I read 'go ask alice' as a teenager and even back then i found it blatantly fiction, watching a pretty-with-curls little darling degenerate into a sweary brat wasn't plausible.<p>I don't like being lied to, not like this and not by the coppas (I'm a brit) who came round to our school to give us The Drugs Talk. In a limited sense, when I became an adult (and a <i>lot</i> later), I was less afraid to experiment with drugs <i>because</i> of the one-sidedness of my drugs so-called 'education'. I guess it worked on some other kids though.
Buried lede IMO: There's a TV movie of the book, starring Andy Griffith...<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBxT53r2AlU&t=2447s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBxT53r2AlU&t=2447s</a><p>...and mustached William Shatner!<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBxT53r2AlU&t=2997s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBxT53r2AlU&t=2997s</a><p>> the state is estimated by some to boast a Ponzi scheme for every hundred thousand people<p>Sorry but looking up the state population that's got to be way, way too low. I'd say 1:10k at the least! But so many of them are ad hoc and built on the back of business affinity relationships. (By the time you hear about them from your assigned ministering brother or sister, it's too late and the ground floor has been marbled over. :D)
The podcast <i>You’re Wrong About</i> recently did a three-part series on <i>Go Ask Alice</i> with Carmen Maria Machado. Episodes are here: <a href="https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270" rel="nofollow">https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270</a> or pull them down in your favorite podcatcher.
This is the end of TFA:<p>> <i>Emerson sees Sparks chiefly as an impostor, but she comes across as a true believer, both in evil and in her capacity to combat it by scaring teen-agers straight.</i><p>Imposter vs. True Believer: evil schemer or naive righteous soccer mom...<p>Mmm... Or maybe she was... an artist?!<p>I find it quite shocking and incredible that still today, she's casually dismissed as a fabricator. Every fiction is a fabrication. That's what artists do; that's the original meaning of the word "poetry": to make [0].<p>The fact that publishers decided to market that fiction as a true testimonial is irrelevant. (It is mentioned in the article that the "impostor"/anonymous part was the idea of the publisher, and that Sparks only reluctantly agreed.)<p>It's possible her ultimate motive was to save teenagers from the perils of drugs, but in the process she created works that obviously resonated with a lot of people. How hard would it be to respect her a little.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-history-of-the-word-poet" rel="nofollow">https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-history-of...</a>
So strange. I had never heard of. Go ask Alice, and then last week I was listening to a 5-year-old podcast episode of "I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats" and they were talking about it.
<i>As a few ex-Mormons have pointed out, Sparks was not the first Mormon to publish a text ostensibly based on an original source that the rest of the world did not get to see.</i><p>Hah!
Very interesting article and it's worth considering how even though we can easily recognise these stories as being laughably fake these days, it's worth keeping in mind that fearmongering stories like this continue to be peddled to people with certain prejudices, and the only thing that's really changed since then is its shape and approach
> Utah, reputed to be the fraud capital of America; the state is estimated by some to boast a Ponzi scheme for every hundred thousand people<p>Small tangent, but does anybody in Utah have insight into why this might be? This is bewildering to me.