Seven years since that idea popped into his head, Emerson has finally published Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries, out this month from BenBella Books. “But then it got much bigger, much faster.” “ Go Ask Alice was the bright, shiny object that started the story,” he tells Rolling Stone. What he discovered was more shocking than he could have imagined. Who was she, really? Where could he find out more about her? When he got home, he realized that the book he wanted to read didn’t exist, so he set out to write it himself. classes and War on Drugs it helped to fuel - began wondering about the mysterious author.

Driving home from lunch, Emerson - who wasn’t born when the book came out, but lived through the Reagan-Era D.A.R.E. It was Sparks who captured Rick Emerson’s imagination one day back in 2015. But by the early 21st century, questions had arisen about the book’s veracity, as well as the true identity of its “anonymous” author - something only known by the book’s editor, a supposed child psychologist named Beatrice Sparks. Over the ensuing decades, it sold tens of millions of copies - beloved by teens for its frenetic entries about taboo subjects, and by adults because it was a text they could point to as proof of the ills of drugs. Purportedly the real-life diary of a straitlaced teen girl who lost her life to drugs, i t was an instant hit, touted by critics across the country as a must-read for parents and teenagers alike. In 1971, the YA book Go Ask Alice hit shelves and almost immediately set off a firestorm.

Go ask alice by beatrice sparks