Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

I liked this book as a kid even though it was HELLA depressing.

I think I read this book when I was about 11 or 12, before I’d developed critical thinking ability.  It had a big impact on me.  But I still thought it was fiction.

Jeri - I was the EXACT same way.  I read this wheenn I was way too young and it scared me to death.  In fact, my friend Kacie told me (while we were waiting at the bus stop) the same thing happened to her little brother when he was 5, and he was never the same.

To this day I have an irrational fear someone will put something in my drink!

I teach a Great Books class for high schoolers, and one of their assignments is to pick a book they feel will be considered a “Great Book” in the next 50 years. Every semester, some kid picks THIS book, which always blows my mind. They’re so devestated when I tell him it’s BS. Of course, I guess the fact that they think this is actually realistic tells me they’re not druggies themselves…

Librarian here, and let me tell you this book is still HUGELY popular.  So huge that I found myself buying several replacement copies at my former place of employment.  I hadn’t read the book since I was a teen, so casually flipped through it (having forgotten 99.9% of it) and cannot believe how popular this book still is today.  I mean, it was dated back when I read it - even more so now.

How did I miss this one?? Maybe it was already removed from my library!

When this one came out, there was a furor over it in my junior high school—teachers would confiscate copies they found in class, people read it on the sly, kids who didn’t read eagerly glomming copies.

I read maybe a chapter or two, rolled my eyes, and passed it along to the next person.  I think even then I realized this was fiction not fact, especially when my mother, having read a few chapters herself (pushed on her by another mother who was trying to get it banned), told me it reminded her of those awful tales of white slave traders grabbing unwitting innocent girls she’d heard when she was growing up.

I read this in the eighth grade, way back in the day. It helped me to become freakishly paranoid at age 13. Plus, it ruined that Jefferson Airplane song for me.

I went through a phase - like most teen girls - where I read nothing but depressing books. I recall reading this title, Lisa Bright and Dark and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden all about the same time.

Times haven’t changed much as depressing books are still somewhat popular with teen girls. It’s the only thing I can think of to explain the multitude of Lurlene McDaniel titles in my library.

I do recall being surprised to learn that this was fake, but then again, I hadn’t known SE Hinton was a girl and a teen when she wrote her books. It was a week of “what the???” for me. I’d definitely hand a different book if they wanted to read about drug abuse than this one though.

Maybe this book is an American phenomenon because all through school I never heard this book mentioned by teachers or other students and never saw it in the libraries.

Any other non-Americans come across this title?

The movie version was quite awesome.  How could it not be, when William Shatner played Alice’s father?  There is a wonderful scene in which Alice and her wacky hippie friends are bombed out of their tiny little gourds at Alice’s sweet sixteen party, while Alice’s mother, oblivious, offers them birthday cake, while teasing that she knows how “square” these kids find the idea of birthday cake.  “No, man,” one strung-out girl replies, “we craaaaaaaaave sweets.” In a voiceover, Alice is amazed at how stupid and guileless her parents are--surely a valuable lesson to teach our youth: invite your stoner buds to your birthday party!  Your folks are too dumb to notice!

Hey Ann, in Germany we read the book “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo” I’m not sure if there is an american translation. But it was written by two reporters in about 1978 about teenagers addicted to Heroin in Berlin. They were runaways and prostitutes and untill today the book is referred as an very acurate portrait of how kids can get into seriouse drug addiction. The book also had some very graphic photos and I was pretty terrified when I read it. I think I was about 13, oh and no single spiked drink. So no I haver never heard about “Go ask Alice” untill I started working at a bookstore here in the US.

I saw the movie version of this book when it came out. Still have fears of leaving my drinks unattended. I remember being told it was based on a true story but I never got around to reading the book.

Felicia, I’m very curious about the book you cited. Instead of “Alice” I remember reading a book about a teenage heroin addict in Berlin. Very graphic. I wonder if it was translated into English. And please don’t ask me what the title was. I don’t think I remember it.

OMG!  I remember passing the book around when I was 11 years old, though it never turned me to drugs.

You know, I never understand the banned book.  What’s with HUCK FINN?

I read this book when I was maybe 11 and several more times over the years.  I’ve always liked it.  I don’t know that I ever thought it was “non-fiction”, maybe just a fictionalized diary.  Didn’t scar me, although it did make me wary of open drinks at that time and probably scared me off ever trying LSD or heroin (which is not a bad thing!).  I also never got the impression that “Alice” was dragged kicking and screaming into drug addiction.  She went very willingly.

Isn’t one of the reasons HUCK FINNN supposedly on the banned list because of the homoerotic friendship/relationship between Jim and Huck?  I remembered reading that HF was on the list because of that along with Mark Twain’s use of the “n” word.

