You're Wrong About
You're Wrong About
Go Ask Alice Part 3 with Rick Emerson and Carmen Maria Machado
Sarah and Carmen complete their epic trilogy by meeting Rick Emerson on the edge of Mount Doom to discuss his book, Unmask Alice, and some of the story behind the diary that has captivated America—and informed its drug policy—for half a century. Digressions include multi-level marketing, Oceans Eleven, the Great Salt Lake.
You can hear Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Here's where to find Rick and his book Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries:
Website
Here's where to find Carmen:
Website
Support us:
Bonus Episodes on Patreon
Bonus Episodes on Apple Podcasts
Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, You Are Good
[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Links:
https://carmenmariamachado.com/
http://www.rickemerson.com/
http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
http://apple.co/ywa
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com
Sarah: Welcome to You're Wrong About I'm Sarah Marshall. Welcome to Go Ask Alice, end game. With me today is our friend Carmen Maria Machado. And with us also is super-secret guest Rick Emerson, the author of Unmask Alice: LSD Satanic Panic and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries. If you want to hear some bonus episodes from your wrong about, you can go to patreon.com/yourewrongabout, and hear them there. You can hear them on apple subscriptions, or you can go see one fifth of Maverick. Okay. It's time for the conclusion to our story. I hope you enjoy it. I hope that solving mysteries always makes you feel like there are just 100 more mysteries out there for you.
Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast for sadistic switch hitters and those who love them. With me today is Carmen Maria Machado, and our secret exciting mystery guest stepping out from behind the crushed velvet curtain, Rick Emerson. Author of Unmask Alice. Hello, Carmen. Hello, Rick.
Carmen: Hello.
Rick: Howdy.
Sarah: Hi. So Rick, tell us about your book. I bet it has a subtitle.
Rick: The subtitle, because all books now must have subtitles that are four dozen words long, the full title of the book is, Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries.
Sarah: Can I just say, here are my three favorite things: LSD, the satanic panic, and imposters. That's it. That's all I want.
Rick: Have I got the book for you!
Sarah: I feel like this book is about many slices of American history. It's like this cross section of mid 20th century America, or mid to late really, that we get by following the Go Ask Alice story. It's like a long, thin slice of pork belly.
Rick: If you follow, go ask Alice, it's going to take you through several decades of American history, several moral panics and quasi social breakdowns, and a whole cast of just unbelievable characters and events, all of which are all the more astounding for really existing and having happened.
Sarah: So here's what I'm going to do. Carmen Maria Machado, noted public intellectual, brilliant author, who I forced to read trash with me cause you're a Philadelphia trash raccoon, just like me. I'm going to ask an opening question and then I want you to try and get as many questions as you can answer.
Carmen: Fantastic.
Sarah: So first question. Is this book a true story written by a real teenage girl who really died?
Rick: Well, I mean, it really is, if nothing else intentional or not, it's one of the most brilliant marketing moves, certainly in literature. And certainly in young adult literature, it's sort of like that prize in the box of cracker jacks. Which is, well, how can you get kids of every era, no matter what else is on offer, to pay 5,000% mark off what is basically stale caramel corn. It's like you'll put a prize in there, but they won't know what it is. It'll be a mystery.
And it's almost two questions in one, because on the one hand, it's ‘is this book real’? Is the diary authentic? And then there's a secondary question, which is, leaving aside the issue of the diary's authenticity, did this girl, did Alice really exist? Leaving aside the question of Alice's authenticity, hold chunks of the diary, Go Ask Alice, of the book are just undeniably false. There's just no way around that. There's a lot of the stuff that probably a lot of people noticed on the first reading that it took me many ratings to eventually catch onto.
You guys did a great job of talking about this in the last episode, this sort of reverse drug escalation that she goes on where she starts with LSD and then by the end is basically just shooting morphine into her eyeballs. And then finally says, now I should try this marijuana that the kids seem to be all about. I mean, it probably ranked false to a lot of people at the beginning. It took me a while to catch onto that, or the fact that the diary’s not even really consistent with itself.
So for example, at the beginning, there's this editor's note that says ‘names, dates, places, and certain events have been changed in accordance with the wishes of those involved’, which is both overwritten and hard to deconstruct, but which essentially means we've changed some things for privacy. And yet there are all of these names that are just redacted when you could have changed them. So there's an example where she says, “Well, I met Fawn blank at the store today.” And it's well, hang on. Are we redacting names or are we changing names? And if we're doing one, why are we doing the other? So there's that.
Leaving that aside, the timeline just doesn't work. Even if you make allowances for changing the dates and some of the events for privacy, there is just no practical way that certain things line up with reality. So Beatrice Sparks, who presented herself as the editor of this book, was consistently inconsistent about a lot of things. Her books, her background, her education, her training, and that extends to Go Ask Alice. Sometimes there was one diary. Sometimes there were two. Sometimes Alice died three weeks later. Sometimes Alice died six months later. It seemed to change depending on what day she told the story. But there was one thing that was fairly solid when she told this backstory, it was that she met Alice - the real Alice - at a Christian youth conference in the summer of 1970. So for reasons I get into in the book, that immediately gives us a six-week window. She had to have met Alice between June 15th and July 31st. And that in and of itself essentially dismantles the entire timeline, for starters. The diary doesn't mention a Christian youth camp or anything remotely resembling that, much less her parents letting her travel again. It's well, you've just had this psychotic break and most of your hair is missing, and you're covered in gouges, have fun.
Carmen: And your fingers are like hamburgers or whatever.
Rick: Exactly. I mean also, every time you leave the house, you seem to run away or end up with the worst people imaginable. So good day to you, just enjoy your trip to the Christian youth conference.
