Part Five
For My Next Trick, I’ll Need a Volunteer
Let’s pretend it’s 1993.
You are an editor at Avon Books, a division of Hearst Publishing.* Every day, proposals and pitches arrive by the dozen. Only a few get any response; most are filed and forgotten. Prepping a book for market is a long, arduous process, and you pick your projects carefully.
One day, an agent pitches something intriguing: a new diary from Beatrice Sparks, the woman behind Go Ask Alice.
You check the numbers. After more than twenty years, Alice is still selling fifteen hundred copies a week.
Sure, you say. I’ll take a look.
Soon, you receive a copy of a very short diary. Its contents are direct and crushing.
“Nancy” is fourteen. Sweet and trusting, she falls for an older man. At first, he seems protective, but it’s an act. After giving Nancy a spiked wine cooler, he rapes her. Even worse, the man has AIDS, and soon, so does Nancy.
As her life spirals toward darkness, Nancy battles depression and physical torment. Buoyed by faith and family, she slowly accepts her fate, and dies with a measure of peace.
It’s timely, for sure. In 1993, AIDS is gouging its way through America, turning humans into scarecrows. Already, it’s the leading killer of men aged twenty-five to forty-four. By 1995, it will be the leading killer of all Americans in that bracket.
Even children aren’t spared. In Indiana, thirteen-year-old Ryan White is fighting to stay in school after catching AIDS from a blood transfusion. His teachers, classmates, and several dozen parents have signed a petition to keep him out, and if that doesn’t work, they plan to start a private school—one that Ryan can’t attend.
Yes, you think, Nancy’s story could matter. And there’s that pedigree. “From the woman who brought you Go Ask Alice.” That will get people to at least notice the book, and maybe pick it up, or scan the back cover. Do that, and you’re halfway to a sale.
True, the diary’s language is a little . . . off. Nancy doesn’t write like a teenager. Not a modern teenager, anyway. Take the entry from June 12:
Oh, what a beautiful day. The beginning of a future that is going to be more glorious than has ever been known by mankind since the beginning of the Earth . . . as well as all the other creations of infinity.
But there’s no fighting the math. Go Ask Alice is still selling and has massive name recognition across two generations. Alice will open doors.
Management agrees, and soon it’s decided. Avon Books will acquire the diary, fix it up, and publish it as It Happened to Nancy.
Now comes the work—the long, slow process of smoothing out the kinks to make the whole thing readable. It’s a partnership: you and Beatrice Sparks, sending things back and forth, shaping the final product.
Tuesday, June 29, 1993
You open a letter from Beatrice Sparks. It’s on custom stationary; the heading reads, “Beatrice Mathews Sparks, PhD.”
Did she have a PhD before? Well, it’s been a few years since her last book. Maybe she went back to school. Good for her.
Sparks weighs in regarding Nancy’s subtitle:
Front Cover
Nancy’s folks and I prefer:
A TRUE STORY
FROM THE DIARY OF A TEENAGER WHO LOOKED FOR LOVE . . .
AND FOUND DEATH THROUGH AIDS
It must say: Edited by Beatrice Sparks, Ph.D. on the front cover.
Friday, July 23, 1993
The sales department has some worries. Putting a grown-up’s name on the cover might scare kids away. It would look much better with just “true story” and “teenage diary,” and the other selling points. Nothing formal or adult. That worked for Alice, right?
Maybe you can strike a balance, putting Sparks’s name on the back cover, but in big letters. That should make everyone happy.
You send the idea to Beatrice Sparks.
Monday, July 26, 1993
The fax machine squeals to life, shoving out thin sheets of crinkly paper. One by one, they curl and drop into a pile.
It’s your letter to Sparks, with handwritten notes all over it:
What kids Don’t know Can HURT THEM!
Kids respect Education
You’d be surprised how many want to be psychologists or therapists of some kind.
Next to your suggestion about keeping the cover “grown-up-free,” there’s another long scrawl:
When kids find a “grown up” they trust—they trust completely!
My problem is trying to get away from them after a month in session.
“After a month in session”? She must mean with her teenage patients. She is a PhD.
Friday, October 1, 1993
A doctor from the CDC is vetting the manuscript, making sure the AIDS information is correct. At least, that’s supposed to be happening. Sparks is the go-between, and she says she already sent you the doctor’s approval, but it never arrived. Maybe it got lost in delivery. You make a note to ask again.
But there’s a bigger issue.
You have a copy of Nancy’s diary, plus the updated manuscript from Sparks, and you’re checking them side by side, looking for stray mistakes, when you notice something strange. On page 79 of the manuscript, a whole section has been altered. Nancy’s original entry is short—just a few lines—but in the manuscript, it runs for nearly a page, and most of it seems brand new.
You keep reading, and find more long passages that weren’t there before.
You phone Beatrice Sparks. She doesn’t answer, and her machine is turned off, so the phone just rings. You hang up, then write a brief letter, asking about the CDC vetting and about the strange new material.
“There are some pretty huge chunks that don’t seem to exist in the journal at all,” you write. “Were these moved from another section of Nancy’s journal?”
Sparks is smart; she’ll read between the lines. All she has to do is say “yes.”
Tuesday, October 5, 1993
Once again, Sparks sends your own letter back to you, covered with notes.
At the bottom is a whole paragraph about the new material:
IT HAPPENED TO NANCY is a compilation from her diaries, note scribblings on margins, interviews with family, friends and teachers, and over forty tapes which I made. I thought you understood that. Never did I say it was word to word hers. I put her thoughts and materials together as I thought they would best tell her story.
Then:
Sorry if you misunderstood.
Mid-October 1993
You’re reading the manuscript again. In places, Nancy’s diary resembles Go Ask Alice, and even Jay’s Journal. Phrases and quirks seem to repeat, sometimes in near-identical wording.
Jay: I remember a speaker at a conference said that bad thoughts are like birds . . . we can’t keep them from flying over our heads but we can keep them from nesting in our hair.
Nancy: She said she understood what I was saying, but that kids had to learn that they “couldn’t keep birds from flying over their heads, but they could keep them from making nests in their hair.”
Late October 1993
Cover blurbs from other authors are important. They get people’s attention and give a project more weight. Quotes from experts help, too.
For It Happened to Nancy, Sparks has obtained glowing quotes from two doctors. You read the first one:
“Only when one has been intimately involved with a real AIDS-infected person like Nancy can one slightly comprehend the overwhelmingness of the disease.”
—Milton Norbaum, MD, AIDS Specialist
“AIDS Specialist” sounds a little general. Is that a real title?
And “overwhelmingness”? Perhaps Dr. Norbaum has spent too much time with Beatrice Sparks, who slaps “-ness” on every other word: “exoticness,” “delectableness,” “absoluteness,” “amazingness.”
You read the second blurb:
“It Happened to Nancy is a deeply disturbing book because it faces AIDS honestly, realistically and head-on.
Up to 30 percent of people who have AIDS are diagnosed in their twenties, which means most were infected in their teens.”
—Dorean Hadley Staudacher, Psychiatrist working with AIDS
Again with the vague titles. “Psychiatrist working with AIDS”? What does that mean?
At least Sparks answered your question about the AIDS vetting, though it’s a little terse:
Everything is approved by the CDC.
December 1993
You’re reviewing the completed manuscript. Realistically, this is your final chance to pull it back or make any changes.
The foreword is blunt and seems to start in midthought:
FOREWORD
Precious little fourteen-year-old Nancy’s tragic battle with AIDS becomes all the more tragic because of her extremely lowered natural immune system, which allowed the virus to so quickly ravage her delicate body. Ordinarily the latency period from infection to symptoms for AIDS is considered to be from five to ten years.
It’s confusing, but eventually makes sense. In most cases, it takes up to a decade for HIV to become AIDS, and another few years for AIDS to kill you. Nancy’s whole diary is only two years long, and her battle with AIDS was even shorter: she went from infection to death in just twenty-three months. So, she . . . what? Had a broken immune system to start with? That must be it.
The foreword ends:
I worry about all the beautiful, innocent young Nancys.
—Dr. Dathan Sheranian (one of Nancy’s doctors)
“One of Nancy’s doctors”? Is Sparks being purposely fuzzy?
By now, you know the manuscript inside and out, but last looks are always a good idea, so you read it one last time.
