Go Ask Alice Part 1 with Carmen Maria Machado

This week we begin our journey into the totally true not at all made up diary that has been scaring America’s teens for fifty years. Digressions include Jell-O, magic mushrooms, and ironing your hair, and Sarah promises to trip with Carmen. “Button, Button” is by Richard Matheson.

You can hear Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

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Transcript

Sarah: You know what would be really traumatic? Any exposure to the substance that could potentially allow us to treat trauma.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm your host Sarah Marshall. Today we are learning about Go Ask Alice, which has been terrifying America's youths for 50 years. Go Ask Alice was published in 1972, it has never been out of print since. And for comparison's sake, The Bell Jar, which was published in 1971 and has also never gone out of print, has sold over 3 million copies in its lifetime. Go Ask Alice has sold nearly 6 million copies. 

Go Ask Alice was published as the real-life true story of a real teenage girl who descended into a hell of drug use addiction, and a spiral leading into death itself. And it all started with an LSD trip. And you will be shocked to learn that there is a relationship between this book and the war on drugs. This is part one of a multipart odyssey. Through this book we're going to get to the beginning of the downward spiral. 

And I'm so excited to be going on this downward spiral with Carmen Maria Machado. Carmen is the author of many wonderful books, including, In the Dream House. And I think that she's one of the most interesting people writing and thinking about horror. And so it was a great joy to think about probably the most horrific book that has ever passed for educational in the American school system. So relax into your shag carpet, have a bottle of Coke, and enjoy this episode.

Hello. 

Carmen: Hello, how are you? 

Sarah: I am at this moment fantastic because it is impossible to read this book without wanting to tell someone about every third sentence that you have read. And now I get to talk to you about it. 

Carmen: That's true. I have highlighted so much of this book. It's quite silly, actually. 

Sarah: And who are you and what do you do when you're not talking about this book?

Carmen: My name is Carmen Maria Machado. I'm a, what am I? I'm a writer, I guess. And I have written three books, Her Body and Other Parties, which is a short story collection, In the Dream House, which is a memoir, and The Low, Low Woods, which is a comic series from DC Comics.

Sarah: And I'm so happy to be talking about, I guess, also a work of horror literature with you, but on a very different part of the spectrum.

Carmen: Yes. 

Sarah: And did you read this when you were a kid?

Carmen: I did. I, it's funny because I definitely remember reading it and I couldn't have told you one single thing about it before I started rereading it. And now that I'm rereading it, I'm like, I think this book was more formative to me then I have recalled, or that I've given credit to. Because there's a lot of stuff in here that is familiar, and it is reminding me of things that I did and said as a young person that also has lingered into adulthood. And I'm like, could you all be because of this book? and it's been really, yeah. It's been like a very odd experience revisiting it. 

Sarah: Yeah. There is something really powerful about returning to something that was formative to you in a way that maybe you didn't really realize. And that reminds me of, I feel like there's a lot of Creepy pasta type stuff that's like, remember this thing you saw on TV, when you were a kid? It was pretty scary, right? And I've been thinking too that these things connect. I've been researching Judy Garland, possibly for show related reasons, and asking people when did they first see the Wizard of Oz? And a lot of people have the answer I have, which is, I can't remember when I first saw the Wizard of Oz. I started watching it before I was forming discrete memories. Or if I was, I don't have that anymore. So it's just always been there. 

Carmen: Yes. I don't even know what age groups this is supposed to be for. I guess like teens, but I've probably read this book, when I was like, if I were to guess like maybe nine or 10. Yeah. It shaped me, I think, in ways I'm just beginning to understand. 

Sarah: So yeah, as all our episodes are, it's a journey into the self.  I remember also reading part of this in fifth grade, which seems really young. This was a time when we were doing anti-drug education DARE type stuff. Quite young kids in schools are reading this now, because I think I petered out after about 50 pages because the issue with this book makes it, I think, feel more real. And this reminds me of Michelle Remembers, that either something horrible is happening or it's so boring. And like I just could not make it through the initial chunk before she started doing drugs. And so I feel like I was saved by my short attention span in that regard. 

Carmen: We're lucky because you didn't go into high school writing weird short stories about drugs that you'd never taken.

Sarah: I was writing a lot of Newsies fanfiction. So I did have a thing where Spot Conlan is doing opium, but that's another show. 

So we're talking about, Go Ask Alice. This book is turning 50. It was published around the time young adult fiction was being invented as a genre. It is allegedly a real-life diary by a real teenage girl. That's how it was marketed initially. That's how many people first experienced it. And that's what I totally believed about it when I was a kid. And we now know that's not true, and we're gonna get to the details of its un-trueness after we work through the book itself. 

But I want to start by going through this story and giving you the experience of it. Whether you read it once or have read it recently or are never gonna read it. And Carmen, I want to start with you setting us up and telling us who the story is about where we begin? 

Carmen: Not to begin by just reading the beginning, but like the opening is so, I don't know, it felt so real. I feel like the experience of this book that was so strange for me was that it was simultaneously the realest and fakes thing I'd ever read in my life. Because there were parts of it that were so, oh this is actually sort of how a teenager thinks. And then there were parts that were like, so sort of pedantic and didactic and silly that I was like, this isn't obviously not real. 

We sort of begin with this Alice, this amazing line, “Yesterday, I remember thinking I was the happiest person in the whole earth, in the whole galaxy, in all of God's creation. Could it have only been yesterday or was it endless light years ago? I was thinking that the grass had never smelled grassier, the sky had never seemed so high. Now it's all smashed down on my head, and I wish I could just melt into the blindness of the universe and cease to exist.” Which I feel like that sort of high and low maybe because I'm also at this moment of my life, where I'm in this moment of high and low, but I'm like, oh God, that's so being a teenager, right. 

So she begins with buying this diary. She's writing down about her crush, Roger, who she's really obsessed with, who then of course she immediately has a humiliation about there's like this, right? What is that? The moment of humiliation they have?