Sarah: Butterflies are free.
Carmen: I've been to Christian youth conferences. Some stuff happens there. So yeah, definitely.
Rick: So it doesn't really scan as they say, even if you assume that the meltdown happened after the Christian youth camp. In other words, Beatrice Sparks meets the real Alice at a Christian youth camp. And then the meltdown happens sometimes later. That also doesn't work because it doesn't leave time for everything that follows, including a month in the hospital. And at one point she makes a reference, the only reference that Alice herself makes to anything happening at, because this Christian youth camp was supposedly at a college campus, the only reference to that that Alice actually makes is when she talks about perhaps taking summer classes at the local college the following year. So, the timeline just doesn't work, which is something that happens again and again, in the other eight diaries that Beatrice Sparks somehow discovered.
Sarah: Found! Just under a manhole, just cause the thing about troubled dead teenagers, diaries, that you can find them just all over the place, just on bus stops and in the bookstore and at the supermarket.
Rick: It does seem to be the case that people who find one miraculous thing, then just keep finding miraculous things, right?
Sarah: Like fossils. Yeah.
Rick: Exactly. On a more basic level. Some of the language just points to a problem. There are certain phrases in Go Ask Alice that repeat word for word nearly in later books. So at one point, Alice is talking about a girl named Doris. And she says, “Well, since then, she's hopped into bed with anybody who would turn down the covers.”
Sarah: A lot of maids.
Rick: And then Beatrice Sparks says, next book, a character says, let's see, I wrote this down. A character talks about “hopping from bed to bed with anyone who would turn down the covers”. So it's very nearly the same phrase. In Go ask Alice there's a May entry where Alice says, ‘it's a good thing most people bleed on the inside, or this would really be a gory, blood smeared earth.” In Spark’s next book, a character says, “depression only makes you bleed on the inside. Maybe that's a good thing because it would be a pretty slippery, red, gory, bloody world.”
Sarah: Oh my God.
Rick: So this happens throughout her writing/editing career. There's actually one phrase. The phrase is, “Bad thoughts are like birds. You can't keep them from flying overhead, but you can keep them from making nests in your hair”, which I think we can all agree is sage advice.
Sarah: No, you can't.
Rick: It's actually such sage advice that phrase turns up in three different diaries. Edited by Beatrice Sparks and almost exactly the same wording. I don't get too snarky about this right out of the gate, but I will say that.
Sarah: We'll get too snarky later.
Rick: Because this is, on some level, a kind of horrific story. There's a lot of really unpleasant aspects to this. So I didn't want to be too cavalier about it, but I did in an early draft, I had this Beatrice Sparks drinking game.
Sarah: Please share it.
Rick: Well, so this part is germane to our conversation right here, because one of the rules was drink every time someone slaps “ness: on the end of a word where it doesn't belong.
Sarah: Oh, that's so much drinking.
Rick: Yeah. So In Go Ask Alice, “blondness” “exoticness” “delectableness”. One of her later books has, “absoluteness”, “amazingness”. I believe there's a point in one of her later books where a character talks about Idaho, might be Montana, but I think it's Idaho. And he says, “I just can't wait to see the rollingness of Idaho”. So just these two areas, that great language overlaps and the timeline kind of negates the idea that we're dealing with an untraveled diary.
Sarah: What if it's a Dalai Lama type situation, and the same team keeps being born again and again into new bodies. We don’t know.
Carmen: Well, this is just so funny to me because, as a writer, I think a lot about you know how, if you read all of my stuff, you'd be like, oh here are all Carmen's bad habits. Or whatever, or ticks, or linguistic tendencies, this is how you know, you can look at the text and be like, oh, she does this kind of over and over again, which is normal for a writer to do. It's just funny to imagine it when like the one time it's like actually a serious problem is when you're allegedly editing a bunch of different texts by different people. And they just all are like in exactly the same prose style.
Rick: Yeah. I mean, this is years ago, this is like a mid-nineties reference. But a guy I used to live with, he's talking about whatever the new Kevin Smith film was at that point. And he said, it's amusing and all, but he said, the problem is all these characters are just Kevin Smith with a thesaurus. There's a little bit of that dynamic that happens here too.
Sarah: That’s true. Which is often quite enjoyable, but, yeah. I guess the moral is that if you're going to pretend to have found diaries by multiple teens, maybe you have to be more creative than this.
Rick: Or not, possibly.
Sarah: Just don’t do it, is the other option. And most of us are not doing that. So good job, everybody.
Rick: It also doesn't seem to have been much of a hurdle for agents, editors, publishers, journalists, or most of the people who were responsible for getting these books into, cause it's not a one-person operation. This is not a self-publishing gig. So there were a lot of people who looked and were like, good enough. Stamp, and just send it out.
Sarah: There's so many interesting questions in that part of the equation, because yeah, of course it takes a whole team of people to bring a book into the world. But Carmen I want to turn it over to you because I'm curious myself about what your most burning questions are having just finished our fascinated journey through the dark right of this journal.
Carmen: I guess it's sort of a question of what was the path to publication of this book? Were they like, ah, yes, a teenager's diary or were they all just like, ehhh. As a teen, it felt realistic, as an adult human I'm reading it, being like, this is so obviously not real. Were people having those thoughts in whatever, what were the years it was published? 72?
Rick: 71.
Carmen: 71. Okay. Yeah, like in 71 were people like, this is bullshit, or did people buy it? What was the publication process like, if we know and were people just like, yeah, this seems real? Or were they just doing that cynical publishing thing of just yeah, pushing it along.
