First published in 1971 under the byline "Anonymous," Go Ask Alice is presented as the real diary of a fifteen-year-old girl — an ordinary, middle-class teenager whose life unravels after LSD is slipped into her drink at a party. From that first unwitting trip, the entries trace her escalating drug use, her estrangement from a loving family, and her drift into running away, homelessness, and the dangers of life on the streets.
Marketed for decades as an authentic teenage journal, the book is now widely regarded as a fictionalized work shaped by its editor, the youth counselor Beatrice Sparks, and its authenticity has been extensively challenged. Whatever its true origins, it became one of the most influential — and most frequently banned — cautionary anti-drug books in American young-adult publishing.
Raw, bleak, and written in confessional diary form, it remains a fixture of school reading lists and censorship debates: as much a historical artifact of the 1970s "scared straight" era as it is a coming-of-age story. (Despite the title, "Alice" is not the narrator's name — it is drawn from the Jefferson Airplane song "White Rabbit.")