The arc is simple and sad:
Nancy falls prey to an older man who rapes her, infecting her with HIV. After hearing the diagnosis, Nancy grows bitter, hating everything she sees, including herself. To get a change of scenery, she visits her aunt and uncle’s ranch in Idaho. All the while, she keeps journaling, even as her body starts to fail.
Toward the diary’s conclusion, you see these entries:
Sunday, March 22, 9:30 PM
This afternoon, Aunt Thelma called a lady she thinks I would like to know. She’s going to fly up in a few days. Aunt Thelma won’t tell me who it is, but she says it’s going to be a VERY SPECIAL, WONDERFUL surprise! Who could it be? Hmmm—my mom? No, she would have told me. Dad? No, he’s not a woman. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.
Tuesday, April 7
Oh, Self:
I’ve had the most lovely day. Mr. Pederson brought Aunt Thelma’s friend in on the helicopter, which he only does on very special occasions.
I can’t believe that the lady was Dr. B., who put together one of my favorite books, Go Ask Alice, from the diary of a girl my age who had gotten into drugs.
You’re reading this manuscript in late 1993. There is no internet to speak of, and Beatrice Sparks (“Dr. B.”? When did that start?) hasn’t published a book in fifteen years. Go Ask Alice is still famous, but outside of Mormon circles, Sparks is basically unknown. Yet when Sparks arrives (in a helicopter!), Nancy, who is literally on her deathbed, does everything but cartwheel.
You keep reading:
As soon as Aunt Thelma introduced us and told me about Dr. B., I knew what they were thinking immediately! Ever since I first found out I had AIDS, I’ve wished, like everything, that I had someone to talk to about it, someone who could answer my questions, or at least question my answers.
After a few minutes, Aunt Thelma excused herself and went up to the house, leaving me and Dr. B. to talk about . . . my book!!! It seemed unreal, but Dr. B. assured me it was as real a possibility as I was.
That last sentence isn’t just awkward, it’s loopy, like something from Lewis Carroll.
Now you’re at the wrap-up, where Nancy gives her diary to—ahem— “Dr. B.”:
I felt like we had been friends forever, like we were long-lost relatives or something. She said Aunt Thelma had called her and said it might be good for me to unload my pain and strain with someone who was knowledgeable.
Maybe I can do something in some way to help other kids who are in my situation.
It’s no shock that Nancy dies. AIDS is a bullet, and effective treatment is still years away. There’s also been some foreshadowing: Nancy’s dog, Red Alert, died a few pages earlier (a ranch hand named Melvin built the tiny coffin), and Nancy’s cat, Cougar, is slowly winding down.
Still, the curtain falls without warning:
EPILOGUE
Nancy died in her sleep April 12th—two days after her last entry.
She is buried next to Uncle Rod in the center of the Sacred Fir Tree Circle. Red Alert’s grave is close to Nancy’s feet, and ailing Cougar will be buried beside him.
On Nancy’s wooden tombstone Melvin carved: THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER NANCY
They buried her in the woods?
Thursday, January 20, 1994
With the book slated for a Spring release, Avon’s promo department needs Sparks’s profile: her bio, education, and so on.
Sparks fills out the questionnaire:
Book Title:
It Happened to Nancy
Author’s Name:
Beatrice Sparks, PhD (Doctor B)
Name as you would like it to appear in connection with press materials:
Beatrice Sparks, PhD (Doctor B)
If not a full-time writer, current occupation:
Therapist, speaker, part time teacher at BYU
Brief summary of education:
Degrees from Southern California, Columbia, and BYU—BA, MA, PhD
So now, the million-dollar question:
How would you, the editor, classify It Happened to Nancy?
* Attention, older readers: Avon Books has no connection to Avon Incorporated, the pushy cosmetics firm.
Sad but True
Ellen Krieger wasn’t just Sparks’s editor, she was the director of Avon’s entire young readers division. A graduate of Wellesley, Krieger had been at Doubleday, then HarperCollins, and was in her tenth year at Avon. She’d handled big authors and big sellers, and was sharp as chipped china.
Krieger was also—irony alert—a fiend for detective novels, and had cofounded a club for like-minded readers, serving as its president for a dozen-plus years.
So how did respected editor/mystery buff Ellen Krieger react to Nancy’s missing diary pages? Or the revelation that the “diary” was actually a pastiche of different sources? Or Sparks’s sudden profusion of college degrees?
Authority and responsibility go hand in hand, and on Krieger’s watch it all got approved for publication, including the blurbs from “Nancy’s doctors,” Sparks’s giant credit (“EDITED BY BEATRICE SPARKS, PhD”), and the flat declaration inside:
This is a work of nonfiction. It is based on the actual diary of a teenage girl who was infected with the AIDS virus as a result of date-rape.
Much had changed in the years since Jay’s Journal, but teenage trauma still sold, and the illicit thrill of reading someone else’s diary was timeless.
The American Library Association selected Nancy as a “Recommended Reading” pick, and Avon sold a quick ten thousand copies directly to school book fairs, followed by ten thousand more a few months later.
“Based on Nancy’s diary and many hours of personal interviews with Nancy,” wrote Jennifer Haines in Provo’s always-reliable Daily Herald, “Beatrice Sparks recreates a touching, open, and true story. Every parent should read It Happened to Nancy. Parents who read Nancy will be able to better teach their children about teen-age sex, teen-age pregnancy, date-rape, and AIDS by using this book as an educational tool.”
The ink had barely dried on Nancy’s reviews when Sparks pitched another teen tell-all to Avon Books, who snapped it up and scheduled it for a 1996 release.
Shameless
In the decade following It Happened to Nancy, Sparks published four more books in the Alice/Jay vein—things like Treacherous Love, the diary of an anonymous teen seduced by her teacher, and Annie’s Baby, the diary of an anonymous teen mother.
The “fiction” and “nonfiction” labels varied with each new printing, but all had the same large credit: “edited by Beatrice Sparks, PhD.”
Even by Sparks’s standards, however, 1996’s Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager’s Life on the Streets was audacious. It seemed less like a book than a high-wire taunt—the absolute proof that no one would stop her.
The story of “Sammy,” a rebellious fifteen-year-old from a malfunctioning family, Almost Lost wasn’t a teenage diary. Instead, it was a case file from Sparks’s “psychology practice,” complete with transcripts, clinical notes, appointment schedules, and worksheets. By now, Beatrice Sparks wasn’t just a character in her own books, she was a therapeutic superhero, rescuing children and families alike.
SAMUEL GORDON CHART
MONDAY, APRIL 4, 2:00 PM
EDITED TAPE FROM FIRST VISIT
SAMUEL (SAMMY) GORDON, 15 YEARS OLD
“Hi, Samuel. I’m Doctor B.”
“Hi.”
Samuel sounded as depleted as if he had just done his best, but still finished dead last, in an exhausting marathon that he had really wanted to win.
“Do you like to be called Samuel, Sam, Sammy, or something else?”
He shrugged.
“I want you to know that anything you say in this session is completely between the two of us. I am required by law to keep it confidential. I am even more bound by my own code of ethics to honor and respect your thoughts and concepts and words absolutely.”
Samuel continues. “What I really want is for you and the rest of the whole screwed-up world, including me, to just quickly and quietly dissolve into nothing, never-was, nothingness.”
“You don’t know me but—”
“I kind of know you through your books.”
“I hope you know how much I cared for each of those kids.”
Over the next 239 pages, “Doctor B” cures Sammy’s depression and steers him toward a sunny, rewarding life. Along the way, she also straightens out Sammy’s parents, saving their marriage and keeping Sammy’s father, Lance, away from cocaine.
The book’s inside description was the most brazen of Sparks’s career:
Almost Lost is a work of nonfiction based on the actual counseling sessions between Dr. Sparks and a suicidal teenager.
To the question “how many diaries can one woman find?” Sparks now had a ready answer: they were actually case studies, all drawn from her clinical practice with teenage patients.
There were no case studies. There were no patients. There was no clinical practice. Beatrice Sparks was no more a psychologist than she was a Sasquatch, and even a lazy editor could have unraveled the lies with a single phone call.*
Like Go Ask Alice and It Happened to Nancy, Almost Lost came endorsed by a medical professional: “Dr. Phillip Morgenstern.” As with the doctors who praised Sparks’s other books (“Dr. Milton Norbaum” for Nancy, “Dr. Myron Greenbaum” for Alice, etc.), Phillip Morgenstern shared Sparks’s distinct writing style, and even ended his forward for Almost Lost with an Alice-esque “love ya.”