Rick: Well, so it's interesting if you go on Amazon, I mean, the last time I checked it was like two or three days ago. I went on Amazon, and I was checking just to see Alice's stats because you can see not only where it's selling overall, but you can see what categories it's selling best in. So it's overall number 160,000 of whatever of all the books they sell. But then Amazon is a book category called “young people, adults, facts of life” and then the subcategory is. “Drug and alcohol abuse”. And I think Go Ask Alice as of this week was number three in that category in terms of current sellers.
Sarah: So helpful, such a helpful book. What I love about is that it gives so much real-world advice for how to deal with addiction as a teenager, which is that you're just going to fucking die no matter what you do.
Rick: And that's not a cumulative sales figure. That's the real time “as of this week” sales figure. And if you look at the reviews of Go Ask Alice right now, there's certainly no uniformity of opinion in terms of, is this real? Is this not? I would say that, working backward, I would say that right now, there's about a 50/50 split in terms of just the general public in how they view it, maybe 60/40 in terms of it being a hoax or being anti-drug propaganda. If you go back a little, when it was released, it was absolutely viewed, I mean, almost across the board, as being absolutely authentic. I mean, there were a few outliers, but the outliers really were the exception that proves the rule. I would say 90% of media reviews, in other words, people who were reviewing this either in a newspaper or magazine or on television, treated it as absolutely authentic. And to some degree that becomes, I think it's a self-perpetuating thing because there was three networks for, if you count PBS, there was two Newsweek’s, and then there was whatever your local paper was. But your local paper also pulled a lot of things from the New York times and from the associated press and UPPI. So there were a lot of outlets, but very few main channels feeding those outlets. So conventional wisdom solidified pretty quickly.
And also just on a more basic level, not to be too sweepingly historic about this, but it was pre so many of the things that I think calcified the idea of media and government and especially government and media together, lying to you. I mean, it was pre-Watergate, it was pre so many of these scandals and before, so much of the worst cover ups about things like Vietnam had come out. And even now, if you talk to people about Go Ask Alice or any book like this, one of the things they will say, I mean, my mother actually said this and my mother is nobody's fool, but she said, I thought they couldn't say it if it wasn't true. Yeah. It says real. How could they say that if it's not real?
Sarah: That's truly what I believed about books as a kid. Yeah. That really brings me back to that. And I really, it's funny because I'm so disabused of that now and I spend so much time thinking about hoax nonfiction, but yeah, I believed. And I believed that books had the power to just have truth in them almost all of the time. I mean, one of the things I think people don't realize is how flimsy publishing's apparatus is and I guess always has been for ensuring truth. Because my understanding now is that if you write a nonfiction book, you basically have to have it independently fact checked. Your publisher doesn't provide a fact checker, which is incredible to me. That's unbelievable.
Rick: It is one of the things. So I have a chapter called, Don't Believe the Truth, which is all about this sort of thing. Because going into this, I mean, I had some knowledge. I'd written a book before, but it was definitely different than this. And I'm certainly not a publishing veteran. So I still had a lot of ideas about, again, it's the, well, there must be somebody somewhere who looks at this and says no, this has to be labeled blank. Or this fails the test to be labeled nonfiction or memoir or whatever.
But the thing I learned is that, in the United States, where most products, nearly anything you buy, I mean, advertising can be somewhat deceptive and it can be somewhat misleading, but when you go buy a can of soup, I'm not saying there are no bad actors out there, but when you buy a can of soup, essentially, that can of soup has to tell you what's really in it. I mean, now sometimes they'll mask it with sort of, made up verbiage or have some gigantic, long chemical name that you don't really understand. It's just horse hooves, or it's like when you buy a Twinkie and it says cellulose fiber. And you're like, how is that different from sawdust? But essentially the product has to tell you what it contains. And books are a towering exception because the publishing industry essentially runs on an honor system.
And the thing about honor systems is honor systems only govern people who don't need it. I mean, if you're going to follow an honor system, guess what? You don't need the honor system. And there's also just the economics of it, which is that the publishing industry has always run on really thin margins, especially now. And so when you write a book and you submit a book, I actually talked to one of her editors later in her career and it took me quite a long time to get her to finally just flat out say, she was her own fact checker. I mean, that's just how we go with things. And so when people wonder, how does this keep happening? How do memoirs keep coming out? And then they turn out to be mostly or completely fabricated. That's why, it's because there's no regulation and no apparatus in place to control it. And there's not much motivation because it doesn't seem to have much impact.
Sarah: Yeah. It's like, why do we keep having white collar crime? It's because nobody gets punished for it. And when they do, it's the same with publishing where occasionally there'll be a famous hoax memoir and you have to go get scolded by Oprah, but it happens so rarely. And so relatively meaninglessly that who cares?
Rick: And even in that case. So in the case of James Frey and A Million Little Pieces, which is probably the case that people know the most, if you look at the proportionality of that scolding. I mean, I'm certainly not trying to exonerate or exempt James Frey from this because he's the one who wrote it and turned it in and said, but by all accounts, first of all, he submitted it as a novel to begin with. And so he said, Hey, here's this thing. Here's this thing that kind of draws my life, but is basically fiction. And they're like, fiction.
Sarah: Why are the paragraphs so short, goddamn it?
Carmen: I did not know this. This is news to me. I mean, I knew that it was like a hoax, but I didn't realize that they had submitted it as fiction. What is the publisher pressured him into just?
Rick: Just so starting around 1991 with the novel or with the memoir actually Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. That is when the memoir explosion, I mean, if you look at a pie chart of publishing, memoirs really over the last 30 years have become an increasingly large part. It's just become whether it's a phase or a trend, or just a natural direction of the way the publishing goes. Memoirs really started selling like gangbusters. And so they were like, you know what people love? They love those memoirs. How about we just do a novel? No. How about a memoir by James Frey?
