podcast friday

[sabotabby]

Time to get in the wayback machine and talk about a nostalgia episode from a new-to-me podcast.

I've just started listening to You're Wrong About after hearing about it for ages. Sarah Marshall was a guest on...something?? recently and she was funny so I figured I'd check it out. Scrolling back, I found a three-part episode on Go Ask Alice by Anonymous/Beatrice Sparks and I knew I was sold. And it featured no less a literary luminary than Carmen Maria Machado.

For those of you who didn't grow up in our weird-ass puritanical North American culture, Go Ask Alice is a book from the 70s that purports to be the diary of a teenage girl. The narrator, Alice, is unknowingly drugged with LSD at a party, which sends her down a rabbit hole (hah) of drugs, promiscuous sex, bisexuality, madness, and Satanism, before she dies of a drug overdose. I think I read it when I was about 10 or 11. Presumably it's given to kids to warn them away from doing any kind of drug ever, but it's an oddly compelling little book and it's one of those moralistic lessons that makes doing the bad thing seem really fun and cool until it kills you, which was appealing to a kid like me.

Now, it was not at all written by a teenage girl who died of a drug overdose but by a Mormon who had never done a single drug in her life, which you can tell if you yourself have done any kind of drug and then read the book afterwards (at the age I read it, I was ill-equipped to fact-check its veracity). A shocking number of people don't know this, though! I remember an English teacher I worked with who was planning a unit that was to include Go Ask Alice and A Million Little Pieces and I said, "oh, you're doing a unit on literary frauds?" and she had. No. Idea. When it first came out everyone thought it was real and now about 50% of people still think it's real.

That said, it's not without literary merit, as Sarah and Carmen discover. Beatrice Sparks never did drugs but she was once a teenage girl, and there's an emotional core to the book that works. So while there's a lot that's very silly about it, there is a reason it still appeals to kids.

All three parts can be found here. Don't miss the last part even though Alice dies in Part 2—there is a special guest who does the best plug for a book I've ever heard in my life.

Comments

[ioplokon]

I'm always glad I ended up reading Speak instead of that one.

[sabotabby]

I haven't read Speak but I am sure it was a better choice.

[ex_flameandsong751]

I remember reading that book as a young teenager and being like "whoa" and then re-reading it as an adult who's done some drugs and still uses cannabis and being like "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA". And you're right that even though it's meant as an anti-drug morality tale it backfires at it [see also: I read it, I've done some drugs].

A Million Little Pieces is not something I've ever read mainly because by the time I got around to wanting to read it, James Frey got exposed.

[sabotabby]

An ex of mine who had some serious addiction problems was given A Million Little Pieces as a gift and he kept being annoying about how great it was and I'm like, "this doesn't sound like a thing that ever happened" and I felt very validated when it was exposed as a hoax. Though (and they address this in the podcast), Frey got the worst of the backlash but doesn't deserve the worst of the backlash because he did try to market it as fiction first.

[minoanmiss]

This pretty much. *fistbump*

V, you know what it reminded me of? Remember the radio show "Unshackled" on soi-disant Family Radio [1] where people did fun naughty things and then Accpted Jesus and Were Unshackled From Their fun naughty Sins? GAA reminded me of the first half of one of those.

[1] fundie Christian radio, for all those fortunate enough to never have listened to it

[frandroid]

> "oh, you're doing a unit on literary frauds?"

zzzzzzzing!!

As in, amazing that she had picked BOTH of the most well-known drug tale frauds and put them in the same unit?

Also, was she not doing any research about her assignments?

[sabotabby]

I wasn't even meaning it as a zinger! I thought it was a genuinely interesting subject that I would have LOVED as a student.

But yeah she just thought teenagers = drugs = relatable. She wasn't a very critical or frequent reader.

[greylock]

I love this icon.
Sceptical Kira is great.

[chagrined]

I haven't listened to that podcast in a while, but they have a lot of good eps. I think my fave night still remain the one about the DC snipers, because wow I didn't know any of the stuff they went into with how that related to domestic violence & stuff.

I did listen to the "Go Ask Alice" eps, or at least the 1st one? But I never read the book.