These doctors have something else in common: none of them seems to have actually existed.
Ancestry.com, which currently indexes more than one hundred million family trees and more than thirty billion historical records, has no trace of a “Milton Norbaum.” Even dropping the “Milton” only gets you fourteen results—and several of those are typos.
“Dr. Myron Greenbaum” and “Dr. Phillip Morgenstern” fare scarcely better. Of the few Myron Greenbaums listed by Ancestry, one vanished after the 1930 census, one is a young lawyer in Illinois, and one is an electrical engineer in New Jersey. As for “Dr. Phillip Morgenstern,” the closest candidate is a gastroenterologist who emigrated from Poland in 1920 and focused on the study of mustard gas.*
Considering that Sparks was the go-between for these endorsements, the conclusion is hard to avoid: the doctors were, like so much else in Sparks’s life, a flimsy, obvious hoax.
And what was her punishment for all of this?
* The state of Utah, for one, could have confirmed that Sparks had no license, much less an actual psychology practice. The state might have added that posing as a psychologist, even on paper, was a jailable offense.
* Also (and there is no other way to put this), names like “Milton Norbaum, MD” manage to ring both false and clichéd—the creation of someone for whom Jews are a theoretical concept.
Scene and Herd
Wednesday, November 6, 1996
The Waldorf Astoria’s Grand Ballroom was a sea of little round tables, each one draped in black and topped with a spray of crimson flowers. High overhead, a massive chandelier—sixteen feet of shimmering Waterford crystal—glowed a soft, golden yellow.
The National Book Awards always drew a powerful crowd, and this was no exception. More than six hundred publishing luminaries had gathered for the industry’s version of the Oscars; a well-placed meteor strike would have crippled the business for at least nine months.
And there, at table thirty-seven, seated among the book world’s brightest names, was a woman born near the train tracks of an Idaho mining camp.
For Beatrice Sparks, it was the apex of a lifelong transformation. Yes, there had been other shining moments: a year earlier, Beatrice and LaVorn had attended a private Sundance Film Festival party where they’d mingled with politicians, tech luminaries, and even Robert Redford. But for a writer, especially one who craved importance, the National Book Awards were hard to match. And Beatrice Sparks wasn’t just at the National Book Awards, or there as a nominee. She was attending as a judge.
The invitation had come in April, just as Almost Lost, her case history of “Sammy,” was headed to bookstores. The National Book Foundation was adding an award for Young People’s Literature, and since Sparks had helped establish the young adult genre, why not put her on the panel?
Sparks had accepted, then spread the news far and wide, even to people who probably didn’t care. On the registration card for a different convention, she scrawled, “Sorry I cannot join you—I have been invited to be a judge for the National Book Awards!” (Despite having no plans to attend this other convention, she filled out the entire form, describing herself as a “PhD, Adolescent Psychotherapist, and Writer.”)
Checking in to the Waldorf Astoria, Sparks entered a kind of pantheon. Winston Churchill had stayed at the Waldorf, as had Albert Einstein, the Dalai Lama, and every US president since Herbert Hoover. In 1939, Cole Porter had simply purchased a five-bedroom suite, and lived there until his death in 1964, after which, Frank Sinatra moved in.
Even the floors were priceless. The Park Avenue lobby was tiled with a stunning 148,000-piece mural by French artist Louis Rigal, one of fourteen Rigals in the foyer alone.
The rooms themselves were breathtaking, of course, and each had its own design. That was part of the allure: you could stay at the Waldorf a hundred times and never see the same thing twice. The only constant was marble, which gave pleasing solidity to the Art Deco sheen. White marble with dove-gray feathering. Black Belgian marble with powder-pink highlights. Italian marble the color of jade. And every suite had a large marble bathtub, polished and shaped to a cream-smooth finish.
By normal standards, the rooms were spacious; by Manhattan standards, they were cathedrals, with the biggest approaching twenty-three hundred square feet. A few had private elevators, their brushed-nickel doors like satin to the touch.
When you arrived at the Waldorf Astoria, you had arrived.
A few hours before the ceremony, Sparks and the other judges met at a nearby restaurant. Over the previous months, they’d narrowed the field to five finalists, and now, after some back-and-forth, they settled on Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida, a coming-of-age novel by Victor Martinez.
The winner selected, Sparks returned to her suite, then made her way to the Waldorf’s Grand Ballroom, a space with its own rich history: galas for Queen Elizabeth II and French president Charles de Gaulle, New Year’s Eve concerts by Guy Lombardo, and the annual International Debutante Ball, where lacquered girls from upper-crust families were displayed like Tiffany lamps.
So many gatekeepers, so many gates. No one had ever called Beatrice Sparks a debutante, or an upper-crust anything. Not as a teenager, anyway. And yet, here she was.
Sparks’s moment came early, when, just before announcing the Young People’s Literature award, Joyce Carol Thomas thanked her fellow judges.
“And to Lloyd Alexander, Leonard Marcus, Gary Soto, and Beatrice Sparks,” said Thomas, “my gratitude for their months of reading, days of debate, and hours of trying to distinguish among the many wonderful, enchanting, simply beautiful children’s books we received from the publishers.”
Thomas spoke in a halting, buzzy drone; Sparks would have blown her off the stage. Still, it was real. It was official. Beatrice Sparks was somebody.
A few moments later, Thomas announced the winner. “Tonight, I present the 1996 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature to Victor Martinez, for Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida.”
Martinez, a thick-built former truck driver with glasses and facial scarring, made his way to the stage, where Thomas handed him a small crystal statue. Martinez also got a check for ten thousand dollars, more than his total income the previous year.
Childhood exposure to pesticides had ravaged Martinez’s vocal cords, and for two years during adolescence, he’d lost his voice entirely. Now forty-two, he was visibly nervous when speaking in public, and his words came out like sandpaper.
Martinez thanked his editor, his wife, and a few influential teachers, then left to a crest of cheers.
Out in the audience, Sparks clapped along.
Of course, if she’d been up there, it would have been different. Beatrice Sparks could light up a room, her voice loud and strong, filling the place from floor to ceiling. When Beatrice spoke, people felt it.
The other categories drifted by, a collective prelude to the headline event.
As finales go, Toni Morrison was the perfect choice. Oprah’s film version of Beloved was still two years off, but in the right circles, Morrison was already enshrined—an author favored with slow, thoughtful nods. So regal. So articulate.
Morrison took the stage, and everyone stood, twelve hundred hands raining hosannas.
As the applause continued, author Walter Mosley presented Morrison with one of writing’s highest honors, the award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. It came with ten thousand dollars, a large bronze medal, and incalculable validation.
At her table, so far from the stage, Beatrice Sparks watched it all.
Toni Morrison was a publishing insider who’d spent fifteen years at Random House, so of course she had connections, and people tripped over themselves to give her awards: a Pulitzer, a Barnard Medal of Distinction, a Nobel Prize, for Pete’s sake.
“I want to tell two little stories,” Morrison said as the applause finally trailed off. “The first, I heard third- or fourth-hand . . .”
And Morrison’s books were full of mayhem: incest, underage rape, a woman slashing her own baby’s throat. But critics fawned over her, and this room was no different. Everyone church-quiet, just soaking up the wisdom.
Complaining would have been easy. How many of the evening’s winners would even be remembered a year later? Go Ask Alice was a quarter-century old and still moving a thousand copies a week; more than four million so far. With Alice alone, Sparks had sold more books than most of the room combined. But no one asked her to speak, or even to stand up when they introduced the judges.
That’s how it had always been. Ignored. Pushed aside. After all the money she’d made for the publishers, Alice still didn’t have her name on it.
No matter. She’d arrived at the innermost, and that’s what counted.
Fifteen minutes later, Morrison wrapped up, and everyone moved to the Waldorf’s Louis XVI Suite for a champagne reception. As a Mormon, Sparks didn’t drink, but parties weren’t off-limits, and Saints lived to network.
Besides, lying is easier when everyone else partakes.*
* The National Book Foundation did not respond to my numerous requests for comment.
Bad at Being Human
In a granite-shielded, climate-controlled vault deep below Brigham Young University are nine large boxes, each with the same label heading:
Title
Beatrice Sparks Papers, 1949–2000
Creator
Sparks, Beatrice
Biographical History Abstract
Author with PhD in human behavior. Specialist in child and adolescent psychology. Member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon).