So if you look at what happened there, James Fry submitted this book, but there's a long list of people, as with Go Ask Alice, who had to sign off on it. I mean, a book passes through dozens of hands between the time somebody turns it in and the time it hits the shelves, and he received a lot of that scolding. His editor got some of it, although she was decidedly unrepentant about the entire thing. But there was essentially no blowback for his publisher. And in other words, James Frey took the brunt of that punishment. And I can't really disagree with that.
At the same time, the people who are ultimately responsible for putting it on the shelves are the ones, because the public doesn't. When I go to buy a book, I don't really care who the publisher is for the most part, it doesn't really matter to me. So the author is the one who kinda gets tagged with that. The likelihood of an author doing that twice or three times in a row is pretty low. The likelihood of a publisher doing it again is really high. And so we're holding the wrong people accountable.
Carmen: I have so many feelings that I cannot say on this podcast about publishing acting badly and authors taking the brunt of the punishment. Not even, I mean, in the case of things like James Frey, et cetera, et cetera. But also, I feel I've seen it with other situations as well, where publishers skirt by and just do it again and again. And yeah, certain authors just get burned so bad they just are never heard from again or whatever, so this is not surprising to me at all.
Rick: And publishers are usually indemnified by contract as well. It's usually in the deal, in the paperwork between an author and a publisher. I mean, the publisher essentially says Hey, if it turns out that this is a hoax, like it's all on you.
Sarah: It is like white collar crime. It's like, oh, it's interesting that this trader at this famously cutthroat hedge fund decided to indulge in some corporate espionage. I wonder why he did that. And it's well, for his boss and for money and to not get fired, that's why.
Carmen: Yeah. Yes. Well then, okay, so then my follow up question to that is has Beatrice Sparks ever admitted to this being a hoax? I'm assuming not, right. Or what is her relationship? I mean, is she also, is she alive? I don’t even know.
Rick: She is no longer with
Carmen: Okay. Okay. And then has she ever admitted to it, said anything publicly about it?
Rick: Sort of the opposite. And when I say sort of, I mean, decided like the opposite.
Carmen: Just dug in and didn't move.
Sarah: Like a tortoise.
Rick: I mean, I try not to be a person who just ties everything back to the event of the last six years, but-
Sarah: Hard not to.
Rick: As I think we have learned again and again, I mean, as the author, Max Brooks once said, Americans are great at not learning lessons, but in the last few years we've seen just strategically speaking, just in terms of pure tactics, the best approach is just never apologize. Never explain and just double down, because that seems to work. And I feel like there's this sort of villainous, Malcolm McLaren version of me in some alternate reality where I'm like a crisis manager for people that have just been caught lying about things.
Because, for example, I remember when Lance Armstrong finally copped to blood doping or whatever it was he was doing and he finally went on Oprah. I remember watching that and just thinking you are such a fool, because 20% of this country thinks we never went to the moon and people are like, well, the science proves it. I'm like, look around this country. Does it seem like we're a group of people that really embrace science wholeheartedly? So if he had just stuck to his guns, there would've been some core of people that never would've abandoned Lance Armstrong, especially against the French. I mean, let's be honest. I mean, there's some section of America that would've been like, I'm not trusting the French, I'll trust this guy.
Sarah: We hate the French. We're going to eat Kraft singles until the day we die.
Rick: So she, as time went on, really just became more and more invested in this. And I should say for the record, I'm not trying to diagnose anybody, but it does seem like it might have been Aristotle who said the thing about, what you pretend to be, you will eventually become, so you have to choose your mask wisely. And if you tell that story of meeting Alice at a Christian youth camp, and then she tragically dies and you get this diary and it's on scraps of paper and the backs of grocery bags or whatever.
Sarah: It's Carmen's favorite part.
Carmen: That is my favorite part, honestly.
Rick: If you tell that story again and again, and especially if the New York Times embraces it and repeats it as gospel, after a while, yeah, that starts to be a thing that sounds real even to yourself. And so I guess that's a long way of saying no, it really was quite the opposite that she sort of dug in further on that.
Carmen: So then I guess my next question, and again I'm so excited for this book. When Sarah told me that you were the secret guest and that you had read this whole book, I got so excited because there's nothing more than I love than a big, specific book about a weird thing that I'm obsessed with. So I'm very excited for this book, by the way.
Rick: So glad to hear that.
Carmen: I guess I'm also sort of wondering, just reading it with a critical eye. I feel like it's pretty easy to discern moments where you can tell that there's like something, since it's all allegedly real. So it's reflecting something interesting about the author who is again not this young girl, but I kept thinking, okay, so the drug stuff, she's clearly never done a drug in her life, has no sense of like the inner workings of drug culture or anything and that seems pretty obvious to me. I was shocked by the amount of gay stuff in this book. And not just the homosexuality is a shortcut to Satanism, homophobic, gay panic stuff, but actual moments of same sex attraction that was clearly confusing and complicating her life and was confusing her. And we both just kept the whole time we've been doing this podcast, Sarah and I, we just kept every moment being like, gay, gay, gay. There's so much gay stuff in this book. So yeah. Do we know what Beatrice's relationship with gayness was? Like, was she queer? Do we know? And maybe we don't, I don't know. Anyway, that's my big question, honestly.