Sarah: When I read this, when I was a kid, I was like, I have no clue what Roger is supposed to have done. I guess she's just not gonna tell us. And this time I was like, okay, I think he stood her up on a date. That's what I think at this point. 

Carmen: Oh yeah. But she immediately writes, school is a nightmare. Something that the book does not have enough of that I sort of wish there were more of, or these moments that actually feel like real diary entries, which is like “Dad's birthday, not much”. And “It's my birthday. I'm 15”, nothing. I feel like when I did keep a diary and it was very sporadically as a young person, I also had a lot of entries that were just like, “This day, nothing really happened”, but it's, “Sorry, I haven't talked to you in five months. Here's everything that's happened since then”. I feel like it does do a little bit of that, fits and starts that I think feels very real to a diary. 

Sarah: Yeah. I think my childhood diary was mostly apologies to the diary, which in retrospect is very funny and sad. 

Carmen: Did you name your diary? Did your diary have a name?

Sarah: I tried to, but it always felt contrived to me. It was when I tried to have an imaginary friend, but I was just like, I'm just holding, why am I pretending to hold hands with no one? Who am I fooling? I don't buy this. 

Carmen: I called mine Kitty because of the Diary of Anne Frank; she called her diary ‘Kitty’. And then I had a diary that had a cat on the front. So I was like, I'll call mine, Kitty, just like Anne Frank. Which is weird, but I was like ten or something. 

Sarah: There also the thing where this book is part of the kind of the tradition of diary keeping, that I feel like girls are often encouraged to keep diaries. And I've never heard of an adolescent boy being told keep a journal, it'll give you a place to express your emotions and not blow up at people. And then you'll remember what you were doing at this age. Apparently adolescent boys aren't supposed to remember what they were doing. 

Carmen: Did you think of it as I don't know, girls are encouraged to keep diaries and boys are encouraged to make art or create literature. Do you know what I mean? Because a diary is not thought of sort of a domestic almost art form, or like an informal or outsider art form where it's not really thought to be like, it's not being written for an audience. 

Sarah: Right. It can be art, but you don't have to have the social capital of that. Or you don't have to think of yourself that way. 

Carmen: Right. No one's ever gonna ask you how you're feeling. What's going on inside of you. So you should have some place for that. And it should be just this weird book we're gonna give you.

Sarah: Right. It occurs to me that a diary is also, if you are not expected to need to share your feelings with anybody, then it's yeah, the diary becomes the vent. It gives extra power to this book that it does feel authentic to diary keeping. And I'm a much more regular journaler now than I was when I was an adolescent. And I think part of its power, still for me, comes from that. 

Carmen: It's so funny, because I keep thinking about how, when I actually kept a diary in a regular way, it was actually a live journal. So it was public facing, there was almost an audience.

Sarah: And then if you're writing a diary with the expectation that it's for posterity, then it's not really private either. It just cuts out the middleman of time. 

Carmen: It's not gonna be discovered at some point. People are in real time responding to your thoughts and, but yeah. Anyway, so then they move, which is sort of, I think the beginning of this sort of displacement, right. That Alice, her family, her dad gets a job somewhere. And they decide to move. She's also obsessed with dieting, which I know we were texting about a little bit, which is so sad. I was not expecting this level of food obsession and weight talk.

Sarah: Right. You're like it's in the sixties and it's about a teenage girl. So could we possibly escape diet talk? No. And this book goes to some really depressing places. But I think maybe some of the saddest stuff for me is still in the opening pages when we got her talking about dieting and her body. And there's, I'm gonna find this passage. She goes on a date, October 26, “date and six fries”. 

Carmen: No, “I ate six wonderful, delicious, mouthwatering, delectable, heavenly French fries,” which is just devastating. This section was really interesting to me because it had this quote, which I think I also texted to you, which I sort of made a note to myself. Just wrote “gay” because she's like really obsessed with how she more than wants to have sex with Roger. And then she says, “I don't ever want to have sex with any other boy in the whole world ever. I swear, I'll die a virgin if Roger and I don't get together. I couldn't stand to have any other boy even touch me. I'm not even sure about Roger, maybe later when I'm older, I'll feel differently. Mother says that his girls get older, hormones invade our bloodstream, making our sexual desires greater. I guess I'm just developing slowly. I've heard some pretty wild stories of some of the kids at school. But I'm not them, I'm me. And besides, sex seems so strange and inconvenient and so awkward”. 

And I was like, huh, interesting. I feel like, I don't know, I guess this sort of like ambivalence about sex or confusion about sex does feel actually really true to me. I feel like not even for me, because like I'm Bi. So I've always had crushes on like everybody, but a lot of lesbians I know have said, yeah, I didn't know what sex sexual desire was because I would look at boys and be like, eh, or I'd kiss and be like, I guess kissing just feels like nothing. And then they’d kiss a woman and be like, oh, this is the greatest thing ever. And it's just that they were kissing the wrong people. 

Sarah: l feel like in a culture where women having sexual desire is considered either dangerous or anomalous. It feels like that also contributes to how you could just be like, I feel nothing when I kiss men, but apparently no one else does either. They like it if they're the blonde lady and It's a Wonderful Life, she's getting run outta town or whatever. So yeah. It reminds me of the annual discourse we have around “Baby, it's cold outside”. And the argument that actually it's a song about how the woman who is dueting with Dean Martin has to keep saying no, even if she wants to say yes, because she's not allowed to, and therefore he's doing her a solid. And if you have no way of knowing if you're doing someone a solid or actually just imprisoning them, then there's something wrong with the culture.

Carmen: I feel like this section really spoke to something in me because, I don't know, I moved when I was a kid, and it was incredibly traumatic for me. And I remember sort of the grief of being dislodged from my family or my friends and my house and my room. And this place where I had been at that point for my whole life was actually quite intense. And obviously not very serious on a scale of potential traumas, but there was something about this section too that really spoke to me that I was like, yeah, I remember actually being really messed up by moving. She just is like, I hate to think of this new family running up and down our beautiful front stairs with their dirty, sticky fingers on the walls and their feet all over mother's white carpeting. Those big feelings of being like I'm being sort of displaced from this place that I know for reasons that I can't control, I'm just being moved cause I'm a kid. 