Each box is packed with manila folders, and each folder bulges with unsorted bric-a-brac: pamphlets, brochures, news clippings, holiday cards, personal letters, and scribbled notes about future projects. It’s as though Sparks couldn’t stand to part with anything bearing her name, a trait that quickly turns from “interesting” to “ghastly.”
Let’s dispatch with the basics. Beatrice Sparks was, in every sense, a terrible liar. Her deceptions weren’t just frequent and hurtful; they were klutzy, bordering on incompetent.
For one thing, Sparks saved numerous drafts of her fraud. Large sections of Alden Barrett’s journal were photocopied, altered by hand, then copied again. Others were spackled with correction fluid, allowing Sparks to shuffle the order or insert new text between sections. Elsewhere, a letter from Alden’s friend Kurt has been copied, and a new sentence added: “There’s only one way out now—through the grave.” (Across the side of this copy are the words “Do Not Use.”)
One page, buried halfway through a stack of unrelated papers, reveals the whole lazy scam.
It’s a note supposedly typewritten by Alden and “redacted” by Sparks for the sake of privacy. Throughout the letter, the name “Teresa” is whited-out and changed to “Tina.” But there’s a problem: at two different points, “Tina” is typed directly on the page. (In other words, rather than “Teresa” whited-out and replaced with “Tina,” it’s just “Tina” from the outset.)
(Courtesy of the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Department, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.)
Since Alden (a) didn’t type his journal, and (b) wouldn’t have called Teresa “Tina,” it doesn’t take Veronica Mars to figure out the rest.
It’s a clumsy, telling mistake. Sparks couldn’t even be bothered to forge correctly, much less dispose of the evidence afterward. She assumed (rightly, as it turned out) that people would accept whatever she told them.
There are dozens of these slipups, and they soon become a dispiriting wash. That changes with Box Number Two.
There, amid the scraps of commerce and myth, is a stash of news clippings about the fallout in Pleasant Grove.
As the Barretts found themselves besieged, slowly coming apart in a cauldron of public shame, Sparks observed it all with an artist’s care, clipping and filing the snapshots of another family’s destruction.
This is something more than wrong. It outstrips squishy labels like “troubling” and “problematic.” Even “sinister” feels inadequate.
That Beatrice Sparks, whose own family imploded after her parents’ divorce, and whose own first child died in infancy, betrayed the Barretts is vile enough. That she tracked their suffering—and actually kept souvenirs—is ugly beyond measure, and carries the unmistakable stench of a crawlspace.
It also leads to a strange reappraisal.
I’m Looking Through You
While the outer details shifted, Sparks’s core explanation for Go Ask Alice was nearly always the same. Here’s the five-sentence version:
In the summer of 1970, Sparks was teaching daytime classes at a youth convention on the BYU campus. Late one evening, a teen attending from California (“Alice”) had a sudden, hysterical breakdown. After trying and failing to calm the young woman, a counselor finally phoned Beatrice Sparks, who arrived at the dorm and soon had Alice under control.
As the week progressed, Sparks learned more about Alice’s troubles—stories of drug use and sexual indiscretions.
When the youth convention ended, Alice returned to California, and Sparks stayed in touch with the girl and her family.
From there, things quickly went sideways,* but the central facts were consistent, especially for Sparks, who excelled at forgetting her own stories.
What’s notable is what’s missing. When discussing “the real Alice,” Sparks rarely called her a runaway or a former drug dealer. She skipped the acid-laced soda, and the long stretches spent on the street. Instead, she hit the same few points: the youth convention, the California teen, the late-night breakdown, the call from a counselor.
It’s miles from Go Ask Alice, but Alden Barrett is miles from Jay’s Journal. (Without the personal details, would anyone have read Jay’s cow-killing escapades and thought, Wow, that must be Alden?)
For more than fifty years, people have asked the same question: Did the girl from the diary exist?
But there’s a question that seemingly no one asked.
Did the girl from the story exist?
* Sometimes Alice died thirteen days later; sometimes it was six weeks, sometimes several months. Sometimes Sparks got the diaries from Alice, sometimes from Alice’s parents. Sometimes there were audiotapes, sometimes not.
An Interlude
There’s no way around this, so let’s deal with it now. What follows is altered for privacy.
I know how that sounds, especially after three hundred pages explaining why truth is fiction, war is peace, there is no spoon, etc.
If you choose to doubt, I won’t blame you. That said, if you’ve made it this far, perhaps I’ve accrued a little trust.
In the next two chapters, I’ll tell what I know, and do my best to protect the innocent. That this story exists at all is on Beatrice Sparks. Not causing further harm is on me.
Flashback
Saturday, July 11, 1970
The campus of Brigham Young University is dry, in every sense. Elevation and weeks of summer have parched the air, and it chaps your skin, wicking away every drop of sweat, and turning your voice to a rasp. The breeze smells like a dusty attic.
Everywhere you look, there is order. The campus buildings are wide and squarish. Not actually ugly, but beige and imposing. The lawns are golf-perfect, and they stay that way, because nobody touches them. Instead, everyone uses the concrete paths. “Cougars,” the saying goes, referencing BYU’s mascot, “don’t cut corners.”
To the east, the Wasatch Mountains fill your vision. Two miles high and spanning half the state, the slabs of rock and earth seem close enough to touch, but impossible to cross. The sense of isolation is absolute. At BYU, it’s easy to feel that no place else exists.
Late in the morning, young women arrive, emerging from cars or stepping off buses. Nearly all are white, with straight, sleek hair that hits the shoulders. They carry suitcases and vanity bags, and most wear dresses or long skirts; a few are in pants, but that won’t last. The girls are chatting and smiling, seeing old friends and making new ones.
This is Youth Academy, a summer camp for Mormon teenagers. For the next seven days, the young Saints will have a microversion of college life: attending classes, eating in the commons, and living in a dorm room with an assigned roommate.
As the young women mingle, we zoom in on a fourteen-year-old with dark bobbed hair, a sunburn, and an impressive scrape on one elbow.
A tomboy from Washington State, Tobi Hudson didn’t always look like a proper young Mormon (female version), but that was deceiving. She was a true believer who’d spent the spring picking apples for five cents a pound, then paid the $125 tuition herself. It was her first visit to BYU, and she was nearly aloft with excitement.
Suitcase in hand, Tobi made her way to Deseret Towers, the seven-story dorm where she’d live for the next week. Navigating the blue-carpeted hallways, she eventually found 308, a double room with white cinderblock walls and a view of the mountains.
As she unpacked, someone appeared in the doorway. Tobi looked over . . . then looked up.
At fourteen, Brenda March was taller than most boys her age, and she positively loomed over Tobi. A pasty Californian with long blond hair and eyes of pale amber, Brenda wasn’t just tall, she was powerfully built, and the flowery dress didn’t hide it. She had broad shoulders and muscular arms, with strong-looking hands, and nails that were chewed to the quick.
Underpinning all of this was a kind of intangible bluntness. It was in the way she talked, and the way she sat, and it was always there.
Decades later, Sarah Faber, a volunteer counselor in 1970, drifts into memory, searching for the right description.
“Brenda was . . . having a real identity crisis,” says Faber. “She was so masculine. She didn’t—absolutely did not—want to be a girl, and so she had trouble fitting in. All the girls had to wear dresses, and Brenda was very large-framed, and just so . . . masculine. She talked like a boy.”
Still, rules were rules. Girls were expected to dress and behave like girls, and if they didn’t know what that meant, there were men on hand to explain it.
Stepping onto BYU’s campus, even for a visit, meant accepting the school’s Honor Code, a set of dictates with the force of law.
At BYU, there was no alcohol, no tobacco, no tea or coffee, no gambling, no “erotic material,” and no illicit drugs. For students, an arrest for drug possession (even if the student was later found innocent) meant automatic forfeiture of that semester’s credits.
Men had to be short-haired, clean-shaven, and dressed respectably. Bare feet were forbidden, as were sweatshirts and above-the-knee shorts.
Women could wear makeup, but nothing too garish. Hair had to be a “natural” color. More than one piercing per ear was forbidden. (This being 1970, other piercings were a nonissue.)
Women couldn’t wear pants. If they tried, they’d be sent back to their rooms to find something feminine. But not too feminine: skirts and dresses had to cover the knees, and couldn’t be strapless, spaghetti strapped, or form fitting. Show up in anything like that, and it was back to your room—again.
During the school year, a team of “skirt police” handed immodest women a pamphlet titled Pardon Me.
