Go Ask Alice by Beatrice Sparks.
Title: Go Ask Alice.
Author: Beatrice Sparks (originally published as "Anonymous").
Genre: Fiction, YA, teen, drugs, addiction, epistolary fiction.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1971.
Summary: A diary of a 15-year-old where in a sensitive, observant style, she records her thoughts and concerns about issues such as crushes, weight loss, sexuality, social acceptance, and difficulty relating to her parents. Tragically, she quickly plunges into the world of hard drugs, and spirals down it.
My rating: 6/10
♥ You know, when I think about things like that, I suddenly don't want to leave! I'm afraid! I've lived in this room all my fifteen years, all my 5,530 days. I've laughed and cried and moaned and muttered in this room. I've loved people and things and hated them. It's been a big part of my life, of me. Will we ever be the same when we're closed in by other walls?
♥ Even with them I'm not really me. I'm partly somebody else trying to fit in and say the right things and do the right thing and be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing. Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other, trying to buy the same records and everything even if we don't like them. Kids are like robots, off an assembly line, and I don't want to be a robot!
♥ Oh, I do hope I won't have to be a nagging mother, but I guess I'll have to be, else I don't see how anything will ever be accomplished.
♥ It's a completely new world I'm exploring, and you can't even conceive the wide new doors that are opening up before me. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. Maybe Lewis G. Carroll was on drugs too.
♥ Adolescents have a very rocky insecure time. Grown-ups treat them like children and yet expect them to act like adults. They give them orders like little animals, then expect them to react like mature and always rational, self-assured persons of legal stature. It is a difficult, lost, vacillating time.
♥ All the dumb, idiot kids who think they are only chipping are in reality just existing from one experience to the other. After you've had it, there isn't even life without drugs. It's a prodding, colorless, dissonant bare existence. It stinks.
♥ I have lamented until I am dehydrated, but calling myself a wretched fool, a beggarly, worthless, miserable, paltry, mean, pitiful, unfortunate, woebegone, tormented, afflicted, shabby, disreputable, deplorable human being isn't going to help me either. I have two choices; I must either commit suicide or try to rectify my life by helping others. That is the path I must take, for I cannot bring further disgrace and suffering upon my family. There is nothing more to say, dear Diary, except I love you, and I love life and I love God. Oh I do. I really do.
♥ I don't want to get old. I have this very silly fear, dear friend, that one day I'll be old, without ever having really been young. I wonder if it could happen that quickly or if I've ruined my life already. Do you think life can get by you without your even seeing it?
♥ I used to think I would get another diary after you are filled, or even that I would keep a diary or journal through my whole life. But now I don't really think I will. Diaries are great when you're young. In fact, you saved my sanity a hundred, thousand, million times. But I think when a person gets older she should be able to discuss her problems and thoughts with other people, instead of just with another part of herself as you have been to me. Don't you agree? I hope so, for you are my dearest friend and I shall thank you always for sharing my tears and heartaches and my struggles and strifes, and my joys and happinesses. It's all been good in its own special way, I guess.
♥ I used to think I was the only one who felt things, but I really am only one infinitely small part of aching humanity. It's a good thing most people bleed on the inside or this would really be a gory, blood-smeared earth.