Sarah: Well, I guess it helps that we spend, because we're with Alice for eight months before she does a single drug. We're spending time with her as a person. And I feel like this is when she's most convincing. And then when she goes on these drug benders, then things change. It feels authentic to me to being a teenager, but also to the kind of the human condition in the sense that I still have more teenagery times than others. And sometimes I feel like I'm not so far away from that teenager feeling of everything is wonderful or everything is terrible. I have no ability to find a middle. 

Carmen: No, you're right. It's so funny. Because you're right. The drug stuff is so stupid and is so non-realistic in any way. But the other stuff, and presumably because the author - not to jump too far ahead - but the woman, the adult woman who wrote this book, presumably was a teenager at some point almost certainly. And so had a lot of these feelings and maybe those are the details that feel so real where it's like, she's just like accessing this actual part of her own sort of adolescence or youth. 

Sarah: I don't know, maybe these are things that people associate with the feelings of adolescence. But I think that for many people, they never really go away or maybe it's a bigger part of some people's lives than others. But I feel like we're returning over and over before drugs enter the picture. And then after they do as well to this feeling, our protagonist has that she's just nothing, right? That she's a bad friend, even to her diary, that she's dragging down her family because her dad has an important job at the university. 

And her mother doesn't seem like a fun mom. There weren't so many of them at the time, but she was pretty proper and had high expectations. And she has a little brother and a little sister, and they immediately make friends, and this feeling of just being like a drain on everyone around you just feels so real. And I feel like, the more we're talking about it, the more I'm like, is this secretly a book about depression? 

Carmen: Yeah. And right, and the sort of fixation on her own sort of loneliness. And then her weight up and down, which is actually way more interesting than weird fake drugs.

Sarah: Right. And if a book had come out at the same time, that was like, Alice is a teenage girl, just like you, but she has depression. Would it have become this legendary scare tactic that everyone read when they were growing up? And we're still talking about 50 years later? No. Because Nixon wouldn't get behind it, for one thing.

Carmen: You can't make anti-depression policy. You're not like running on, if I am president… 

Sarah: You can't have a war on depression that allows you to incarcerate an entire generation for no reason. 

Carmen: Exactly. Where does the money go? Where is it coming from? Yeah, no one wants to do that. It's a shame because that would've probably made this book better in that sense.

Sarah: I would love a presidential war on depression. I think we could really, if we could put our backs into this, we could really get somewhere.

Carmen: God, I would too. Okay, so let's see. So she goes to her new school, she hates it. Nobody wants to talk to her. She feels like shit. She finds a friend. She says, “Claudia is as misfitting as I am. But I guess that old pop about birds of the feather is true. And it was Gerda who came to pick me up for the movies, and my folks were everything but rude to her. Imagine my long suffering, sweet-mouthed mother being tempted to utter a slimy phrase about my drab looking, nobody friend.” Oh God, it's horrifying. 

Sarah: And meanwhile, good for Gerda who had the sense to stay in this book very briefly and then never return. She's like, I just like earth tones. 

Carmen: Drab is a strong word. I don't know. And then she has this friend, Beth, she makes this friend Beth. There is a something between them that feels almost something like attraction or at least that was my vibe, which kind of brought me back to this gay thing. Because once they actually part ways for the summer, she has this tremendous grief about parting from Beth. Which I thought was super, super interesting.

Sarah: I want to read that passage because that's one of my favorite parts.

Carmen: Please go ahead. June 23rd.

Sarah: June 23rd. “Beth and I have only two more days together. Our parting is almost like looking forward to a death. It seems that I have known her always, for she understands me. I must admit that there were even times when her mother arranged dates for her that I was jealous of the boys. I hope it's not strange for a girl to feel that way about another girl. Oh, I hope not. Is it possible that I am in love with her? Oh, that's dumb, even for me. It's just that she is the dearest friend that I have ever had or that I shall ever have.” 

Carmen: So, gay. And also it also feels really real. That's another one of those details where I was like, that is absolutely a thought that even I think actually a heterosexual, or I should say a person who thinks that they're heterosexual adult woman, could nostalgically remember. Oh, when I had that friend, and we were so close and partying from her was like death. And I had these very intense thoughts that she is the dearest friend that I have ever had or will ever have in my whole life. 

I don't know. I felt like this meme the other day that was very funny that I laughed out loud where it was like, did you ever have a really weird and close, intense friendship that ended in a massive friend breakup or are you straight? But I think is there is something just queer about a friend with whom you are so close. Parting from them is like death.

Sarah:  I feel like in the past 10 years we've seen a fair amount of media that's like, friend breakups are real and it's a big thing. And it's part of millennial culture to take friend breakups seriously in a way that seems, at least as being positioned as new. And it seems like recognizing intimacy as an important ingredient in friendships or bringing close friendships into adult life. If the alternative is relationships where you never have a breakup and where there's never like a traumatic rift or something, because they're just never needed to be. You just stopped jogging together, or somebody moved, or it petered out. But it feels like, I don't know, not everything has to end in pain or end. But it feels if you're not having emotional intensity around friendship as an adult, then maybe you're not putting intimacy into that. 

Carmen: A friend breakup is a pretty devastating thing.

Sarah: Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. This is a part of the book where I'm like, yep, this is written from some kind of lived experience. This isn't like you just looked up a name of a drug and then read an article in life about it. 

Carmen: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So then Alice goes to her grandparent’s house for the summer, and has this big separation. She weeps when she parts from Beth, and then goes to her grandparent’s house and back to the place where she lived before. So it's back to the community where she was like her old school and stuff. 

Sarah: And I feel like from context clues, it seems like her family has moved to Utah. And that's where the new house is. 