On the surface, Youth Academy was like any summer camp. Kids got a break from their parents (and vice versa), and spent a week feeling slightly older. There were courses to take and things to learn, from music and painting to college prep.
There were other courses, too, with names like “Sports Adventure for Boys” and “Survival Adventure for Boys.”
There was no “Sports Adventure for Girls.” No “Sports Adventure for Everyone.”
In theory, young women could sign up for whatever they liked. In practice, they were shunted into man catching via two courses: “Personal Development for Girls” and “Thinderella” (subtitled “personal development for overweight girls”). Both courses taught etiquette, homemaking, and the all-encompassing “personal appearance,” but Thinderella put extra emphasis on diet and exercise . . . and not asking why overweight boys didn’t have a special class.
It was the absolute center of a pressurized, thought-shaping system. Here, in the most conservative region of the nation’s most conservative state, on the campus of a Church-run college, in classrooms divided by sex (in roles determined by God, via men), young Mormon women learned their life’s purpose: to marry, to have as many children as possible, and to serve their husbands, their male Church leaders, and their Heavenly Father.
As bedtime approached that first evening, Tobi saw Brenda fully dressed and lying on the bed, her eyes clenched against streaming tears.
Tobi knelt down. “Brenda, what’s wrong?”
Brenda looked over at Tobi.
“God doesn’t want me.”
“What?” asked Tobi. “What do you mean?”
For a moment, Brenda didn’t answer. Her eyes were red and swollen; her face gone blotchy. When she finally spoke, her voice was strangled.
“God hates me.”
It was such an ugly, alien statement that Tobi just backed away, like retreating from a strange new insect.
Out in the hallway, Tobi saw counselor Sarah Faber and blurted out, “Brenda needs help.”
It was Sarah’s second summer as a Youth Academy counselor, and she wasn’t going to rattle. She went to the room and saw Brenda curled up, staring off into nothing.
Maybe it’s just homesickness, thought Sarah, walking toward Brenda. She’s been traveling, and there’s no family here. She’ll be all right.
As Sarah approached, Brenda let out a loud, unbroken wail. It wasn’t a scream, because it didn’t trail off or waver, just held an ear-splitting pitch until Brenda ran out of breath, then started up again. Like a siren, thought Sarah.
Tobi watched from the hallway, wanting to help, wanting to run.
Sarah was caught in the moment, unsure what to do. She’d never dealt with something like this.
What if I make it worse? What happens then?
Fortunately, there was someone on call. A green-eyed psychologist named Beatrice Sparks.
When living in Los Angeles, Sparks had volunteered at a veterans hospital, and after moving to Provo in 1964, she’d done the same at the Utah State Hospital, which had a separate psych unit for adolescents—the Youth Center.*
According to the hospital’s Volunteer Service Department, volunteer duties included “mending and sorting clothing, providing evening entertainment, and assisting teens with homework.” Admirable service, and necessary. But in Sparks’s telling, such nonclinical work became “professional counseling of troubled children.” In speeches and columns, meanwhile, she frequently mentioned “psychology training” and having “majored in psychology,” usually at UCLA.
UCLA. Majored in psychology. Worked at the state hospital. Professionally counseled troubled children. For many people, those dots connected themselves, and by 1969, at least one local newspaper had called Sparks “a psychologist at the Provo Mental Hospital.”
Now, as Brenda March wailed in that high, unsettling register, Sarah Faber and Tobi Hudson fought to stay composed, and waited for “Dr. Sparks” to arrive.
Sparks knew how to control a situation. The key was acting like you already ran things; do that, and everyone followed.
Sparks sent the other girls back to their dorm rooms. Tobi didn’t know where to go, so she followed Sarah, and they waited in silence, braced for another explosion.
After a long while, Sparks came to Sarah’s room, and said that things would be okay. Brenda, Sparks explained, had some “unhealthy tendencies,” and back home in California, her parents had already put her in therapy. It was important, Sparks said, to treat Brenda “like one of the girls.”
The next six days were a mixture of fear and exhaustion. Brenda’s meltdown didn’t recur, but she was disruptive and strange, piping up with questions that made no sense, and walking out of classrooms mid-lesson.
When she wasn’t vanishing or derailing conversations, Brenda told abrupt and shocking stories—about marijuana, and heroin, and suicide attempts. About her sex life, and a boyfriend named Steven. All in the same deadpan delivery.
In the cloistered space of Youth Academy, the stories circulated, and people believed what they wanted.
One day, Tobi saw Brenda standing in a stairwell, talking to . . . nobody. After a few moments, Brenda turned to Tobi and waved her over. As Tobi approached, Brenda said she wanted to introduce her boyfriend.
“This,” said Brenda, pointing to a fire extinguisher, “is Steven.”
The scandalous tales and odd behavior, Tobi later concluded, were a kind of emotional venting: one part performance, one part aggression, one part personal anguish.
Despite the tumult, Tobi and Brenda made a connection. They were different cuts of the same cloth, these intense and brilliant girls. Tobi Hudson was a good-hearted zealot who wanted to save the world (possibly by force). Brenda March prayed with equal fervor, but also with desperation; there was fear in her entreaties, and a clutching, desolate hope.
When Youth Academy ended, Tobi and Brenda vowed to stay in touch. They lived on opposite ends of the West Coast (Tobi up north in Yakima, Brenda down south in Ukiah), but swapped addresses and promised to write.
With tears and hugs, they said goodbye, and went their separate ways.
It’s a common refrain—I’ll stay in touch, I swear—but Tobi meant it. From her first week back in Washington State, she wrote to Brenda, sending long, thought-out letters of prayer and support.
Brenda’s responses were sad and confusing, and more than a little scary:
I miss you more than I can even say. I wish you could come see me.
I don’t know what is wrong with me, but I ruin everyone and everything. Maybe that’s why God hates me.
There is nothing anybody can do. God doesn’t care. I would be better off dead at the bottom of a river. I should kill myself and get it over with.
Then, a few days later:
Isn’t life perfect? I’m so glad we met. Heavenly Father is watching over me, and He will not let me falter. The future is beautiful and bright, and I am blessed!
The emotional whipsawing broke Tobi’s heart, and she prayed and fasted, sending every good thought toward her suffering friend. If I only pray hard enough, she thought, Heavenly Father will keep Brenda safe.
Please, God. Please make Brenda well.
The letters kept coming.
God has shut me out. Why? I ask for His help, and feel only coldness. Why doesn’t He love me? I don’t think I can go on like this anymore. I’m so sad and scared.
Tobi gave sympathy, advice—whatever she thought might help, but nothing seemed to change.
She didn’t know what to do.
But she knew someone who might.
* Alice’s July 22 entry reads, “Dad and Mom keep calling the place where I’m going a youth center, but they aren’t fooling anybody . . . they are sending me to an insane asylum!”
Follow You Down
Thursday, September 10, 1970
After Youth Academy, Beatrice Sparks was at loose ends. Three years earlier, she’d ghostwritten for the Family Achievement Institute, and pitched several ideas to Art Linkletter, but nothing had stuck.
Now, Linkletter had changed. His daughter had jumped out a window, apparently after taking LSD, and Linkletter was crazy with anger, condemning the drug as unalloyed evil.
He wasn’t alone in that view. In Los Angeles, the Manson trial had barely started, and lawyers for both sides had already mentioned LSD. Charles Manson, they said, had used it to rewire good Christian girls, turning them into blood-hungry monsters.
In Marina del Rey, cops had arrested a frizzy-haired activist for bringing acid-laced snacks to a “swinging singles” party. Seventeen people—or possibly fifty, depending on the source—had wound up in the hospital. Two, said newspapers, had even slipped into comas.
And on Capitol Hill, Congress was about to pass Nixon’s new drug law, making LSD a Schedule I substance, no different than heroin.
It was all in the ether, waiting to form.
Going through her morning mail, Sparks saw a letter from Tobi Hudson.
I am so frightened for Brenda, Sister Sparks. I fast and pray, and I try to help her see the good parts of life, but I don’t know if it’s even helping. I am so afraid of what she might do. She thinks God has abandoned her. Please, please help her.
Sparks rushed a reply, and a three-sided circuit commenced: Brenda sharing her pain with Tobi, Tobi consoling and praying for Brenda, and Sparks getting the updates. Sparks also contacted Brenda’s parents and bishop.
As the weeks passed, Tobi’s moods began to mirror Brenda’s, shifting from joy to despair without warning. Tobi’s parents grew increasingly worried. What if Brenda did something rash? How would Tobi react?