Rick: Well, and that is, it is a distressingly common theme in the books that she, depending on one's view, wrote or edited. I mean, that is one of the many sort of horrible threads that runs throughout her catalog. This is where knowing about Beatrice Sparks really does help bring some things into focus. Because even more than most Christian faiths, Latter-Day Saints do really seem to have a conflicted and complicated fixation on sex. The church's full name, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which most people call Mormons. Or in Utah actually the common term is LDS. But as I say, at one point I mentioned LSD like 5,000 times in this book. So that seems like a recipe for hilarious confusion. But the church teaches that. And I have this quote here, because this is a thing that they say repeatedly, the church teaches that “sexual purity is youth's most precious possession”. And this is the part that you can lay a lot of trouble at the church's doorstep for this, that a young person is, “better dead and clean than alive and unclean”. And that's not just premarital sex. I mean, that's obviously same sex activity. That is even masturbation.
And one of the ways that, and I talk about this in a later section of the book, one of the ways they reinforce this purity is something called a worthiness interview. And I want to say for the record, I'm not singling out Latter Day Saints just out of malice. I mean, this book is rooted in Utah county to a large part and Utah and in that culture. So that hence the focus, but they do this thing called a worthiness interview, which is something that's required to take part in temple activities. And in a worthiness interview, you go sit in a room with your local Bishop and it's a one-on-one thing, just you and him. And it's of course, always a him and he asks a lot of really detailed, awkward questions about your life and your behavior. Things like do you tithe properly and do you avoid caffeinated beverages, et cetera. But a lot of times that includes sexual questions like whether you masturbate. And oh, you do? Well, when was the last time and what were you thinking about? And have you become unchaste with someone? Have you engaged in sexual activity? And if you say yes, it's well…
So I know someone who went to a worthiness interview. And of course, you're raised to think this person is speaking to you for God and essentially interrogating you on behalf of God. And it was, well, have you engaged in heavy petting, or whatever he called it? And she said, “Well, yes I have.” And then his next question was, well, what kind of underwear were you wearing? Now, I'm not saying that type of question happens every time, but the point is that bishops have broad latitude in what they ask, how they ask it, and how detailed those questions are. So my point is that there's simultaneously this fixation on sex, and yet this depiction of sex, especially sexual sin, as something that can literally be worse than death. And there's another layer to this, which is that the church, and they don't talk about this a lot because it makes nonbelievers sort of roll their eyes, but the church teaches that Satan is essentially always trying to take control of your body. One of the teachings is that he's a spirit who doesn't have his own temporal form. And so he's always trying to sort of hop into you like a kind of bipedal taxi.
Sarah: Like Glory on season five of Buffy.
Rick: Yes, exactly. But he's always trying to take control of your mind and your actions and that Satan controlling your mind and your body is the cause not just of sin, but the cause of a lot of physical ailments and or mental and emotional ailments. And so if you then zoom out and you look at the nine teenage diaries that Beatrice Sparks produced, there's a lot of recurring elements, but more than sex, more than drug abuse, more than anything else, these teenage diarists seem to be haunted by this specter of mental illness, a mental upset tumult. And it comes in a lot of forms, but it's always there. And if you come from a culture where sin, especially sexual sin is not just worse than dying, but is paired with mental illness as something caused by the devil, then you're going to be hyper vigilant about it. And that's a very long way of saying that whether we're talking about a girl named Alice or whether we're talking about a woman named Beatrice, I'm not saying she was crazy, and I'm not saying she was secretly gay, but it would make a horrible, strange kind of sense for her to fixate on one or both of those possibilities.
Carmen: Got it. Interesting.
Sarah: Oh Beatrice.
Carmen: I know. Because she's not explicitly Mormon. I mean, Alice is not Mormon. Is she in the book? Do we ever, there's no real… now I'm thinking back.
Sarah: I feel like there's a part where she's naming lack of religion as one of the incipient problems in her life, because she has her first friend who she's obsessed with who's Jewish and then she's I wish I knew about our family’s religious traditions, but I don't even know. Okay, bye.
Rick: It's not as explicit in Go Ask Alice as it becomes in some of her later books. There are some signifiers in there, so at one point, I mean, she does talk about visiting the Great Salt Lake. Which as I believe Carmen mentioned is a hideous place that looks beautiful until you get out of the car and then you're just like, why am I here?
Carmen: I got so many messages on Instagram of people being like, yes, the Great Salt Lake is disgusting.
Rick: It smells like a sewer, and it's covered in brine flies. It's awful.
Carmen: Exactly.
Rick: But there are some references there to what we might broadly call Mormon culture. and there are some things that are not there that become more apparent in later books, but it is also worth noting that one other recurring element in these teenage diaries. So Beth Bomb, which is the girl that Alice gets this sort of crush on, or however she would describe it. “Is it possible I'm in love with Beth? Horrors!” Whatever she says, there are a lot of Jewish characters that show up in these teenage diaries. And so Jewish culture plays a big role and the reason that it's significant is because in Mormon culture, they really view themselves as having this very strong connection. They view themselves as essentially being one of the other, lost tribes, one of the other tribes that is in North America, in fact so much so that, within Utah itself, the nickname for Utah is Zion. That's what they call it in Utah. So they very much perceive this interwoven aspect between Judaism and Latter-Day Saint culture. So that's another connective thread. Sparks herself in multiple interviews explicitly said that Alice was Mormon or that she met her at a, sometimes she says Christian youth conference. Sometimes she says Mormon, but that's the thing that it's there if you're looking for it.
Carmen: Interesting. So what do we know about Beatrice? Do we know much about who she was as a person? Do we have any biographical insight into her in any way, or is she a little bit of a black box?
Rick: The way that I sort of describe her is, I sometimes say she's not just the unreliable narrator of other people's lives, she's the unreliable narrator of her own life. I will say out of the outset, first of all, this book took me far longer than I expected to write. I mean, I think part of that is my instant karma. I think the universe is teaching me humility because my first book went from idea to published in 19 months. I was like, this is easy. Who are these people who take seven years? What are they slackers?
