As a 90s kid, I remember being fascinated by the books Go Ask Alice and Jay's Journal - and then being confused about their origins. For all lit-nerdy 90s kids, this is a must-read exploration of the woman behind these books and their role in propagating the disastrous war on drugs and the satanic panic. It's meticulously researched, and engagingly written.

This book was a bit out of my comfort zone for me but it really intrigued me and over all I stayed intrigued through the entirety of the book! It was informative and riveting. I enjoyed the authors writing especially since the concept was so interesting.

In a world where baby boomers were becoming parents and their biggest fear was their kids doing what they did in the sex drugs and rock ‘n’ roll era that they created. They were a prime target for these two diaries by anonymous. It’s a butterfly wing can set off a slight wave then these books settle of a hurricane and having lived through Satanic panic it really makes me angry. So many innocent people were touched negatively so this woman could get some sort of recognition that she seems to have needed and she didn’t care who suffered. although 50 years too late, I am so happy Rick Emerson decided to write this book and let the world know what a fraud this “author“ is. It makes me very sad and almost sick to think about the people disaffected and change their lives for the horrible. This really is a must read especially for those who are baby boomers or children of baby boomers and that’s a book I highly recommend. I was given this book by Nick Galli and I am leaving this review voluntarily. Please forgive any grammatical punctuation errors as I am blind and dictate my review but all opinions are definitely my own.

I found this book to be brilliantly researched and well written. The case itself is deeply disturbing and my heart broke especially for ‘Jay.’ It’s a intriguing look at a controversy that was very much ‘of its time.’ - excellent but not an easy read.

This book was truly wild. Beatrice Sparks exploited so many people and told so many lies. She looked completely embarrassing by the end! This book also gets a little into the war on drugs as well as the satanic panic.

The author uses ableist language and I think he was careless when describing certain people and their situations. For those reasons I can give this no more than two stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and BenBella Books for this digital copy!

I remember reading Go Ask Alice in the 80s as a rite of passage.

When I started as a middle school English teacher in the late 90s, I was shocked when the librarian told me that the book was actually fiction. She gave me the highlights version of how the cataloguing of the book had changed over the years.

When I saw this book listed on NetGalley, I was pumped. I wanted to read the whole story. How did this author or publisher get away with passing off this diary as real?

The three stars are entirely for the research put into this account. Emerson clearly did his due diligence and pieced together multitudes of documents and interviews to share this publishing hoax.

Sadly, Emerson’s snark gets in the way of his narrative, and his organization gets muddied in places.

As I was reading, there were several times when I wondered where he was going, but I could always count on him adding a disparaging footnote. Funny how he criticized Beatrice Sparks’ writing style, but his own style included sprinkling nonfiction with so many adjectives.

It almost felt like reading a first draft. Definitely a frustrating read for me. The topic is so compelling, and I know this book could have been a five-star read.

If you’re someone who remembers the Go Ask Alice buzz from your childhood, or you’re pursuing a master’s of library science, or you have some niche interest in this topic, then you can probably read this book and take away some good information. Just be prepared for a snide guide.

As someone who read Go Ask Alice in my youth and had no idea (or intention to find out) if it was fact or fiction, the premise of this book grabbed me. Anonymous was an actual person? Add in the subtitle about drugs and Satanism and I was there.

This book had a clear agenda. Non-fiction, yes, but with the intent to let you know Beatrice Sparks was a Bad Person. And I don't think I disagree after reading. Rick Emerson just has an Opinion and it's obvious throughout the book. He fills the footnotes with snide and sassy remarks that were enjoyable even though I thought they were a bit odd for the setting. I don't know how unbiased non-fiction should truly be but it seems like maybe more than this book.

The layout of the book is a bit jumbled. I often felt as though when I got to a new section and the author had jumped to a totally different person/place/time that I had maybe missed something or skipped ahead. Emerson does a good job of setting the scene and building up information to tell the story but I don't know if there might have been a way for some of the transitions to be smoother. I still greatly enjoyed all of the details Emerson added in each section to really show how everything led from one thing to another and snowballed into the 70s being what they were: namely, fucking nuts.