Carmen: I think that seems correct. But yeah, so she goes back to her old home and is staying with her grandparents. And then runs into this girl, Jill, who had been a popular girl at her old school. And Jill invites her to an autograph party. Which is so funny because sometimes I forget when this book is taking place and then I'm like, an autograph party? Oh my God. She's like, thank heavens I brought my yearbook so everyone will be able to sign. She says it won't be the same as theirs, other pictures will be in it, but then mine won't be in theirs either. So I guess they're gonna get together and sign a bunch of yearbooks, which I was used to doing in a frenzied panic on the last day of school. So it's nice, the idea, they have parties where they could get together and do this. And then this of course is the first introduction into drugs. So the kids, she goes to this party, the kids are doing coke. 

Sarah: No, they're drinking Coke. They're drinking Coca-Colas. 

Carmen: Really? Oh God. Oh, wait. Yeah. You're right. You're right. Okay. So they're drinking. Oh, that's weird that it’s lower case.

Sarah: Well, but I'm gonna read this passage, because I think this whole sequence is very interesting. She says, “A little while after we got there, Jill and one of the boys brought out a tray of coke”, which you can see why your mind would go there. “And all the kids immediately sprawled out on the floor on cushions or crawled up together on the sofa and chairs. Jill winked at me and said, ‘Tonight, we're playing button button, who's got the button?’ You know, the game we used to play when we were kids”. Which like, no, Jill, I don't know because I didn't grow up in the 1940s. But, I do know that from I think there was a Twilight Zone episode and this is a story that's been adapted many times. And the concept is like a scary man comes to your house. He has a button. If you press it, a stranger will die, and you get some amount of money that's exciting for whatever period we're adapting this in. And then the twist is that he leaves and you're like, who are you gonna take the button to next? And he is like, no one you know. So it's a children's game. And in this case, the button is the Coca-Cola with acid in it. 

And Alice writes, “Bill Thompson, who was stretched out next to me, laughed. Only it's just too bad that now somebody has to babysit. I looked up at him and smiled. I didn't want to appear too stupid. Everyone sipped their drinks slowly and everyone seemed to be watching everyone else. I kept my eyes on Jill, supposing that anything she did, I should do suddenly. I began to feel something strange inside myself, like a storm. I remember that two or three records had played since we had the drinks. And now everyone was beginning to look at me. The palms of my hands were sweating, and I could feel droplets of moisture on my scalp at the back of my neck. The room seemed unusually quiet. And as Jill got up to close the window shades completely, I thought, they're trying to poison me. Why? Why would they try to poison me? My whole body was tense at every muscle and a feeling of weird apprehension swept over me, strangled me, suffocated me. When I opened my eyes, I realized that it was just Bill with his arm around my shoulder. Lucky you, he was saying in a slow motioned record on the wrong speed voice. But don't worry, I'll babysit you. This will be a good trip.”

Carmen: That was amazing. So, yeah, then she begins this visual, like a bunch of visual hallucinations. Basically they've put LSD in the drink, but not everybody got LSD. Some of them had it and some of them didn't. I have never done a hallucinogen in my life. I am incredibly afraid of them, which is one thing that I think possibly is the fault of this book.

Sarah: It can't have helped you to not be afraid of them, I gotta say. 

Carmen: But I'm really quite sure that the fear of it comes from this, because it is such a horrifying idea that someone could just give you a drink that then has LSD in it, and then suddenly you could be having this experience happen to you and not realize what's happening, which seems like a nightmare. And just the way that she writes about it, feels silly, but also there's some pretty moments where I'm like, oh, it's nice, actually or it's interesting to imagine I'm like, has this woman ever done drugs? Probably not. This is probably how I would've described doing drugs having never had done it.

Sarah: Yeah. And knowing that this was written by someone not a teenager, who was doing so in an explicit anti-drugs capacity. It's funny to think about being like, I hate drugs and I hate them so much. I have to sit around imagining what it's like to be on drugs for a lot of time, a lot of space in this book ends up going to that. 

There's a description that I love, and I haven't had this specific feeling that I can see myself having it. She says, “My senses were so up that I could hear someone breathing in the house next door, and I could smell someone miles away making orange and red and green ribbed Jell-O”. That's more evidence that this is Utah by the way.

Carmen: Oh, right. The Jell-O. Yeah. It is weird also because it's so pleasant. The way it's described is actually quite lovely. 

Sarah: That's the thing. She's been so miserable. You're like, well, God, like good for you.

Carmen: Yeah. Honestly, I can't imagine something more pleasant than smelling someone's Jell-O making from miles away. That actually sounds beautiful and transcendent. And I'm like, God yeah, I want that for her. And then, yeah, and they basically, at some point, I guess when she comes down, she's like what happened? And they're like, oh, 10 of the 14 bottles had LSD in them and just no one knew who would get it. Which again, it really freaks me out. The idea that it'd be a thing that someone would do. 

Sarah: I don't know. This is an interesting one, because I feel like we didn't grow up in the heyday of like urban legends about LSD by any means. But I feel like I definitely grew up hearing about flashbacks as something people believed in and hearing that it could get stuck in your hair. 

Carmen: Oh, the thing I remember about LSD, the urban legend that I heard was if you took LSD some number of times, I think the number was like six, you were legally insane.

Sarah: I think I did hear that. And maybe I heard it from D.A.RE.

Carmen: That’s very possible, but I feel like a person told me and I feel like flashbacks would happen at any moment at any time. And also, yeah, if you took LSD some number of times, you were legally insane. And I was like, wow, why did anyone do that?

Sarah: I remember in D.A.R.E., they were going over the different drugs and I was like, okay, cocaine, I get why that's bad, meth, I get why that's bad, etcetera, cetera. I get it. I get it, possible death. All right. Don't want that. And then they were like, hallucinogens. You can't really probably die from them, but you'll see things that aren't happening, so that's bad. Right. And I was like, is it?  