When they heard that Brenda was mentioning suicide, they finally stepped in, putting an end to the friendship. You can’t talk with Brenda anymore. No letters, no phone calls, nothing. We know you tried to help her, but now you have to stop.
Tobi’s bishop agreed. This was between Brenda, her parents, and Heavenly Father. It was best—for everyone—if Tobi moved on.
Then they made her burn Brenda’s letters.
Several weeks later, Tobi, who was still only fourteen, reflected in a letter to Beatrice Sparks:
Looking back, I wish I had done more. If I could only do things over, I would treat Brenda as a person, and only as a person. Not as a “problem” or some kind of outcast, but a person who needed my help.
I tried to play psychologist, and it got the better of me, but it also hurt Brenda, and for that, I am so filled with remorse.
If there is ever a next time, I must and will do better.
I do hope that you and I can remain in contact (if you are not too busy, that is).
May the Lord bless and keep you.
Love,
Tobi
Sparks never replied. Perhaps that’s because she was very busy. By the time of Tobi’s final letter, Sparks had sold an exciting new project. It was the story of a troubled girl from California who got into drugs—even heroin—eventually suffering a terrible breakdown. And, said Sparks, it was all entirely true. In fact, she’d met the girl just a few months earlier . . . at a BYU summer camp.
A Girl Like You
Time passed. Presidents came and went. Fashions emerged, flourished, then faded away.
But certain things remained.
1976
In Fayetteville, New York, Laurie Halse Anderson, fourteen, found a copy of Go Ask Alice and felt transported. Here was someone with a life as ugly as her own, maybe more so.
The year before, just prior to starting ninth grade, Anderson had been raped by an older boy, and the experience turned her spectral and silent. When the rapist died in an accident just one month later, Anderson thought her own sorrow had ended.
She was wrong. “I did not know,” she later wrote, “that the haunting had just begun.”
Anderson’s father suffered from war-induced trauma and drank heavily, and her mother labored to keep things afloat. Afraid that speaking up might add to the burden, Anderson kept quiet about the rape.
She vanished in plain sight, shielded by drugs and the printed page.
“When I wasn’t stoned,” wrote Anderson decades later, “the only thing that helped me breathe was opening a book.”
One day, she discovered Go Ask Alice. “Not only was it a gripping read,” Anderson recalled, “it also convinced me that there was somebody out there whose life sucked worse than mine.”
It took another twenty years for Anderson to tell someone—a therapist—about the rape. In the meantime, she’d written several books of her own. The breakthrough came in 1999, when she published Speak, a novel whose teenage protagonist, Melinda, is raped at a party. Speak was a bestseller, a finalist for a National Book Award, and a target for censors, who fought to remove it from schools.
A film version followed, and later, a graphic novel.
Speaking to Booklist in 2004, Anderson gave thanks to the unnamed diarist who’d helped her survive—and find her own voice.
“I owe it all to Anonymous,” she said. “Sometimes you take hope where you can find it.”
1996
In southwest Pittsburgh, teenager Gillian Jacobs found a copy of Go Ask Alice and figured she’d give it a chance. Just a few pages in, she was transfixed.
An actress since the age of eight, Jacobs had already met her share of drunks and druggies, and knew that if she wasn’t careful, she could go the same route. Her father had been fighting addiction for years, a constant reminder of its parasite grip.
After reading Alice’s final few pages, Jacobs vowed to avoid drugs and booze forever.
Twenty years later, after roles on Girls, Law and Order, Love, and a six-season run on Community, she was still clean and sober.
“Go Ask Alice,” said Jacobs, “inoculated me.”
2010
In Arapahoe, Nebraska, twelve-year-old Morgan Curran was afraid and confused. Her older sister, Sam, had turned into someone else—a stranger you couldn’t trust or talk to.
It was meth. Sam had started getting high in her teens, taking whatever was offered, but meth had hollowed her out, leaving her glassy and vacant. She stole from the family and lied to their faces. Every now and then she cleaned up, but the drug always lured her back.
Morgan wanted to understand, but more than that, she wanted to reach inside and grab the real Sam; to pull her out before she dissolved forever.
At school, someone told Morgan about Go Ask Alice and said she ought to read it.
When she got to the epilogue, it felt like a punch in the stomach. The girl was dead. Dead and cold and never returning. Tears streamed down Morgan’s face, and she found herself trying to will the future. Sam won’t die. Sam won’t die. Sam won’t die.
But at the same moment, she understood two things: I can’t fix Sam . . . and I will never use drugs.
Later, Morgan read about Beatrice Sparks and about Go Ask Alice; how people said it was all made up. That didn’t wash with her. Embellished or not, there was truth at the core, and anyone who’d been there could see it.
Sparks herself understood Alice’s legacy, and she guarded it like an angry parent. In 1998, she learned of a website called GoAskAlice.com. The site, run by Columbia University, was an advice column for teens and twenty-somethings, and gave blunt, graphic answers to sex and health questions. (“Alice” was the collective name for the site’s editors.)
Sparks was appalled by the content, particularly its judgment-free discussions of group sex, anal intercourse, and other outré activities. When Sparks discovered a spin-off paperback called The Go Ask Alice Book of Answers: A Guide to Physical, Sexual, and Emotional Health, she was apoplectic, and sent a series of outraged letters to Columbia University president George Rupp. Written on “Beatrice Mathews Sparks, PhD” letterhead, the opening salvo was a perfect distillation of Sparks’s public persona:
In 1971, my book titled Go Ask Alice was published. It started the genre of Young Adult Books and was a “best seller.” It is still selling well. I am an Adolescent Psychologist and all my books come from true diaries or case histories of teenagers.*
I also hold a Doctorate of Philosophy in Human Behavior. My books have won Christopher Medals and been named as School Library Journal Best Books. I was a 1996 National Book Awards Judge and lecture around the nation.
While on a speaking, book-signing, and award-receiving tour, The Go Ask Alice Guide to Physical, Sexual, and Emotional Health was shown to me by a librarian. She presumed I had written the book.
COLUMBIA’S GO ASK ALICE IS MALIGNING MY REPUTATION AND CREDIBILITY!
That any of this even mattered spoke to Alice’s unflagging popularity. Decades after shocking America, Go Ask Alice had sold nearly four million copies and become a rite of passage—a grubby, strip-mall cousin to The Bell Jar. (And a more successful one at that: by 1998, Alice was outselling Sylvia Plath’s iconic novel by more than two-to-one.)
But the numbers were only part of it. Go Ask Alice was embedded in the culture, and even people who’d never read it knew the broad strokes. Some junkie’s diary . . . it might be fake . . . I think she dies at the end.
That was Alice in a tiny, tiny box, but the real sweep was bigger. Alice was a social Rorschach, reflecting whatever you already believed—about drugs, about kids, about adults, about life. If you were young and fucked up, Alice rang true. If you were aging and fearful, Alice rang vile. To censors, it was filthy. To cynics, it was funny.
As the internet ascended, Go Ask Alice, like everything else in America, became a siloed property with opposing, intractable camps, each calling the other naive. A quick scan of Amazon’s reader reviews from 2016 gave a sense of the rift:
A must read for parents and impressionable boys and girls alike. I first read Alice when I was in middle school many years ago. When I re-read it as an adult (and a mother of two girls), I came away with a different perspective on the mindset of adolescents and the pressures they are under. Timeless life lessons.
—Leo 69
Tedious. Preachy. Obviously fiction. This may have worked to scare kids into not using drugs in the 1970s; I hope no one is relying on it to do that today. Basically, it’s a quaint, naive relic from the beginning of the “war on drugs.”
—CJFCL
If you have children or work with children, please read Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal . . . they just may save your life or the life of your child. Read them with your children, with your students, and within your communities.
Both journals are extremely honest and nakedly candid, poignant and tragic. Neither were released for the sake of profit, but rather by two sets of parents hoping they would prevent other children and teenagers from the same fate.
—JMV
Stupid, melodramatic crap. Go Ask Alice is severely overhyped and is written like a bad after-school special.
—BewareOfOranges
The all-or-nothing view extended into classrooms, especially where drugs were concerned. In Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, and elsewhere, schools used Alice in the fight to keep students sober. At the University of Washington, Go Ask Alice was one of the college’s “Young Adult Resources on the Science of Addiction.”
