary value,[32][33] educators generally viewed it as a strong cautionary warning against drug use.

However, some adults who read the book as teens or pre-teens have written that they paid little attention to the anti-drug message and instead related to the diarist's thoughts and emotions,[43][47] or vicariously experienced the thrills of her rebellious behavior.

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 teenage girl, over time the book has come to be regarded by researchers as a fake memoir written by Beatrice Sparks,[3][2][4][5][6][7][25][26] possibly with the help of one or more co-authors.

[1] Despite significant evidence of Sparks' authorship, a percentage of readers and educators have continued to believe that the book is a true-life account of a teenage girl.

The original edition contained a note signed by "The Editors" that included the statements, "Go Ask Alice is based on the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old drug user....Names, dates, places and certain events have been changed in accordance with the wishes of those concerned.

According to Lauren Adams, Publishers Weekly magazine was the only source to question the book's authenticity on the grounds that it "seem[ed] awfully well written".

[6] Suspicions were heightened in 1979 after two newly published books about troubled teenagers (Voices and Jay's Journal) advertised Sparks' involvement by calling her "the author who brought you Go Ask Alice".

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.

[25] Urban folklore expert Barbara Mikkelson of snopes.com has written that even before the authorship revelations, ample evidence indicated that Go Ask Alice was not an actual diary.

According to Mikkelson, the writing style and content—including a lengthy description of an LSD trip but relatively little about "the loss of [the diarist's] one true love", school, gossip, or ordinary "chit-chat"—seems uncharacteristic of a teenage girl's diary.

Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

[4] As of 2011, a UK paperback edition published and marketed by Arrow Books contained the statement "This Is Alice's True Story" on the front cover.

[21] Go Ask Alice has been a frequent target of censorship challenges due to its inclusion of profanity and references to runaways, drugs, sex, and rape.

[4][10] Nilsen and others have criticized this on the basis that the dishonesty of presenting a probable fake memoir to young readers as real should raise greater concerns than the content.

It starred Jamie Smith-Jackson, William Shatner, Ruth Roman, Wendell Burton, Julie Adams, and Andy Griffith.

[71][72][73][74] A 2012 novel called Lucy in the Sky was published anonymously, featuring the story of a preppy Santa Monica student who falls into drug addiction and alcoholism.

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.