I think Emerson did a great job of setting the scene and making a non-fiction book read much like a scandalous novel. He did interviews and did some intense fact-checking (including of the weather) to really help the reader feel involved in the story. The book brought a lot of interesting events together in my mind that I had no real idea were connected. Let's start with: I had no idea Go Ask Alice was written in the 70s. Add that to the creation of LSD and Satanic Panic and this book was a pretty wild ride.

I would recommend to anyone that has read any books by this author, those who enjoy learning about the 1970s, or those who love a good mystery!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC!

A fascinating look at the Go Ask Alice phenomenon, 70s “satanic panic,” the Mormon church/society, and the incredible hubris of Beatrice Sparks.

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley and Be bella Books.

So, I read GAA in middle school and even then something seemed off for a true story so I wrote it off as kind of a satirical parody.

Then I found out the truth about Jay's Journal and what Beatrice Sparks did to the memory of a teenage boy.

This book digs into the Barrett story which I don't think can be told enough. This vile woman took advantage of a grieving mother and lied about her dead son.

Reading this book made me angry again for all the right reasons.

In the unglorious school days of my 1980s, probably when I was eleven years old, our headmaster forced my class to read *Go Ask Alice*, a diary written by a real drug addict. The bleak story painted a very stark picture of a young girl who in her own words wrote a story where she was an everyday kid, then started dabbling with weed, ran away from home, and did far more and various drugs. Spoiler: the book ends with a note saying the fifteen-year-old died from a drug overdose.

About fifteen years after I read it for the first time, I happened to find it in a salvation army-type bin. I bought and re-read it. The first time I read it, I thought it was intense and very scary. I remember that the book felt a bit off, just like the times my class watched government-sanctioned films about the horrors using spraypaint on walls or doing anabolic steroids. It all felt dressed-up by grown-ups who weren't connected with my generation. It felt false.

After reading the book as a grown-up, I looked into the details. Turns out, it was a sham. The book is most probably written by Beatrice Sparks, a person who very much was distraught by the fact that her publisher decided to erase her name from its cover and instead say 'By Anonymous'.

Rick Emerson has interviewed and analysed his way through Sparks's life, through her twists and turmoils while she tried to become famous and remain in the limelight, unconcerned of the effects her words had on millions of readers. Sparks used shock and lies as her main tactics.

>Even before its whiplash ending, Alice was brutal, shoving your face in shit. If you made it past the drugs and teenage hookers (and neglected toddlers and gang rapes), Alice’s final meltdown was a long, shrieking nightmare:
>>Gramps . . . tried to pick me up, but only the skeleton remained of his hands and arms. The rest had been picked clean by wriggling, writhing, slithering, busily eating worms which seethed on his every part. They were eating and they wouldn’t stop. His two eye sockets were teeming with white soft-bodied, creeping animals which were burrowing in and out of his flesh and which were phosphorescent and swirled into one another. The worms and parasites started creeping and crawling and running toward the baby’s room and I tried to stomp on them and beat them to death with my hands but they multiplied faster than I could kill them. And they began crawling on my own hands and arms and face and body. They were in my nose and my mouth and my throat, choking me, strangling me.
>When a fly buzzes through her hospital room days later, Alice starts screaming, terrified that the creature will lay its eggs on her body. Stumbling to a mirror, Alice sees a bruised, scratched face and patchy hair. Maybe, she thinks, it isn’t really me. This wasn’t a Nancy Drew mystery or some haunted English castle. This was up close and intimate, a fear that burrowed inside you.

>There was also pure nonsense. Go Ask Alice put every drug—LSD, marijuana, heroin, speed—into one lethal basket, with no attempt at nuance.

Brightly, Emerson links the tale of [Art Linkletter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Linkletter) and his daughter, Diane, into this book. Emerson was a big celebrity. When his daughter died at a young age, from throwing herself off a building, LSD was erroneously blamed; she had no drugs in her body at the time. This didn't stop Linkletter from cavorting with Nixon. From Nixon's secret White House recordings:

> Nixon: Asia, the Middle East, portions of Latin America . . . I’ve seen what drugs have done to those countries. Everybody knows what it’s done to the Chinese. The Indians are hopeless anyway. The Burmese—
> Linkletter: That’s right.
> Nixon: Why are the Communists so hard on drugs? It’s because they love to booze. I mean, the Russians, they drink pretty good. Linkletter: That’s right.
> Nixon: The Swedes drink too much, the Finns drink too, the British have always been heavy boozers, and the Irish, of course, the most, but on the other hand, they survive as strong races.
> Linkletter: That’s right.
> Nixon: At least with liquor, I don’t lose motivation.

