Prentice HallPublished in 1971, Go Ask Alice is a novel about the life of a drug-addicted teenage girl. The novel is a compilation of diary entries which deal with everything from high-school romance to sexuality, isolation and experimentation with drugs. When it was first published, Go Ask Alice was marketed as a compilation of extracts taken from an actual diary. The book was promoted as non-fiction and its author credit was merely Anonymous. Shortly after its publication, a woman by the name of Beatrice Sparks began to make media appearances promoting the work, claiming to be its editor. Sparks said that the diary was taken from a patient named Alice, and that the vast majority of it was transcribed, though a few fictitious alterations were made. This all seemed fairly suspect until Sparks unveiled a second diary project titled Jay's Journal. Jay's Journal was supposedly based on the diary of a boy who committed suicide after becoming involved with the occult. The boy's family, however, were very much real, and were not happy with the book, claiming that Sparks had only used a few of his diary entries. Whether or not this means that Alice DID exist and her diary was merely inspiration or she was completely fabricated is still hotly debated. Regardless, Go Ask Alice is still in publication over forty years later.