Carmen: Yeah, you're definitely getting punished.
Rick: Oh yeah. So when I started this book, the universe was like, all right, jackass, how about we punish you for your overconfidence? So the thing about writing about anybody who is an unreliable source is that nothing can be taken at face value. I mean, everything has to be when I interviewed one of her children, his opening line to me was nobody knows her story, including me.
And so part of that I think is generational in the sense that, and I think there was definitely an under sharing or anti-sharing aspect to people who grew up, in the Great Depression, especially because a lot of times people - and Beatrice Sparks included - lived through an era that was just objectively terrible in many ways. And not just because things had not evolved socially. I mean, it was obviously a much different era, in a lot of ways, but also there was the great depression and then there was a world war and then another world war. And it was just a whole lot of things people wanted to forget. And I think there was very much an element of that's in the past. I don't want to think about it. I don't want to talk about it. I'm looking at the future.
And now this is me sort of just speculating/diagnosing, but there's a weird Great Gatsby element in the sense that, there's this American idea of self-invention and recreation. A thing that we obviously know is not true, but that we are still told and that we on some level all want to believe, which is the idea that in America, it doesn't matter who you are, where you're born, or whether you're rich or poor, you can become whatever you want. And the phrase there is ‘become’. We in America tend to really lionize, reward, or even worship success at the same time we tend to gloss over a lot of the self-reinvention, which is sometimes another word for deceit that goes into that. We tend to value a lot of things, but we don't want to know how that sausage is made. And so to some degree, there were a lot of, I'm going to pretend to be the person I want to be, and I'm going to pretend to be that person until I become that person. It took quite a long time to unravel her life and her background. And I'm sure that there are things that are probably not known to anybody. And a lot of that seems to be by design. And so, if you are unhappy with who you are and you're desperate to become somebody else, you're probably not going to be forthcoming about a lot of that.
Sarah: What do we know? Are there indisputable biographical facts?
Rick: Yeah. She was born in Logan, Utah, which is now and was even more so then a very small, very, very, very Mormon place. I mean, even contrasted with the rest of Utah. When she was in her teens, she moved, I mean, you want to talk about a culture shock. So she moved from Logan, Utah to San Francisco.
Sarah: San Francisco, California.
Carmen: Oh, this makes a little better of the book. Make a little more sense. That's very interesting.
Rick: Well, if you want to do another Beatrice Sparks drinking game and you drink, or, have some Jell-O or whatever it is you want to do every time a character mentions or goes to San Francisco. That seems to be a thing that turns up quite frequently. And San Francisco in the mid to late thirties was, I mean, it's obviously a tumultuous, chaotic city at all times, But especially then, because it was just in addition to the actual, real literal earthquakes, there was a lot of social upheaval happening at San Francisco at that moment. And so it is hard to imagine actually a greater contrast going from tiny town, Utah to San Francisco. I mean, I cannot even imagine. Even going to some place like Manhattan or Las Vegas, I think would not be quite the same.
Then by the mid-sixties, she's back in Utah, she's married, she has family. And she moves to a place that is often called the fraud capital of America, which is Utah county, which effectively means Provo. Provo was the heart of that. So just a couple of miles from BYU.
Sarah: Is that why those twins are from Provo in Oceans 11? But this idea that it's the designated American capital of con artists.
Rick: At one point, I don't have the stat in front of me here, but I'd have to do it from memory, but I think this is true. At one point, I believe, I guess it would be the FTC that did this investigation. I believe at one point they estimated that something like, and I think the number was literally two thirds that two thirds of investment in securities fraud had traced to Utah county in some way, that it was in some way based there. If you want to do a real life drinking game, actually you can just drink every time you find a multi-level marketing company that is based in Provo or Utah, or that has very strong roots there. So Unique, for example, the makeup company, they're the most recent example that I can think of, but multi-level marketing stuff is gigantic. It is enormous in Utah county, which tells you a lot.
Carmen: I feel like now we're really on a thread and we're super off topic, but I'm just curious. Is the multi-level marketing thing because Mormon women are supposed to be at home. I feel it’s that, or is it like, is there some other connection?
Sarah: Is it like Delaware where the laws are weird?
Rick: That's a good question. I can really only speculate on that. I mean, I think it's probably a mix of things, a confluence of factors, but I would say off the top of my head, I think the idea that, and again, I do apologize to anybody who feels like I am perhaps picking on their faith. I'm really not, but that just happens to be what we're talking about. So, I mean, on the one hand again, you've got this strange dichotomy where the church. I mean, it's a prosperity faith in many ways. And there's some rational underpinning to that, that they, I mean, to be fair and Mormons were undoubtedly undeniably, persecuted for a long time. I mean, at one point I believe it was Illinois actually, the governor signed a thing called the Mormon extinction order, an executive order signed by the governor saying we need to exterminate Mormons.
And so there is a well-founded to some degree sense of solidarity against the outside world and self-reliance, the idea that we need to have our own money and our own economy, because things might go south for us again. At the same time, women are not exactly encouraged to be independent or to work outside the home or to do anything that takes them away from raising the family and so forth. And if you can, in theory, make money pushing cosmetics to your friends on Facebook or whatever that, that's splitting the difference, for some people.
I think also Mormons are, again, according to a government report that I have a copy of somewhere, Mormons are especially ripe for what they call ‘affinity fraud’ and affinity fraud just means that you're likely to believe the claims of somebody who's in your same social group.
Sarah: That's so interesting. Because most people, a lot of secular people, kind of suburban moms in America don't have a social group and that's one of the big problems they face, so that's depressing.