I remember actually putting my hand up during an anti-drug lecture in I think in fifth grade and asking the person, why is it bad? Why is LSD bad? I don't get it. And if I had finished this book, I would have gotten an argument for why it's bad. But yeah, I think it's interesting to me that something that people seem to have been incredibly concerned about in the sixties was the idea that they would get dosed with LSD, and that hippies were trying to give everyone LSD all the time. And I think, yeah, that definitely did happen. Especially if you got something that a, anything that you weren't expecting or something that was extremely strong or something, that would be horrible. 

But it's very interesting that in this moment when America was entertaining, this massive fear of a hallucinogen or a psychedelic, although I think, what happened with that? Have we started saying psychedelic instead of hallucinogen because hallucinogen has become negative? 

Carmen: I think so. Yeah. I think so. Okay. Yeah. So hallucinogen at the time and a psychedelic in today's language. But that we were conflating the idea of either seeing things that weren't there or seeing things that are there, that you can't normally see. But we can't talk about that as an individual concept, we have to talk about it always connected to the idea of someone forcing you to do that. It's really interesting. Is this because we're afraid that the hippies are showing us like the soul of America and it's uncomfortable?

Carmen: Or it's this idea that you can be out of control at any moment, right? Even if you take it once, like in the future at some point, there's like a risk that it'll come back to you or there's a risk someone could dose without meaning to, and that makes a thing that is actually not that scary, scary. 

Sarah: Especially because, after it was initially synthesized from the beginning, and certainly now, people have always talked about, have always recognized that LSD has potential for treating trauma and for making scary things less scary. And so it feels, yeah, I guess so really tragic, more than anything, just deeply tragic that we had this science that allowed us to deal with the trauma that feels like such a big part of our national character. And we then were like, you know what will be really traumatic? Any exposure to the substance that could potentially allow us to treat trauma. Yeah. 

Carmen: Or depression or something. Speaking of. 

Sarah: Yeah. Right. All of it, all the good stuff. Just, yeah. The idea that this drag is gonna stick its fingers in the spaghetti of your brain. I get it that that's scary. And going on a trip is scary. Carmen, if you want to trip with somebody, I'll do it with you like time and I'm not gonna, push you.  I am not a pusher. 

Carmen: You're gonna hand me a Coca-Cola. 

Sarah: I will. I’ll have you over to my house and be like, button button, Carmen. Specifically mushrooms for me have been such a positive space in my life and have created a space where the exhausting and sometimes all but impossible experience of being inside my own brain has been able to subside for a little bit. This is a whole other topic, but ego death is much better than actual death. It's the fun one. And so the idea of that we couldn't talk about that. We had to think of it as psychedelics are a tool that someone is gonna use to commit violence against you. And that's how we're gonna think about them. Or they will cause you to do violence against yourself. I don't know. The more I think about it, the more it feels connected to the idea that self-insight is the enemy here, which I think was not helping us at the time.

Carmen: It also feels important narratively speaking, that according to the way this book is structured, LSD is like the oh, God, what's the word?

Sarah: Is it the gateway drug? 

Carmen: Yes, the gateway drug. Thank you. It was like the introduction drug? Sorry. I had COVID a few weeks ago and my brain is like mush.

Sarah: The anti-posti. 

Carmen: The gateway drug. Right. Which I was like, LSD is a gateway drug. What a curious idea. Cause pretty soon after this, she's taking torpedoes, which what the fuck is that? And speed and shooting things into her arm. And I'm like, how do you go from LSD to shooting shit into your arm in one summer?  

Sarah: I have this in front of me. She did acid for the first time accidentally on July 10th. And then she injects speed into her arm 10 days later on the 20th. She's popping Benny's by the fall. She's getting into sleeping pills. She's just an equal opportunity. She's just trying it all. 

Carmen: If it was just about this depressed girl who started doing LSD and it actually felt amazing, I would be like, yeah, that totally makes sense. The progression of drugs in this book is very strange. And I think it's notable that this actually harmless sort of mind-expanding drug that can help with depression, whatever. Or a class of drugs that's the gateway drug into the things that will ultimately kill her.

Sarah: And also that people who do drugs want you to do drugs. It’s not just that people get dosed sometimes, or it's a known thing because no, anybody who likes LSD, they kind of like taking LSD, but they really like giving LSD to everybody else. And does it not occur to anyone that any of this is in short supply for some of these 15-year-olds? 

Carmen: Yeah. They're not just handing it out. Yeah, no, it just doesn't make any sense. This is actually another reason that I do think that this book was more influential on me than I remembered because when I was in high school, I wrote a short story that I submitted to our literary magazine anonymously about a girl who dies at a party after doing drugs. And there was a detail in the story, which I have never forgotten. And I truly do not know where I got it from. She goes to the party and remembers seeing barrels of ecstasy, a unit of measurement.

Sarah: Well, did it take place like in Wyoming on the ecstasy, the oil fields where it just comes bursting out of the ground, like in giant?

Carmen: Clearly, I had no idea and I remember sitting in on this magazine meeting, again, nobody knew it was my story. And someone very gently breaking the silence by saying, does ecstasy come in barrels? With the answer very clearly being, no. 

Sarah: It does when you buy it at Costco!

Carmen: My fear of drugs is like a concept that has existed for most of my life. And even into now, in some ways, I think it came from this book, which is sort of horrifying to imagine. 

Sarah: That's why we do book clubs. We just gotta comb through the whole thing and figure out how we got here. 

Carmen: But even the speed section has some really good, she says, “no wonder it's called speed. I could hardly control myself. In fact, I couldn't have, if I had wanted to, and I didn't want to. I danced, like I'd never dreamed possible for introverted mousey, little me. I felt great, free abandoned, a different improved perfected specimen of a different improved, perfected species. It was wild. It was beautiful. It really was.”  And then immediately her grandfather has a heart attack. 

Sarah: As if in retaliation. 

Carmen: I know. I know. I know. God. I also just feel as a teenager, whenever I did something even slightly bad and it was slight and something bad happened soon afterward, I absolutely believed that it was my fault and I had done it.