I seem to recall that all those stories in TRUE CONFESSIONS magazine were made up by old men as well.

Times haven’t changed much as depressing books are still somewhat popular with teen girls.

My junior high set all read VC Andrews and Carrie, back in the day ;)

Any other non-Americans come across this title?

No, I’d not heard of it before. I’m in the UK. There are a couple of copies in my local library system. Literally a couple, both at the largest library in the city, and one’s in the reserve collection. The other is shelved in the “Family: Health” section of “Adult Non-Fiction”.

Any other non-Americans come across this title?

I’m in the UK and I’ve never come across it before. I checked my library’s catalogue and there are a couple of copies floating about. The most recent edition is from 2002. Interesting. As a former librarian, perhaps I ought to have known about it.

I feel as though I missed out on an entire - thing!

Desertwillow, I did some googeling and there is an english translation, the title is “Christiane F.” There was also a movie made in the early 80’s with David Bowie in a small part. And an extremly gross toilett scene waaaaay before “Trainspotting”

I don’t know how I missed this one since I would have been in the target audience when it first came out. 

The Reefer Madness of its era.  Of course it came out shortly after the death of Diane Linkletter which was held up as a Dreadful Warning to us all about the dangers of LSD.  (She supposedly was tripping LSD, thought she could fly and then jumped out a window to her death.  Snopes.com debunks the story at http://www.snopes.com/horrors/drugs/linkletter.asp

A lot of the things that was done to make drugs sound unattractive to kids in the late 60’s early 70’s were not well thought out.  A film in health class that was supposed to show us what tripping was like was very intriguing if inaccurate. Then the local law enforcement came to an assembly of the whole school and showed us how to shoot up with a spoon, a candle, a piece of elastic and a hypodermic.

“Then the local law enforcement came to an assembly of the whole school and showed us how to shoot up with a spoon, a candle, a piece of elastic and a hypodermic.”

I remember having that lecture in my school in the mid-80s and thinking how ridiculous it was! Of course I already *knew everything* there was to know about life at the time…

I still cannot convince my father, a doctor, that this story is not completely true. *sigh*

“an innocent young Christian girl who is slipped a dose of LSD in her soft drink while she is at a party and almost instantly turns into a promiscuous, drug-addicted runaway.”

Hmmmmm dang, that sounds so easy one hit of acid and a life of moral turpitude is yours for the taking! *snort* Straight people are so gullible.

Oops, did I say that?

Another Non-American here, and I never heard about the book until I got on the internet. Since then I have occasionally heard the title “Go ask Alice”, but my ideas of this book are far from the real (or not) story. I kind of caught that it was some sort of Christian propaganda book, but my version was more happy-Christian and Alice is a old black woman. (I liked my version better)

Felicia: We here in Norway read the “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo” too. It’s called “Christiane F - Å være ung er for jævlig”. Being reminded of it now still fills me with horror. I remember stepping off the train in Berlin in 1990, 15 years old, filled with the horror-pictures form the book. I almost stepped back into the train.

I read Go Ask Alice here in Australia in the 1970s. I had a copy of it, although whether I bought it, or my parents or my older sister bought it for me, I have no idea. I also read I Never Promised You a Rose Garden ,which I can remember a little more about - probably because the imagery was stronger and the writing better.

It was adapted into a bad tv movie with the Jefferson Airplane themesong when I was a kid… they force fed it to us in grade school and junior high.  I remember every teacher pointing out that the “girl in the picture frame on the desk” in one scene was the “real Alice.”

But I also remember being convinced it was written by the father of the allegedly real Alice.  Most of my peers thought so, too.

Didn’t read the book but loved the song. All I took away from the movie was how to listen to the parents from the bathroom using a glass. My sister and I tried this only to hear the oldies sleeping.

I read this book, I never promised you a rose garden and Christiane F. as a teen in the UK. Living in a boring little town I found all the counterculture references very exciting. It was disappointing to find out that life out in the real world is not as melodramatic as books. Though of course you do live longer…

couple33!

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Felcia, maybe it was the same book. I still remember an extremely gross toilet scene (sorry to steal your words but that’s exactly what it was) and some discussion by her mother of the difference betweening treating adult addicts and adolescent addict.

I think I’ll google “Trainspotting” I don’t know what that is, not sure I want to know.

Thank you.

I read this when I was 12 or 13, and I also liked depressing books at that age.  I remember thinking I was getting away with something when I read it in front of my mother, that I was ‘cool’.  I kept the book for years before finally getting rid of it in high school.

Man, I was gullible back then.  Still am in some ways, but at least now I have better taste in books. :)

I’m German, and I do think I’ve read Go Ask Alice when I was a teenager, so it must have been sometime in the 1980s. At least it was a book that had a protagonist named Alice who drank a softdrink with LSD (I think) in it and who then became a drug addict. I got it from the library and it was definitely on the same shelf as the novels rather than in the non-fiction section - otherwise I would never have read it!