Rick: And if you are predisposed to just, somebody in your church says, hey, so I've been making some money. I don't know why I always become this anonymous guy from Brooklyn.
Sarah: I've been selling this LuLaRoe pretty good product.
Rick: Exactly. The same sort of thing, they’ll strike up a conversation at a barbecue or something and say yeah. So this is working out really well for me. I might be able to go into business for myself. Sarah, you seem like a real go getter, a person who really, really wants to make money.
Sarah: Oh my goodness. I am.
Rick: So,, I can't make any promises, but I could maybe bring you in on this. I mean, if it's something you're interested in, I could talk, I mean, there's a long line.
Sarah: Nice. Create a sense of urgency.
Rick: If you're really, I mean, if you're really willing to give it a hundred percent, I can make a few calls for you.
Sarah: I love giving a hundred percent. Yeah. Carmen and I also were very charmed by the section of the book where inexplicably our girls, Alice and Chris start a small business.
Rick: Yep. That is very much part of, in my experience, at least that is very part of the Latter-Day Saint culture. It's the idea of business acumen, self-reliance.
Carmen: This makes more sense in this context. Yeah. And it tracks also with how the church operates in terms of their COVID has impacted this, obviously, but in terms of their outreach, because, and I'm not passing any judgment, but really, missionary work is sales work and sales work is missionary work. And if you're good at one, you're going to be good at the other.
Carmen: So then my next question would be, I feel like my final question is going to be like, is Alice real? Or was there a real Alice, but before that, I also wanted you to speak a little more broadly to the role this book served in the culture of the moment it came out in. So obviously like in the subtitle of the book, you mentioned the satanic panic. Obviously, there's a drug, moral panic happening and a sort of a way that America's responding to drugs and to mental health. And there's like all these things. So, yeah. And also, I mean, at some point she's in an asylum, which, I mentioned during our last episode, I was like, when did asylums get shut down in the us? But it was a moment where you would, you could end up in like this situation.
Sarah: A freak wharf, if you will.
Carmen: A freak wharf, exactly. Yeah. So yeah. Where did this book sort of land culturally? And what was sort of the impact of that in the moment when it came out?
Rick: I was listening again, to the first installment you did about this. And you really made some really insightful points, things that I've been kinda thinking about for a long time, in why it has such cultural currency and such ongoing currency. Because even today I try never to say here's what the young people are talking about. But I do know that if you go on TikTok, for example, which I try not to do, but if you do, I mean, there are 15-year-olds today reading this not because somebody wanted them to or not because an adult told them to, but because it speaks to them, it resonates with them in some way. And I mean, there's a reason it's never been out of print. A 50th anniversary edition just came out last year. So, I'll do that in two parts.
The first is that the social part with Go Ask Alice, adults tend to respond to and be horrified by the specific events, the things that she does. So this girl runs away from home, and she has sex with men she hardly knows, and she is consuming drugs and it's just all of these. And I'm certainly not telling anybody that Alice is a model on which to base your life.
Sarah: She’s taking pills like fistfuls of Jordan almonds at Easter.
Rick: I'm not trying to downplay this seriousness of the activity she's taking part in. But the interesting thing to me is that adults fixate on the things she's doing. Young readers tend to fixate on the character herself. In other words, adults are like, I'm horrified by the things she's doing. And young people say, this girl breaks my heart. Or this girl could be me.
Sarah: That means I'm still young.
Carmen: For all of the books' fakery, Beatrice at some point was obviously at some point was herself a teenage girl. And so there was an unavoidable reality to just knowing what it's like to be a young woman in the world, which obviously had changed, it’s been a long time since she'd been a young woman. But also, it's yeah, you can't even really fake that. Maybe that's why the teens, because on some level there is like a real, a feeling of realism just being in this deeply transitional sort of deeply I hate to use the word liminal. I overuse the word liminal. This is how you'll know my work, because you'll see the word liminal appearing way too many times. That's my tell, that's my drinking game. But yeah, like she's in this weird just moment of ambivalence and strangeness and the sort of these minor traumas of just being a young person in the world. And I feel like that part, there are moments in the book that do resonate in a very real way, even if the drug stuff is so obviously fake.
Rick: Absolutely. And it really does capture, it really is lightning in a bottle because it does capture the way it feels to be a teenager. Now, again, it's been a long time since I was a teenager, but I think that the evidence, the proof is in the pudding. It's the reason why it continues to sell and continues to resonate. And when you're a teenager, a lot of things are true at the same time. You are simultaneously convinced that you are going crazy and that you are the only sane person on the planet. Just this massive rush of strange conflicting emotions often coming at the same time.
And I think that is why there's this split of young people resonating with the tone resonating with them and adults though, fixating on the, but the drugs and the sexing and the so forth. Another good example, a comparison is the book Carrie, by Steven King, but the reason why Carrie resonated with young people and with a lot of people, it's not because she had telekinesis it's because of her home life and the relationship with her peers and her mother and her school and she's sexualized, but is also repressed. And she's all of these strange things at once. Carrie and Go Ask Alice, they feel a little bit similar in that way.
So in terms of the societal impact and why it was such a big hit, it came in a really propitious or a word like that. Propitious, I think, moment in that. A) the number of runaways have been increasing every year since the late fifties and not increasing by a little bit, doubling in some years. And by 1971, the average American runaway was a white suburban girl who was barely 15. And that was a change because it had never been that way before. And it had become, I think by 1970, the number of teenagers who vanished long enough to be declared missing was 400,000. Society was not prepared for that, especially not when they looked and saw, but they're from good homes and they're from the suburbs, which of course is code for they're white.