Sarah: Oh yeah. Do some crack break your mother's back.

Carmen: Yes. Exactly.

Sarah: Oh, I want to point out something that is interestingly going to be a light motif, which is that after Gramp’s’ heart attack, she's thinking about death and she writes, “I wonder if there really is a life after death. Oh, I do hope there is, but that isn't the part that really worries me. Actually, I know that our souls will go back up to God, but when I think about our bodies being buried in the dark, cold, ground and being eaten by worms and rotting, I can hardly stand the thought. I think I'd rather be cremated. Yes, I would. I definitely would. I'm going to ask mom and dad and the kids, as soon as I get home, to be sure to have me cremated when I die. They will, they're a sweet and wonderful and good family, and I love them and I'm lucky to have them.”

Carmen: Yeah. 

Sarah: Just laying some groundwork for how the story is going to unfold. 

Carmen: Right. I believe we call that foreshadowing. I believe that’s what they call it in English class.

Sarah: I wonder if, when it's this overt, it's like coloring as hard as you can with a crayon or something.

Carmen: But again, think about also if you're reading this as a teenager, then realize, yeah. Going back and being like, holy crap. She knew it. She knew on some level. 

Sarah: Yeah. Like Laura Palmer. 

Carmen: So then a few days later she has sex with God, not Roger. Who is it? 

Sarah: Richie? Oh, Bill from the acid party.

Carmen: Bill from the acid party. Yeah. So they have sex and she's wow, I never thought I could have sex with anybody except for Roger. But she has sex with him on acid. I had to go ask somebody who has done acid. I was like, I feel like you've said to me that it's very hard to have sex on acid, and this person confirmed for me that it is in fact very hard to have sex on acid.

Sarah: Oh, really? If you have a penis or just generally. 

Carmen: No. Just that sex is not, so this is just one person's perspective, but I was like, oh, that's so interesting that she loses her virginity while being on acid. Which sounds really wild though. She describes it as sort of beautiful. I don't know what your feelings are on this sort of moment of the book. 

Sarah: Right? My first thought is that we're being shown by the author that basically once you let one virtue fall, there's gonna be a domino effect and then you're gonna have to do every drug and then you will also have sex. Yeah. The gateway drug idea. And also, this idea very present in American sex ed and drag education that I think we see in a lot of conservative Christian culture that like things are either sinful or not, and you are either fallen or not. And that once you do one big taboo, then just everything's fair game, right. If you have premarital sex, then you might as well do something that actually harms somebody, because it's all the same.

Carmen: Which is obviously objectively ridiculous, but in the course of the entry, there's something about this part that calls to me, the form of the diary. The nature of a diary. So a thing that happens earlier in this book that feels really real is where she has some really short entries and some entries where she's sorry I've been gone for a long time. And that feels true to the form of the diary, of the form of the book. But in this section, it's weird because she’s sort of talking about how amazing it was making love to Bill. She says, “All my life I thought the first time I had sex with someone it would be something special, maybe even painful, but it turned out to be just part of the brilliant, freaky way out forever pattern.” Which I fucking love. And then suddenly she's like, wait, what if I'm pregnant? And in the course of this one entry, she is flipping out, that she could be pregnant. And then she's thinking about having an abortion. Another girl in her school did and she's, “Please, I don't want to be pregnant. I hate this place. I need to leave. I need to call my mom. I need to get out.” She's freaking out by the end of it. 

Sarah: Yeah, I love that she starts at totally exultant and by the end she's absolutely terrified and that does feel like an exaggerated version of part of the experience of diary writing, where you start off where part of it is to process your feelings, and let things bubble up and halfway through, you're like, oh fuck. Oh, fuck. Wait. I hadn't thought of this implication, but yeah. And then she's having this incredibly stressful summer and it's gonna get so much worse, but the drugs are within the world of the story, having a negative effect in some ways, but also it seems like her guilt over the drugs I would argue was harming her more.

Carmen: Oh yeah, of course. Of course. 

Sarah: And this thing that she can never tell her parents and they never know the full extent of what she's been through, presumably until this book is published. 

Carmen: Right. Right. If this were real and written by an actual teenager, could you imagine the parent just picking up the book and being like, oh my God, my daughter's diary. But yeah. So she goes home. Wait, does she go home? No. Then Roger comes by, her first love or her first crush. 

Sarah: Which is also typical. You finally bang someone else and then fucking Roger comes over. This book has moments of realness. It's fair. 

Carmen: Yeah. And she's like, oh my God, I can't believe that I just did this. And what if he finds out? Oh my God, I just had sex with another boy. And now, Roger is here. And then he basically tells her I really like you and I'm gonna be going to military school. And these are all my goals and dreams. And then they kiss. “Then he kissed me. And it was what I had always dreamed it would be since I was in kindergarten, other boys have kissed me, but it wasn't the same at all. This was fondness and liking and desire and regard and admiration and affection and tenderness and attachment and yearning. It was the most wonderful thing that has ever happened in my life.” And then she's like, oh no, but what if he finds out about Bill. She's like, if I were Catholic, I could do penance to pay for what I've done. How will he ever forgive me? And the entry ends, “Oh terrors, horrors, endless torment.” Which I just love so much.

Sarah: Oh my heart just bleeds for this girl. I know she's not real, but she's also very real, right? And I feel like this is why this book has the legs that it does. One is just that it's fun to be scared. It's fun for adults to scare kids of things that they think they should be scared of. And also just that this is the despondency and the sort of feeling of what it does to you to have such powerlessness as a teenager. This just feels so true. 

Carmen: I did not have sex as a teenager and I did not do anything even remotely, like any of this as a teen, but I do feel like there was even stuff that I did that was so minor. I remember this sensation of feeling so deeply alone and being like no one could ever understand if I explain to them the complexity of what is going on and what is going on is actually quite basic and quite simple and quite complicated because you're 15 or 16 or whatever, and you're like, oh my God this is the end of my life. But the perspective. I don't know. I guess it's just the perspective of being an adult, duh, but yeah. I don't know. 

