Beatrice sparks anonymous books6/24/2023 She would sometimes say she had “found” the diary, or that it had been given to her by Alice’s parents. On any given day she would call herself a psychologist, a therapist or a social worker, with qualifications from universities that have no record of her. In Unmask Alice, Sparks comes to life as a driven, shameless fabulist. “It was a marketer’s wet dream,” Emerson writes.īeatrice Sparks claimed to have “edited” Alice’s words. In the US, it appeared on reading lists with Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. The Herald said it had the poignancy of Anne Frank’s diary. It was lauded by critics for dispelling the allure of drugs and condemned by moral conservatives who wanted it banned. Go Ask Alice sold more than 2 million copies in its first two years, was translated into 16 languages and has never been out of print. In his new book, Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic panic and the imposter behind the world’s most notorious diaries, Rick Emerson reveals how Sparks approached publisher Prentice-Hall with the “diary” she claimed she’d received from a 15-year-old runaway, only to regret the decision when it cost her the fame she craved. Credit:įifty years on, the author’s identity has been confirmed as Beatrice Sparks, a wealthy Mormon housewife who cobbled the book together from conversations with teenagers and her own imagination. Go Ask Alice has never been out of print.
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