Sarah: Like that lovely Squeaky Fromme.
Rick: Yes. So there's the runaway aspect and then there's the LSD aspect because the number of users of LSD had been going up every single year and 1970 marked, there's no way to avoid drug puns here, but it was the peak or the high watermark or whatever you want to say. In 1970, 800,000 Americans tried LSD for the very first time, it was the biggest number ever. It was illegal, but nothing seemed to be happening. And the Nixon white house was just bent on criminalizing drugs and not just criminalizing them, but hella criminalizing them. I mean, to classify LSD alongside heroin. And so Richard Nixon is gearing up to launch his war on drugs, which requires whipping the American people into this frenzy and really getting them amped up free yet another losing war. And so Go Ask Alice emerges at exactly the right moment.
Sarah: Come on, folks. You'll love those.
Rick: And they did. And the American public was ready to get behind that because they associated drugs with lots of things, with hippies and with Charles Manson and with losing your identity, which to an American is just, that strikes at the core of the American ideal. And plus it's menacing, the flower of American womanhood. And a book that came out and told you why you should be frightened and angry about those things. That was well timed.
Carmen: Yeah. I mean, I feel like Sarah made this really great point in the first episode, just about how ironic it was that LSD is the, almost the primarily demonized drug in the book, but also Alice is also clearly depressed and probably LSD would be like kinda a helpful drug for her to take. And it's just weird that there's something about the insisting on demonizing this drug in particular at the expense of almost all the others. It's weird, like pot and LSD are the really bad drugs.
Sarah: She tries heroin once. And she's like, eh, not for me, and just moves on with her life.
Carmen: And it's just ironic cause it's LSD and pot. It's the most harmless of the bunch. It's so interesting that that's the thing that she wanted to focus on.
Rick: Somebody one time describes Silence of the Lambs as being perfect, because I think it's like Roger Ebert or somebody said that it's like they made a list of all of the most common phobias and jammed them into one movie. Fear of the dark, and fear of insects, and fear of whatever. If you think about Go Ask Alice, I mean, there's being uprooted and moving and losing your friends and having to go to yet another school, and the fear of being pregnant and body shamed, and feeling torn between desire and the shame that is sort of implanted in you.
There's also a couple of weird things that I'm tempted to, I don't know, I don't want to read too much into things, but there's that moment where you, I think you mentioned this Carmen where, “Today I had six heavenly, mouthwatering, delectable French fries”. There's a weird religious, almost self-denial and then indulgence, maybe overindulgence aspect of that. It's the ascetic, I will deny myself every form of pleasure so much so that these six French fries just taste like manna from heaven. It's a weird, almost fasting binging. So these sort of threads of all of that emotional tumult run through every corner of the book.
Carmen: Oh, okay. So my last big question, which I don't know how much of this you want to answer because obviously everybody should read this book. I'm so excited. I'm literally going to leave this conversation and immediately purchase this book. So, I hope everybody does as well. But my big question is, was there an Alice or was there any version of Alice who existed which part of this diary actually came from? Or was it just invented whole cloth by Beatrice?
Rick: Well, Carmen, that's an interesting question you pose there. I will say that, and I'm not trying to be coy about this when I say that when you go to see a movie and somebody - we've all had this happen - you go to see a movie and somebody says, okay, just be better if you don't know anything about the movie going in, if you just don't look up, trust me when I say just don't read anything about it. Obviously, that's not the case here because, I mean, we're talking a lot about it and a lot of people know about. Not only Go Ask Alice, but also, I mean a lot of this stuff. I mean, it's not like I discovered the name Beatrice Sparks. Obviously, a lot of this stuff has been floating around out there. Even before Google it was findable. And especially now you can Google Go Ask Alice and find, I mean the copyright records and stuff have been around for a long time.
I will say that initially, as we talked about earlier in the early days of this book, certainly for the first decade, probably 90% of the coverage treated it as absolutely authentic. This girl lived, this girl died, this girl left a diary. That was sort of the whole thing. Later, by the time 2000, 2005 rolled around, let it really split to where half the people were like, well, this is absolutely true. And the other half we're like, this is absolutely, whole cloth nonsense. I will say that neither of those assessments is entirely true. And so, without saying too much here, I will say that there is an answer to that question. This is not going to be like one of those DB Cooper books I buy where on the last page, the guy's like still don't know, sorry. There is an answer to this question. And at the end of the book, I lay out the backstory of what really happened. And I will say that while it is not what I expected, and I know that I'm sounding coy, even as I'm trying not to…
Carmen: No, this is so good.
Rick: It's not what I expected, but it actually does make a lot of sense. So the question is answered at the end of the book. And it is not what I expected, but it actually does all fit together.
Carmen: Rick, I feel like you just sold so many copies of your book. That was amazing. That was excellent. That was such a perfect answer. I am burning with desire. I can't even tell you how much I want to, I'm so excited. I'm going to read the book immediately.
Rick: Is it too late to have you blurb this? Hold on, let me just…
Sarah: And here's the plan. Everybody buys Unmask Alice. Money goes into publishing, publishing hires fact checkers. Truth prevails. America heals. The end. Good night.
Carmen: Let’s all hope so.
Sarah: And that's our story. We found it written on paper bags and we've done our best to edit the grammar. But we haven't changed any of the spirit. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for amazing editing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for amazing producing, as always. Thank you to Carmen Maria Machado for going on this weird odyssey with me. I appreciate that so much. I feel like we've been on a camping trip through a fraudulent writer's brain, and I have enjoyed every second of it. Thank you to Rick Emerson for writing a fantastic book and coming to tell us about it. Thank you to you, the listener. See you in two weeks.