Drugs were, by and large, blamed for the moral decline of American youth and used as an excuse to get rid of 'unwanted elements'. There were more near-incredible events:

> In 1953, the CIA launched MK-ULTRA, a cluster of brainwashing experiments modeled on Nazi research. For more than a decade, government agents dosed thousands of unsuspecting Americans—including prisoners, students, and children—with LSD, often in massive amounts. In New York, the CIA went the extra mile, launching its own brothel, complete with heroin-addicted prostitutes. In exchange for dosing johns with LSD (usually via tainted booze), the women got their daily fix, immunity from arrest, and a hundred bucks a night. The agents, in turn, got to watch through one-way mirrors as the hapless men went bonkers. They called it “Operation: Midnight Climax.”

As Nixon targeted drugs as the destroyer of Youth, and with Linklater's daughter's death (not related to LSD, but yet blamed on the drug), Sparks saw her moment.

> Sparks had it all planned out. She would cut the diary down to book size, change a few names, and presto—one cautionary tale, ready to sell. She even had a title. Buried Alive: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager, edited by Beatrice Sparks. There were a million loose ends. Who was this girl? Where were her parents? Was this even legal? But Linkletter’s reaction was all that mattered, and he was on board.

*Go Ask Alice* plays out drugs like Mel Gibson's *The Passion of the Christ* plays out the Jew: they're the root cause, and to show why, we need to show all the guts and gore. Ironically, people who flailed against the book's descriptions of blowjobs, shit, maggots, and rape, were told to chill out: this was, after all, a real diary.

It wasn't, but that, to Sparks and her publishers, was second to greed and vanity.

Not unpredictably, her second book was also a fake journal and about a new horror that destroyed children: role-playing.

*Jay's Journal: The Haunting Diary of a 16-Year-Old in the World of Witchcraft* was published with 'Edited by Beatrice Sparks, who brought you Go Ask Alice' on its cover.

The truly shocking aspect of this book is, to me, how Emerson successfully shows that Sparks didn't only model *Jay's Journal* on actual persons, but thinly 'anonymised' the book so badly that people could easily see who's said and done what. Who cares about the truth?

Emerson points out that to know whether *Go Ask Alice* was fiction or non-fiction, one had to visit the American government's Library of Congress. Or, wait:

> So there you are, standing in the bookstore, looking at the new releases. Fiction, nonfiction, memoir, anthology—how can you tell them apart? At first, it seems easy. Check the back cover, or maybe the spine, or that inside page with all the tiny print. But what if the book is unlabeled, like the Prentice-Hall hardcover of Go Ask Alice? What if there’s no “fiction” or “nonfiction” label, but the cover says “a real diary,” like the Alice paperbacks? Here’s a good one: What if the front cover says “a real diary,” the spine says “autobiography,” and the inside page says “fiction”? Avon’s 1982 edition of Alice is printed exactly that way, with zero explanation. What if the labels disappear again (as they did a decade later), leaving just “a real diary” and “Anonymous,” with no other info? Ah—but maybe you live in the internet era, and information is yours for the asking. Seek, and ye shall find. You go online, search the Library of Congress database, and find the entry for Go Ask Alice. “Fiction.” Bam! Case closed. Except, wait, because here’s a second Library of Congress entry for Go Ask Alice, and this one says “not fiction.” That’s the actual designation: “not fiction.” You look again. Is it a different book with the same title? No, it’s the very same Go Ask Alice. So now, for this one book, there are two conflicting Library of Congress entries, a hardcover with no information, millions of paperbacks saying “a real diary,” and at least one edition that doesn’t even agree with itself. What the hell is going on here?

The real people that Sparks used to write *Jay's Journal* weren't just subject to their local communities. People travelled to one person's grave to perform rites, no doubt something that would never have happened if Sparks hadn't concocted the book.

The book must have done its part to trigger [satanic panic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic) in the USA.