Alice even reached people who couldn’t—or generally didn’t—read. Literacy programs ranked Alice among their most popular titles, ideal for reaching dyslexics and other “low-interest” readers.*
At the same time, social activists continued their anti-Alice crusade. In Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Texas, and New York, censors got Alice yanked from classrooms and school libraries, and for every successful banning, there were a dozen more attempts.
One such battle, Island Trees School District v. Pico, went all the way to the US Supreme Court, where a split decision returned Alice and eight other books (including Soul on Ice and Slaughterhouse-Five) to Long Island school libraries.
This tug-of-war put Alice in rarified company. When the American Library Association unveiled its “most-banned/challenged books” list in 1990, Go Ask Alice sat between Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. A decade later, Alice remained on the list, an enduring middle finger to priggish complainers.
All of it testified to the book’s true power. Alice connected with readers—young women especially—in ways that sometimes defied expectation.
“A lot of people think Go Ask Alice is only about drugs,” wrote Gabrielle Moss in Lost magazine, “but it wasn’t the drugs or the crime or the counterculture that intrigued me. It was the way that the narrator was a mess . . . an exciting, bubbly, rebellious teenage basket case like I had never seen before.
“I didn’t get that we were reading about ‘Alice’ because she was supposed to be a warning,” said Moss, who later became an editor at online magazine Bustle. “I thought we were reading about ‘Alice’ because people like her mattered.”
Likewise, many closeted teens saw themselves in Alice’s narrative—in her mix of lust and self-loathing, hunger and despair. In her desperate wish to not be this way anymore.
It was on the surface:
I’m really confused . . . now when I face a girl it’s like facing a boy . . . I want her to touch me, to have her sleep under me, but then I feel terrible. I get guilty and it makes me sick.
And in the shadows, hidden by slang:
In my head I know it’s going to be all right because I have Joel [her boyfriend] and my new super straight friends and they’ll help me. Besides I’m much stronger than I used to be. I know I am.*
For teens struggling to understand their own desires, or even to just get along with peers and parents, there was kinship in Alice’s story, and the particulars could seem incidental.
“It was less important whether the misdeeds were true or not,” wrote journalist Nathan Smith in his 2021 essay “Seeking Solace in Go Ask Alice as a Queer Teen.” “It was important that feelings of alienation, angst and estrangement existed in others too, signaling that my own were valid.”
And there lay the crux of Alice’s undying appeal. Beneath the dated jargon and drug-porn story line, Alice acted the way you sometimes felt. If you kept a journal, or filled endless pages with dark, haunted poetry, or felt the stab of a singer speaking directly to you, so sweet and sad your heart could barely take it, you had a kindred spirit in Alice. Fiction or not, she was real. And she understood.
* A follow-up letter stated, “Perhaps you are not aware that I have been an Adolescent Psychologist for over thirty years.”
* ESOL classes (English for speakers of other languages) frequently use Alice to teach vernacular English, raising the fantastic possibility of future generations using “ofay” and “freak wharf” in casual conversation.
* Viewed through the prism of shock treatment and other “conversion therapies,” certain passages turn from mournful to shattering: “The nurses and doctors keep telling me I will feel better, but I still can’t get straight.”
This Was My Life
I think I’ll go into child guidance when I get out of school. Or maybe I should become a psychologist . . .
Oh dear wonderful, trusting, friendly Diary, that’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll spend the rest of my life helping people who are just like me!
—Go Ask Alice, undated entry
Alden Barrett and Brenda March weren’t the only teens stitched into Sparks’s writing. Her own past was there, too—all the lowest, saddest moments from a marred adolescence.
Just as Sparks’s father walked out on the family, the fathers in her books were frequently absent or worse, and young women were prey for older (often married) men. San Francisco, where Sparks took refuge after her parents’ divorce, also turned up repeatedly, and always as it was back then: a noisy cauldron of incipient violence.
But the biggest overlap with Sparks’s own life was ambition:
I’m thinking about taking a psychology class next semester . . . I’m so excited I haven’t been able to sleep, thinking about actually being able to: control my life, my actions, my doing, my aggressions, my wimpiness, my desires, my EVERYTHING! It will change my complete existence!!!
—February 10 entry, Kim: Empty Inside—The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager
I’m still not sure if I want to be a teacher or a counselor, but I guess I’ve got lots of time to figure that one out. I’d still love to be a pediatrician if it didn’t take so dang long . . . or a writer . . . I don’t know.
—August 15 entry, Annie’s Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, a Pregnant Teenager
Again and again, Sparks’s young narrators shared these same few dreams: to become writers, or psychologists, or both. To achieve and accomplish. To redeem themselves via success. To be somebody.
In 2003, Sparks’s husband, LaVorn, died at the age of eighty-eight. The boy who’d quit school and gone to work at eleven years old had surpassed all expectations, and then some. In addition to his vast personal wealth, LaVorn had a range of thriving businesses—everything from oil to advertising to apartment buildings. His fleet of vintage cars, all carefully restored and maintained, had once grown so large that he donated several (including a Cadillac, two Model Ts, and a Rolls-Royce) to Utah Valley Community College. In 1993, the school renamed their automotive education facility the “Sparks Automotive Building.”
His personal book collection was even more impressive, boasting six hundred rare and exquisite items, among them a first-edition Book of Mormon and a fifteenth-century Bible. Thanks to sizable donations, LaVorn’s and Beatrice’s names adorned a local library.
Together, they had outlasted a harrowing chain of failures and traumas, finally attaining the good life. In ways both admirable and abhorrent, they embodied the soul of America.
Following LaVorn’s death, an aging and grief-stricken Beatrice retreated from public view, but not before writing a mind-bending finale.
Exit
I do a lot of pretending! I’ve done it all my life! Pretending is the only thing in my life that I can depend on.
—Finding Katie: The Diary of Anonymous, a Teenager in Foster Care
As a book, 2005’s Finding Katie scarcely mattered. As Beatrice Sparks’s farewell, it was something close to surrealist art.
Katie is fifteen. Dumped on the streets of California by an abusive father, she scrapes and struggles, eventually landing in a group home. As Katie adjusts to her new surroundings, the trauma persists, skewing her memory. At times, the past is like a shattered lens, everything angled and blurred, the images overlapping.
“Maybe my whole old life, as I remember it,” Katie thinks, “is a crazy hodgepodge of things I’ve read or seen in movies or on TV.”*
At first, Katie worries about blending fact and fiction, but then she makes an amazing discovery: nobody cares.
“When I got there I couldn’t talk,” writes Katie. “I was so full of lies I’d completely forgotten how to communicate. But that didn’t seem to matter at all. [Another girl] held my hand, and told me how she had always wanted to become a painter or a schoolteacher or a writer, and how she had always lived a life of almost complete pretend.”
The group-home story line was already a poignant echo: after Sparks’s father walked out, her younger siblings had languished in an orphanage. But now, as she completed Finding Katie, Sparks faced a sunset version of that same scenario: Courtyard at Jamestown Assisted Living, a facility that promised “privacy and dignity,” plus bingo, a weekly movie night, and free exercise tips from a “life enrichment specialist.”
It’s an ending no one expects for themselves, even when they know it’s coming. But Sparks had spent decades warping reality, rewriting life to match what she wanted. Now, as time grew short, she crafted her own epilogue.
In Finding Katie’s last few pages, foster child Katie, an aspiring writer and compulsive liar from a broken home, is adopted by Mary Matthews, a respected professor at UCLA.
Professor Matthews has her own rocky past. As a child, she lost her father, and endured a long stretch of pain and isolation. Eventually, however, she became a PhD and married a wonderful man who supported her ambitions.
Then, after a long and happy marriage, Professor Matthews’s husband died, and for a time, she thought her life was over. But now that Professor Matthews has adopted Katie, both of them are happy and content.
So, to recap: Finding Katie concludes with a teenage version of Beatrice Sparks (Katie) being adopted by an adult version of Beatrice Sparks (Mary Matthews, PhD), all in a book written by the actual Beatrice Sparks (née Mathews), PhD, who was, of course, a creation of the real Beatrice Sparks, the compulsive liar from a broken home.*
With that, Beatrice Sparks was finished. Finding Katie’s closing sentences became her final published words.
“I am somebody! For eternity!”
* Ouroboros alert: “Even now I’m not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I’ve gotten from books” (Go Ask Alice, October 10 entry).
* And to think: this woman spent her life denouncing drugs.
Wish You Were Here
Walking through Pleasant Grove today, it’s easy to picture life as it existed circa 1971. Most of the buildings are the same, and the drugstore where Alden Barrett bought his journal still sits at 10 South Main Street, neon sign aglow.