Sarah: Yeah. And even in adulthood, I feel like that still plagues us. And it's one of the reasons why for everything that it's done, I feel like some of the good the internet generally has brought us is a way for people to realize that other people feel the way they feel and do the things they do. Yeah. And I think that Instagram is genuinely bad for us, but I think it's playing on a basic human weakness that's always been with us, which is to presume that other people have some kind of a whole coherent self and life. And that we are the only ones who's an undercooked cobbler that has fallen on the floor. 

Carmen: Yeah. Oh God. So then she spends the next while freaking out that she could be pregnant.

Sarah: Which by the way if she is, she's fucked, because she can't get an abortion legally that this is before legal abortions. And as we're having this conversation, it might be after that, in this country. So something to think about, right? 

Carmen: No. So right. She would've been absolutely fucked, and she's so upset about it that she's takes drugs to compensate for the stress of worrying, she's taking sleeping pills that she steals from her grandfather.

Sarah: I'm sure it'll calm down the baby. 

Carmen: And her grandparents are just what's wrong? Did you have a fight with your boyfriend? What's going on? And she's just she's I'm worried, in her brain, she's I'm worried, I'm pregnant and I'm taking like a million drugs to calm me down. And she runs out of the drugs and then she goes to a doctor, and he gives her more drugs and then her period starts. And then she's like, oh, what a wonderful, beautiful, happy day, my period started. I was never so happy for anything in my life. Now I can throw away my sleeping pills and tranquilizers and I can be me again”. Oh, wow. 

Then Beth comes home, her beloved Beth, and she's hardly the same person. They've already experienced this weird breakup, which is really quite sad.

Sarah: Yeah. And Beth has a boyfriend now. 

Carmen: That she met at camp and then also in the next paragraph it's Beth has a boyfriend. I met a girl named Chris and it's like, okay, moving on to Chris, who's a hippie.

Carmen: Yeah. And then they iron their hair, which I've also only ever read about in books. I was like, I know that's the thing that people did.

Sarah: My mom did that when she was a teenager. Yeah. I don't think she recommends it.

Carmen: It's so funny because this also includes when she basically says I look like a hippie. I guess her mom and dad want to talk to her and she says, “I could tell them a thing or two, because I imagine that sex without drugs isn't even the same thing as the mad forever wonder of it when you're really way out there. Anyway, I seem to be doing less and less right. I'm getting so that no matter what I do, I can't please the establishment.”

Sarah: I love how it reminds me of and And Just like That, the Sex and the City sequel series, where I'm convinced they had a whiteboard covered in words from right now that they wanted to work into the script. So they were like LinkedIn, Uber, Tinder. 

Carmen: Do you think ‘establishment’ was one of those words on this board? 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like she just had a little chalkboard, the mystery lady who wrote this, of things that a hippie would say and threw 'em at random. 

Carmen: Totally. Then the next entry also has this. I keep them just like going through my own highlights, but it's both true and also feels so on the nose that it's so ridiculous, but she says “if only parents would listen, if only they would let us talk instead of forever and eternally and continuously harping and preaching and nagging and correcting and yacking yacking yacking, but they won't listen. They simply won't or can't, or don't want to listen. And we kids keep winding up back in the same old, frustrating, lost lonely corner with no one to relate to either verbally or physically.” That's not not true, but also, it's weird to just say it like that. 

Sarah: Well, yeah. And there are these clumsy moments where you're like, is this the theme? Is the theme that parents need to listen? And then that goes away and you're like, I guess that's not the theme. 

Carmen: Right. Right. So I can imagine a parent listening to this or reading this book, I guess to understand the youth or whatever. And this sort of speaking to them in some way ah, the kids, they're just, they feel like we don't listen to them. That's interesting. Maybe that's relevant 

Sarah: Kind of a recurring problem that happens every generation I feel like. 

Carmen: And then Roger. So she's sort of, I guess seeing Roger, but he's going to his military school and he's I'm just gonna go. He's implying, we're just gonna be in this long-distance relationship or we're gonna be really far apart from each other. And she's like, I'll wait for you. But of course that's gonna be really hard. It's hard for anybody. And it's hard for a 16-year-old or 15-year-old at this point. And then she is hanging out with Chris and doing more drugs. 

Also there's slang in here that I do not understand. “This heart will pep you up like tranquilizers or slow you down.” So he gives her some kind of drug, like an upper that will counteract all the downers and tranquilizers and sleeping pills.

Sarah: It's a little red thing. So I don't know if that's a benny because they talk about bennies later, but yeah. Yeah. She's into speed now. It's fall. So it's time for speed. I think that a lot of teenagers at this point need to take something that could fall into the speed bucket because they are being given too much homework to do so give kids less homework. That's what I think. 

Carmen: Right. Okay. With September 26th, take it away. 

Sarah: And so next entry, September 26th, “Last night was the night, friend. I finally smoked pot and it was even greater than I expected”. And then she describes pot and I'm just like many people have commented on this. It's a notorious thing about this book that like, well, she tries heroin later. She hasn't tried heroin yet, but she's tried almost every drug I think this author can think of and then pot. Yeah. “I don't think I've been that relaxed in my whole entire life. It was really beautiful.” And they walk around on a sheep skin and then apparently based on the order of events, this is the last kind of domino that needs to fall before she becomes an actual drug dealer. Once you do pot, you're in the system. 

Carmen: Then you’re drugs to children in elementary school. Also it's funny to me, it just occurs to me. We are recording this on 4/20, so this feels appropriate. 

Sarah: Yes, I did that on purpose.  

Carmen: Oh you did! Yeah, the description of the sheep skin rug, and then eating a salted peanut and oh, a reference to the Great Salt Lake. So she was coming from Utah also. “So then I picked up a salted peanut and noticed that nothing had ever tasted so salty before. It felt like being a child again and trying to swim in the Great Salt Lake.” Also, I should say, as someone who's been to the Great Salt Lake, it is disgusting and I would never, do people swim in the Great Salt Lake?

