The next one, Jay’s Journal, helped ignite the Satanic Panic, a national hysteria over the occult that lasted for much of the ‘80s. The woman who “discovered” the journals-a Provo, Utah, housewife named Beatrice Sparks-kept producing more diaries.
Over the years, Go Ask Alice fell into a gray area of respectable ill-repute-becoming what Emerson calls “a grubby, strip-mall cousin to The Bell Jar.” “It’s like a Chick tract in novel form,” Emerson says. The efforts of prudes to censor the book only transfigured it into something rare: a sermon on temperance that kids longed to read. Did she exist at all? The claims of Go Ask Alice always seemed a little flimsy-the author trips on acid and graduates to shooting heroin before ever sampling a cannabis joint-but that didn’t break the spell the book cast on a generation who stayed up all night with what amounted to an urban legend in print.
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