Something I didn’t mention in the review for space reasons was that Alice never actually makes the conscious choice to do any of the bad things she does. She may not be ‘dragged kicking and screaming’ to drugs but she is slipped the first hit in a drink unawares, and after that every single solitary ‘bad’ thing she does - having sex with someone who isn’t her Twoo Wuv Forever, experimenting with other drugs and dabbling in petty crime, getting involved with people who are Not Quite Right because they’re Not Quite White - happens when she’s deeply under the influence. When she sobers up temporarily and returns home, she lives the straight and narrow despite the scorn of every one of her classmates UNTIL she’s again unknowingly slipped drugs in her soda. She then immediately falls off the wagon.

The point is, it’s never really Alice’s fault. Unlike all the other kids involved in drugs who are without exception nasty members of the bad crowd, she’s a unique and special snowflake.

We put on a parody of Go Ask Alice for our Grade Nine talent competition and went completely over the top with it. None of us believed the book was true, and none of us thought it was anything but badly written propaganda made up by some middle-aged pinch-mouthed bat (as the slang went back in the day) who was hoping to turn us into good little drones.

*Sigh* I worked for 10 years as a drug abuse prevention specialist and my two biggest problems were 1. countering the lies people were told about drugs, like in the Alice book: “No, people are not giving your children LSD-laced Micky Mouse tattoos.  Drug dealers want to sell LSD, not pass it around to trick-or-treaters and 2. “Why, yes, Mrs. Jones, I am going to explain to little Johnny that the same wine you drink every night and the cigarettes you smoke are also drugs, along with aspirin, caffeine and percocets.  I’m sorry you have a problem with that, since those are your drugs of abuse.”

Anyway, I’m glad I left that behind to write romance novels about pirates.

I read Go Ask Alice in NZ in the 1970’s and it was in my high school library in Australia as well.  Also read the depressing Christiane F in Australia in the 1970’s.

Trainspotting, which stars Ewan MacGregor, is a great movie...barring the toilet scene that completely grossed me out.

I went to Roman Catholic schools through grades 1 to 12 and we didn’t get any of this anti-drug propaganda--for which I am very grateful.  My schools brought in cops with guns...but I was always too busy having conversations with the people in my head to pay attention.  But I assume the message was drugs are bad and expensive.  Since I’m cheap, the latter pretty much convinced me to stay away.

The only story about drugs I remember reading as a preteen is PK Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly.” Sounds like that’s much more realistic than Alice, even though it’s fiction.

I remember Alice, oh yes. I could never figure out why free acid wasn’t available at any of the parties I went to, where people held on to their drugs with iron fists.

Who the heck would throw a party just for the amusement of watching someone else trip? What’s fun about that?

When I was in my teens I must have read I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN fifty times.  I’ve seen copies of the other two, but never read them.

In eighth grade, I did an oral book report on this story. I remember how concerned and upset my teacher looked during my presentation. *shivers*

Wow.  Between thei and Deenie you guys are really dredging up gems from my literary childhood.  Books that I barely remembered until your review.

I hated Go Ask Alice when I read it in the 70s.  I felt betrayed by the unhappy ending for the 5 minutes I actually believed the story was real.

I was so gullible as a young pre-teen when this first came out.  On the positive side, it made me totally afraid to have *anything* to do with drugs (which started being an issue with my friends around 6th grade, which was early 70s.)

Of course, I was also convinced that I’d end up pregnant if I ever had sex, even if I used 12 different types of birth control at the same time.  It was the age of the “problem novel.” I, too, remember Lisa, Bright and Dark and I Never Promised you a Rose Garden, which brought us teen mental illness for the first time.

I started reading Go Ask Alice when I was fourteen, and though thinking back on it, the book may not be entirely correct, it had an enormous impact on me.  I found the prose and style of writing to be so much like my own writing and thought processes and some of her personality traits and situations to be so like mine and my friends, that I could not finish reading it.  The book may not be a word-for-word diary, but it still has an incredibly chilling, eye-opening impact on readers.  Particularly teens.

“The book may not be a word-for-word diary, but it still has an incredibly chilling, eye-opening impact on readers.”

Yeah, till they figure out the lies. Then you might as well hang it up because you have betrayed them. Using Fear without just cause and legitimate excuse has a way of back firing on you.

Do you have any clue how long it took me to find an older guy to get down and dirty with when I was 19? Because these same type of social propaganda prudes made such an issue over gay guys being predatory to young men.

I swear it took like 5 months before I ended up lying about my age to some poor guy just to get laid.

That’s just plain wrong!