[sabotabby]

I suspect it's vastly funnier if you've read the book.

[rydra_wong]

Thank you for the rec! I always have time for Carmen Maria Machado.

[sabotabby]

She's fantastic. I was like, "which one should I listen to first" and landed on her name and was like YES.

[radiantfracture]

She is such an awesome conversationalist.

[blogcutter]

Go Ask Alice may well have been written as a dire warning about the evils of drugs, but it also regular features in the lists of most-banned books! It came out in the era of commercials like "This is your brain on drugs" and hokey magazine ads with labeled photographs purporting to explain to parents how to tell if your kid is on drugs. In high school we saw a film called "LSD: Insight or Insanity" and of course there's that much older cult classic Reefer Madness.

With cannabis now being legal and a financially-struggling pot shop on just about every street corner, I have to wonder if the ads of yesteryear will soon be replaced by Netflix ads along the lines of "How to encourage your kid to smoke dope! With any luck it'll lead to harder stuff and keep the cannabis vendors afloat! Food banks could solicit donations of post-tokial munchies for starving dealers. Maybe you've got the germ of a new cookbook project there?

[sabotabby]

I'm not surprised that it gets targeted a lot. The people who want to ban books don't read books. Also it makes drugs seem like a lot of fun.

Somewhere there is an essay on pot shops as gentrification but I've had a very tiring few days.

[radiantfracture]

Wasn't she recently on Behind the Bastards?

The Michelle Remembers episodes are equally fantastic in my experience (and related to Victoria!).

[numb3r_5ev3n]

A friend of mine likes to talk about how the only books at the vacation house where he and his family used to go during the summer when he was a kid were the Bible and copies of Michelle Remembers and like Flowers In The Attic, and how this basically scarred him for life at the time.

[sabotabby]

Yes, she was! that was it.

I haven't read Michelle Remembers.

[numb3r_5ev3n]

I'm so glad I passed on Go Ask Alice in favor of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

[sabotabby]

I read both. :) I was insatiable when it came to drug stuff as a tween.

[greylock]

I think I read it when I was about 10 or 11.
Wait... what?

I've never read it (not my baggie) but if you didn't choose it that's... A choice.

I admit I didn't know it was a fraud (I suspect), but there are a lot of books from that era (The Story of O, The Concrete Garden and... X?) and TV movies that are mushed in my head.
And Canada's bear-fucking book.

[sabotabby]

I grew up in a library. I read all kinds of things. And yeah, I chose to read it. YA wasn't a discrete category when I was a kid, and until Grade 10 most of what was forced on me at school was children's lit, well below my reading level. So I read what I could get—which was a lot—in my spare time.

I heard the bear-fucking book is good, actually.

[blogcutter]

I'm actually something of a fan of Marian Engel, and not all of her books involved fucking bears ! I think Xaviera Hollander's The Happy Hooker had this scene with a dog, though... Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was pretty kool too.

I do remember YA being a discrete category and section of the library even back in the 1960s. You had to be in grade 8 to get a card entitling you to borrow books categorized as YA and in grade 9 to get an adult card. But an adult could still lend you their card or borrow books on your behalf and fortunately my family was quite progressive that way.

[sabotabby]

I bet the bear-fucking one wasn't even her favourite. It's just the only one people know.

I don't think we had any such restrictions growing up. There was a small area "for teens" that mainly had books about Important Teen Subjects and was boring as fuck, with the exception of Francesca Lia Block.

[highlyeccentric]

An acquaintance who had a much more Interesting Youth than I got really upset recently when I said something about "that's not how peer pressure works, go ask alice was a HOAX", etc. Apparently they find it convincing as a depiction both of drug taking and teen peer dynamics? Baffling. They lean very hard into the explanation that Sparks faithfully plagiarised her teeenage therapy clients.

[sabotabby]

Hmm. I'm reading the book about it now, and it would suggest that Sparks did not have any teenage therapy clients at the time she wrote Go Ask Alice. But the book is very twisty-turny so I will report back.

[rydra_wong]

You may be amused to know that as a result of this, I have spent many days earwormed with Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" (because "Go ask Alice" comes from the lyrics).

[sabotabby]

LOL hard same.