By writing *Unmask Alice*, Emerson has shown Beatrice Sparks for what she really was: a fame-hungry liar who didn't care about the lives she plundered. Naturally, people like Richard Nixon and those working at Prentice Hall/Simon & Schuster, who published some of her books, deserve shame for being as bad as she was. Even though this book is slightly uneven in rhythm, Emerson's detective work brings life into the book, life that sustains it throughout. This is an easy read that should make readers angry for life, against slander, and question clarion calls for 'justice'.

A phenomenal mix of true crime, history and literature studies Unmask Alice is a top notch study of how trauma, paranoia and stories can affect the world. Rick Emerson delivers a biting and sometimes funny summation of the impact of Go See Alice and the con men and women who used these books to affect young people and the USA about topics ranging from Drugs, Moral Panic (Satanic Panic), The AIDS Crisis. As a history major and future teacher, I definitely want to use this book when speaking about paranoia and the lengths people go to push a message. I also loved the discussions surrounding Mental Health and the Counterculture of the US because they are both important discussions that seem to be blocked or ignored. I loved reading this book and hope for another from Mr. Emerson soon!

I didn't find out that Alice was a hoax until a few years back. To be honest, I'd never thought too hard about whether the diary was real or not. My childhood was full of cautionary tales, most of them definitely not true. Alice was just another one of many stories. I never read Jay's Journal, but I've got vivid memories of the Satanic Panic.

Unmask Alice looks at Beatrice Sparks and her hoaxes through the eyes of 2022 and as frustrated as I got by some of the author's descriptions (at one point he describes the letters to the editor page in the newspaper as "a prehistoric comments section") I couldn't put it down.

As someone who's generation was influenced by "Go Ask Alice" and "Jay's Journal" it was fascinating to read the story behind the author and how these stories affected so many people. It's absolutely crazy to see how far some people will go for the sake of a story.

From the very beginning of Unmask Alice, I was immediately gripped by the provocative nature of the material. Emerson has a way of sparking the interest of previous readers of Go Ask Alice. As a child of the 80's, I had read Go Ask Alice. But I was unaware that it was completely fabricated. The cover arouses an interest in the reader with the black and white picture, the half-hidden face of a young girl, playing on the familiarity of previous readers of Go Ask Alice. I had not been aware of Jay's Journal so it was fascinating to me to now have an awareness of it, and its role in the spread of Satanic Panic. I found this to be a fast-paced read packed full of information. I learned a wealth of information regarding America's War on Drugs and how Go Ask Alice rode on the tails of political agenda of those times. Emerson did his research, finding as many first-hand sources to the original stories of "Alice" and "Jay". He acknowledges any holes in his research or any interviews he was not able to obtain. He also recognizes the doubt a reader of his book may have and encourages the reader to do his or her own research into the resources that are available to the public. I think this will be an intriguing read especially for those readers who grew up in the 70's, 80's and 90's but also to those who have grown up knowing Go Ask Alice as a banned book. I honestly cannot believe it has taken someone so long to properly investigate this and publish the truth for all to read.

Sorry, this wasn’t a book for me at all. I may give it a try reading another time. But as for now I don’t think it fair to give a positive nor negative comment about it. I couldn’t get through.

I can still remember reading the final page of Go Ask Alice and how haunted I felt discovering she died. Now Rick Emerson has out on paper the true story of the book's author, Beatrice Strong, a woman so desperate to become a famous author, that she was willing to lie, manipulate and shamelessly capitalize on parents, fear and guilt. Her blind ambition destroyed a family and inadvertently contributed to the drug and Satanic cult hysteria of the 70s and 80s.

Written in a straightforward fashion, Unmask Alice tells the true story of Go Ask Alice, Jay's Journal and several other supposedly true stories written by Strong. You will be left appalled at the lengths Strong went to become "somebody". A fascinating read.

I have not read Go Ask Alice, but I was familiar with the book and what it contained.

The author of this book, Emerson really dives into the history of LSD and the war on drugs. As someone who worked in the criminal justice field for years I was familiar with the drug but did not know as much about it as some others. I found this helpful to lay a basis to what was happening in the world at that time.