Sarah: I was like, do people swim in it? That sounds scary. 

Carmen: Okay. This is my experience with the Great Salt Lake, which is visually beautiful. Obviously. it's gorgeous. It's gorgeous to look at as you drive past it, you've seen it. But the only life in this lake because it's so salty are brine shrimp that die in droves on the shore. So it just smells like death. And I remember getting to this beach and getting out of the car. And it smelled just like the worst rotting seafood. Just disgusting. 

Sarah: Like the dumpster behind a Red Lobster?

Carmen: Yes. Truly awful. And then I thought there was black sand, but as I moved closer, it turned out to be the flies that were on top of the dead brain shrimp. And so when you moved closer to it, all the flies lifted off and chased after you like you were a goddess of death or something. And it was horrifying. Anyway, I don't know if people swim in the Great Salt Lake. Maybe they do. Maybe there's a part that's less gross, but.

Sarah: This is one of the smaller mysteries I think we can solve along the way. Yeah. But I don't know. I think you've just written like a small horror movie. You can adapt that paragraph into a movie. I would watch it. 

Carmen: Yeah. And even this section, I don't know, “The peanut is so salty, my liver and my spleen and my intestines were corroded with salt. I long to taste a fresh peach or strawberry, and then to have the flavor and sweetness and delectableness of them consume me also. It was great. And I began to laugh in a totally mad way.” It's just, oh God, I love it so much. It's so ridiculous and so great. 

Sarah: Whenever this kid is not on drugs, she's down on herself, she's incredibly self-conscious, even when she's feeling happy or hopeful, it's very based on the approval of others. And only when she's tripping or on the pot that she seems to actually have a sense of self and just being enjoying herself. And I feel like that's one of the things about this book that makes it weird and also makes it stick. 

Carmen: Yeah, so then she's given some joints to smoke when she's alone. So then she's deeply in love. So then she is sort of having this thing with Richie and Chris, her friend, is in love with Ted, who's Richie's roommate and they're all dealing drugs. And there's this kind of interesting thing that's happening here where they basically convince her and Chris that you're selling drugs to kids who would otherwise have access to drugs. So it's not like you're doing anything bad. You're selling it to high schoolers who are already gonna get it anyway. 

She's trying to have sex with Richie. He only wants to have sex while they're on drugs. And then she wants to have sex, not on drugs, and he's you are over sexed. And then it turns that Richie and I've already forgotten his name, Ted, Richie and Ted are gay lovers and Chris and her walk into their apartment to find them having sex. And then it gets super homophobic for five seconds. And then of course she's really mad. She's like, man, he had me dealing drugs. At some point he has her dealing drugs to elementary school kids, which I'm like, what?

Sarah: Right. Use your head, how much disposable income does a nine-year-old have, right? Maybe this is why your business isn't working. 

Carmen: There are certainly kids who would unfortunately have access to drugs at nine, but it's not because they're buying it from a local dealer. It’s going to be way sadder and more specific than that. She's like, I'm so ashamed. I can't believe I've been selling to 11- and 12-year-olds and even 9- and 10-year-olds. “I'm a disgrace to myself and my family and to everybody I'm as bad as that son of a bitch Richie”. So then her and Chris get this idea, they decide that they are going to go to San Francisco to start over and make, sort of begin like a new life together. And it'll be easy because they're gonna be away from all these drug people they've been knowing. And they can just sort of start fresh.

Sarah: Yeah. They'll be away from all their temptations in San Francisco. 

Carmen: Yeah. San Francisco. And then they leave. They said they backtrack to Salt Lake City. They've stolen money from Richie, Ted, and also reported him to the police. So they're afraid that they'll come after them. So they do some weird movements to throw Richie off their track. And then she says “goodbye to your home. Goodbye, good family” sort of saying goodbye in her diary to her family. And she's like, I hate being a high school dropout, but I dare not even write for my transcripts, knowing that you might follow them and Richie might follow them. You're very sacred to me. And then they go to San Francisco.

Sarah: And I wonder what will happen to our girls. 

Carmen: Everything's fine. And then she's I'm a lesbian and then everything is fine.

Sarah: Oh my God. Let's just, we have to finish the book, but if you, the audience, want to leave now we can say yeah. And that's the end. And then she and Chris had a great time. And they kissed each other tenderly at Golden Gate Park, the end, end of book, goodbye, go home the end. 

Carmen: And now they go to Dyke March every year, and everybody knows them. And looks for them and is so charmed by them as a couple, it was like an old dyke couple.

Sarah: And they have a little shop called Button Button. 

Carmen: Yeah. That's our Go Ask Alice fan fiction. 

Sarah: But if you want the other story, we will be back with part two. Things are going to escalate. How do you feel at the conclusion of this, I guess the end of the beginning? 

Carmen: Yeah. I feel for her. 

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like this is why this book has endured, because kids, adolescence, we find friends in books and I feel like Alice, despite being someone created very cynically in many ways, has become like Anne of Green Gables or Jane Eyre at this point, she has been beloved by many people for many years. And I don't know, she's important to me too, I guess. I really want stuff to work out for her. I don't think it's going to in the book though, but it can for, I don't know, for the part of her that is us.

Carmen: We got that foreshadowing, so we know. 

Sarah: It was very subtle.

Sarah: Thank you so much for joining us for part one of this very educational story. We can't wait to see you in part two. And if you want to learn about more stories that totally really happened. We have a nice bonus episode on Patreon about the Blair Witch Project with Chelsea Weber-Smith, or you could spend your money on a nice Frenchie. It's up to you. 

Thank you so much to Carmen Maria Machado for coming to talk to me about this wonderfully real fake book. And thank you as always to Carolyn Kendrick who produces this show and makes it sound great. Thanks again. See you next time.