When Alden died, Pleasant Grove had five thousand people. Now, the number is just under forty thousand. Much of that growth is from birth rate, and while some of those children will move away, most will probably stay, creating the next generation of Latter-day Saints.
One May afternoon, almost five decades after Alden Barrett’s death, I parked my rental—a white minivan—on 550 South and stared at a redbrick ranch house. Before long, I realized I’d fallen into the same behavior as countless other voyeurs, and I felt a wave of embarrassment.
I stepped out of the minivan and walked toward the house. Overhead, the sun glared in a cloudless blue sky, but a brisk wind stung my cheeks and cut through my thin jacket.
At the sidewalk’s edge, I stopped. There, amid a tangle of weeds and overgrown trees, hid a miniature lamppost. The top was broken and dangled over the side. Below that hung a grimy metal nameplate:
BARRETT.
(Photo by Rick Emerson.)
You could walk by a dozen times and never spot it, but once you did, it was all you could see.
I continued to the front porch, then hesitated. It was Sunday. What kind of person bothered a stranger, on a Sunday, in Utah County? I would have turned around, but I’d been lurking out front for a few minutes already, and it seemed like leaving would look even more suspicious.
I took a breath, and knocked on the door. After a moment, a woman answered. She looked a bit like Mary-Louise Parker circa Weeds.
Standing there with my notebook and pen, I felt ridiculous, like someone pretending to be a 1970s cop. This only got worse with my mangled introduction:
“Good afternoon, ma’am. I apologize for bothering you on a Sunday. My name is Rick Emerson, and I’m researching a book about myths and rumors in small towns, including Pleasant Grove.”*
Halfway through my opening, she knew what was coming, and when I paused, she said, “This is about the kid, right?”
Linda Butler moved to Pleasant Grove in 1993. Before that, she and her family lived in Portland, Oregon (just down the street from my house, no less). The Butlers are Latter-day Saints, and wanted to raise their kids in a safe, like-minded place. Utah County was an obvious choice, and the Barretts’ former house was for sale, so it was an easy decision.
As the deal closed, no one—not the realtor, not the lender, nobody—told the Butlers about Alden’s suicide. Some states require presale disclosure of murders or suicides, but Utah doesn’t, and for a while, the Butlers were oblivious.
Shortly after moving in, there was some kind of power glitch, and the Butlers called an inspector. As the man checked the cables, Linda Butler asked, “Does the house have bad wiring?”
The inspector kept working, but gave a dry little laugh. “Lady, there’s more wrong with this house than just the wiring.”
“What do you mean?” asked Butler.
He looked up. “You don’t know?”
She didn’t. So he told her the whole creepy story.
Talking about the inspector, Butler shakes her head. She doesn’t believe in hauntings, or at least, she doesn’t believe her house is haunted. She doesn’t know quite what to believe about Alden Barrett, a boy who died when Butler herself was fifteen. She only knows that people can’t forget him.
“People knock on the door. They poke around the yard,” she says with less annoyance than you might expect. “We get letters sometimes, sent to the Barretts.”
All of this makes me feel awkward, and I prepare to leave. I thank Butler for her time and give her my contact info. I ask if I can follow up at some future point; I might have a few questions about the house itself.
She says yes, and then, as I turn to go, she says, “You might want to come by the Pleasant Grove Library tomorrow.”
Before I can ask why, she says, “I work at the library . . . with a woman who knew him. Knew Alden Barrett.”
I say that I will, then I thank her again, and walk back to my rented minivan.
“I work at the library . . . with a woman who knew him. Knew Alden Barrett.”
This, it turns out, is something of an understatement. At the Pleasant Grove Library, where she runs a lauded literacy program, Linda Butler works with three librarians who knew Alden Barrett, either directly or through siblings.*
At first, I wonder if this is retroactive spin, the same way everyone in Aberdeen hung out with Kurt Cobain. It isn’t. I later check the yearbooks for Pleasant Grove High School, and there they are: all three women, gloss-lipped and looking toward the future.
But even without the yearbooks, the women ring true, telling specific, unremarkable stories about Alden and Teresa; the kind of stories that only stick around when they happen to you.
“Remember, that time, with the choir—” begins Tammra Salisbury, at which point, a coworker laughs and skips to the punch line:
“—and Alden fell off the stage.”
Their reactions are sweet and sad, for all the same reasons. Alden was funny and charming, and he’ll never be either again.
Other stories follow. About his basement rock band, and his sometimes-disastrous science projects, and the time he and Teresa started kissing during church.
“They were in the back row,” says one of the women, arching an eyebrow and smiling, “so maybe they thought we couldn’t see them, but it was hard to miss.”
While the women agree about Alden’s intelligence and about his frustration with life in Pleasant Grove, they also agree on the utter waste of his suicide, the squandered potential and needless hurt. That he destroyed his own future is obvious, but he did the same to countless other people, especially the people who loved him most. When Alden died, his pain didn’t vanish—it just found new places to live.
As the women tell stories about Alden and Teresa, I notice a young volunteer eavesdropping. Page is sixteen and archetypically Mormon, with a clean-cut whiteness that’s equal parts Richie Rich and Pleasantville.
Page is sorting a stack of books, and as the women talk, he slows, his head tilting toward the conversation. Eventually, he just stops working, leans against a counter, and listens.
Later, Page asks Tammra Salisbury, “What was that about?”
“He was asking about our friend,” she tells him. “Alden Barrett.”
Hearing this, Page, who was born twenty years after Jay’s Journal (and who isn’t even from Pleasant Grove), nods his head.
“The kid who’s the high school ghost, right?”
Recounting this exchange, Salisbury shakes her head, then puffs a little air.
“It’s like he’s not even a person anymore,” she says. “He’s like a myth or a legend or something.”
There are no copies of Jay’s Journal at the Pleasant Grove Library. Even in the age of e-books, paper editions of Jay tend to vanish. “After twenty or so copies got stolen,” says one librarian, “we just said, ‘Enough is enough.’” Jay is still in the catalog, but the space on the shelf is empty.
It hasn’t stopped the chatter. “It’s on a five-year cycle,” says Carolyn Corry, who knew Alden through her older sister. “Every five years or so, a new batch of kids hears about Alden—about Jay—and they start asking questions. Eventually, they find out I knew him, and they start asking me questions.”
Corry’s own children (now grown) came to her shortly after starting at PGHS. They’d heard the talk and wanted the truth. Corry told them most of it, but skipped the gory details. They’d hear those eventually, she figured. No need to rush.
As for Linda Butler, the electrical inspector’s response was an eye-opener. She sat her kids down and explained things, including the odious rumors. Like Corry, she omitted the explicit parts, but didn’t want her kids to be blindsided. The myth wasn’t fading anytime soon.
Interviewed separately, the three librarians who knew Alden Barrett gave the same basic timeline: In a town of five thousand people, where secrets were hard to keep, no one heard an inkling of talk about Alden and witchcraft until after Jay’s Journal, nearly a decade removed from his suicide. Even Corry, who heard secondhand stories from her older sister (“She told me about going into the girls’ bathroom and seeing the trash cans dancing around; they were bouncing and sort of . . . levitating”), discounts Jay’s Journal and assumes that Sparks just wanted to sell books. Later, Salisbury uses the very same phrase: “I think she just wanted to sell books.”
None of the women ever met—or otherwise spoke with—Beatrice Sparks.
After a few hours, I pack up my notes and say my goodbyes. The women have been exceedingly gracious, answering questions from a total stranger—questions that stir old, half-buried memories.
On my way out, I share a few words with Tammra Salisbury, who had the strongest reaction to the old stories, her tears and laughter sometimes merging. I thank her for talking with me, and just before I leave, she reflects on Page, the teenage volunteer who knows the whole story, sort of.
“Alden’s ‘the high school ghost,’” says Salisbury. “For him to be remembered like that, overshadowing who he really was . . . Alden deserves better than that.”
* Saying, “I’m working on a book about Go Ask Alice” would have been more accurate, but also more confusing. Ditto “I’m writing about Beatrice Sparks,” a woman whose name (even in Mormon circles) often rings no bells. Since the whole saga centered on gossip’s path through insular and/or suburban communities, I felt okay about my intro.
* One of the three, a woman whose brother committed suicide, asked to remain anonymous. I’ve redacted her comments accordingly, editing for clarity when needed.