Following the works of Beatrice Sparks, we as the reader get to see the real stories of people she wrote about and then how she portrayed them. I often found myself upset at Sparks and feeling angry for the families who were affected. The author says to refrain from looking anything up until the end of the book, and while I did it it was a hard task! It’s amazing and frightening that authors are taken at their word about the classification of their books. That’s what made is so easy for Sparks to say these works were non fiction.

Satanic Panic is something that always interests me because it’s amazing how that was the catch all for things happening at the time. Just about anything that was out of the “norm” was labeled as witchcraft or satan worship. I truly believe this was so prevalent because it was so much easier to blame something or someone rather than seeing a problem (in this case mental health and drug use) for what it is. Ignorance truly is bliss.

I did think Alden’s story was a bit drawn out, but ultimately it wasn’t bad. You have to understand Emerson has his own bias when writing this book. Do I think people learned something from all of Sparks work? I do, even if it was fabricated. Do I think she should have done that? Absolutely not. But it would be a disservice to say nothing can be learned from the works.

All in all I enjoyed this book and I learned a lot about Beatrice Sparks and her works. I think I will read Go Tell Alice after reading this one.

Where do I even start with this book? Learning that the series was all fake, and that the "inspiration" behind Jay's Journal was created after conning his parents out of the journal, my mind has been blown. I thought this book was going to be a relatively easy ride but it took me over 12 hours to read it, and I read ridiculously fast. I absolutely love how much information was put into this book and used as a platform for Sparks' lies to stand on. I wasn't expecting to enjoy the political side of the book but I surprised myself and learned a lot about Nixon and his time in office. I'm Pagan, so reading the crazy stories about the 'Satanic Panic' and Anton and all of the stories that popped up were right up my alley. I love learning new thing and building up my brain. There's still satanic panic these days, though it's much more quiet and less people are attacked. What blows my mind is that Alice's book was just a story created out of thin air and wisps of smoke. Jay's had a few truthful journal entries but everything was blown out of proportion and embellished and 95% made up. I feel so bad for the Barretts and the nightmares they had to go through. They had already gone through so much, they didn't need even more on their plate. I was pretty disappointed that, while the brother wrote his own book, none of his family took legal routes and called her out on her degrees, jobs, lies about everything. It's so hard to see them get knocked down and never really get a chance to get back up.

I'm really glad I stuck with the book and kept on going because THESE are the truths that need to be heard. I appreciate you, Rick, for all of your hard work and endless headaches and frustrations while compiling everything for this book. You deserve way more than 5 stars.

This was an absolutely crazy ride and I enjoyed pretty much every minute of it. The Satanic panic of the late-twentieth century has long been a topic I've found extremely interesting (in all of its baffling and destructive stupidity), yet despite having read my fair share of books on the subject (and having watched even more related documentaries) I had never known much about Jay's Journal, aside from a passing knowledge of its existence. Similarly, I had never read Go Ask Alice, so a large majority of the information in this book was entirely new to me and only made reading it all the more engaging.

Emerson has a quick-paced, straight-to-the-punch style that works well with the amount of ground covered, and for the most part I found the tone to be a lot more human than many other nonfiction books. I could see how some of the footnotes might have been polarizing to a certain kind of reader, but honestly I largely enjoyed them and found the bluntness of the author's statements to feel more authentic and truthful than a more sanitized version of the story might have offered. My only real gripe with the book was with the formatting of certain chapters: I felt a lot of them were too short and made the narrative flow less naturally than it would have otherwise. It was a relatively small detail in the grand scheme of things, though, and I did find the story at the core of Unmask Alice to be utterly captivating despite certain editing choices. It was truly impressive how Emerson manages to weave so many intersecting bits and pieces of history together to paint a vivid picture of an overlooked but obviously (for better or worse) pivotal female figure in the young adult genre. If the subject matter looks interesting to you, definitely check it out!

I, like every other child who grew up in the 1970's, have read (or wanted to read) "Go Ask Alice". I was fortunate that I did not have to sneak around to read controversial books. In "Unmask Alice" we are hearing the other side of the story,..the truthful side. It is a wild tale! The author takes you to places and people that will surprise you. I spoke so highly of this book to my store manager, that she is planning on setting up a display with both titles together. Eye-opening read!