This project began in January 2015. I was having breakfast with my friend Peter Ames Carlin, a talented and gracious author who probably wrote two books in the time it took me to compose this sentence.
Peter asked what I was working on, and I bluffed something about a book on organized crime. It sounded dull, even to me, but it still beat the truth: I was doing absolutely nothing, and not in the awesome, Office Space sense. My wife and I had recently split—mostly my fault—and I was in a state of dangerous drift.
Driving home from breakfast, I was on mental autopilot (see above statement re: dangerous drift) when I had one of those ridiculous “out of the blue” moments. (I say “ridiculous” because such moments usually sound fake in the retelling, and even when they don’t, they’re basically useless. Knowing that Paul McCartney dreamed the melody to “Yesterday” doesn’t help anyone write better songs; it’s mostly just irritating.)
Still, as I approached Southeast Cesar Chavez Boulevard, I saw a literal blue flash: an arc of bright azure across my field of vision. When it receded, I had the crux: the true story of Go Ask Alice and the woman behind it.*
Six years, two agents, one pandemic, and countless drafts later, I finished writing this book. And now—in theory—you’ve finished reading it, so it’s time to keep my promise and talk about research.
I thought long and hard about whether to include pages (and pages) of citations for every last stat and statement. In the end, I didn’t. Here’s why:
The book’s content falls into three basic categories:
1.Things that are both public and checkable (causes of death, the weather on a given day, Nixon’s Oval Office musings, etc.).
2.Things that aren’t public per se, but are still checkable (e.g., the layout of Quantico’s underground offices circa 1983; the general format of a “worthiness interview”).
3.Things that aren’t public and, for reasons of privacy, aren’t currently checkable. (This mainly applies to Brenda March, Tobi Hudson, and Youth Academy 1970.)
The first two categories comprise most of the book, and arguably don’t need citations; in most cases, a simple web search or phone call will yield the info. Part of this stems from writing a book during COVID, when in-person research abruptly stopped. Mostly, however, it stems from approach: I wanted to write a fast-paced, readable book that stuck to the facts. Gather enough facts, and you have the story.
The third category is the smallest, and that’s not a coincidence. A book about unsourced allegations and unnamed accusers can’t rely on those same techniques, and if I’d faced that problem with the rest of the book, I would have scrapped the whole thing. (Likewise, if Brenda March felt comfortable being identified, there probably wouldn’t be a third category. Understandably, she prefers to remain anonymous, and that outweighs everything else.) As it stands, the book’s other sections are solid enough that the Brenda/Tobi chapters hopefully ring true, cosmetic changes and all. You’ll be the judge of that.
As for the wealth of details (the “how can he possibly know that?” stuff), a lot of it was self-selecting, meaning you don’t see the sections I shortened or removed—sections that lacked evidence or fine-grain specifics.
If you think of this story and all its events—everything from Beatrice Sparks’s birth to the final glimpse of Pleasant Grove—as a movie, then this book is an extensive, immersive recap (or adaptation), with one key distinction: I’m working with damaged film. Some scenes are largely intact, while others exist as only a few scratched frames. Many are missing entirely. Sometimes context helps fill in the gaps, and sometimes all you can do is wonder.
Listing every site and database I used over the past six years is impossible, but a few deserve special mention: Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com, FamilySearch.org, Archive.org, and PublishersWeekly.com. (Classmates.com was a frustrating exercise in visual pain and perhaps the most off-putting website I’ve ever encountered. Not recommended.)
Also: libraries, libraries, libraries. Without libraries and the people who run them, this book wouldn’t exist and my childhood would have been unendurable. Special note goes to the Library of Congress, whose staff did their best to serve three hundred million people (including me) during a pandemic, and the Harold B. Lee Memorial Library at Brigham Young University, whose archives (and general vibe) are second to none.
Gathering five hundred reams of material is pointless if you can’t search it, so FineReader (a computer app that turns image files into searchable documents) was a lifesaver. The same goes for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s site, NOAA.gov, which gives weather records by zip code for most twentieth-century dates.
A lot of this book, and especially the up-close, personal stuff, came from interviews, and technology made those interviews easier, especially once COVID-19 hit. Thanks to the internet, long-distance phone calls no longer carry the risk of bankruptcy, and video calling allows for real-time responses to historical documents. Without those breakthroughs, I would have been sunk.
To answer a few (anticipated) questions:
Q: If Tobi’s parents made her burn Brenda’s letters, how do you know what those letters said?
A: Two big helpings of luck. First, Tobi Hudson wrote a lot of short fiction in high school, and some of her stories drew from real life, including her tumultuous friendship with Brenda.
An important distinction: unlike Beatrice Sparks vis-à-vis Alden Barrett, Tobi worked to shield Brenda’s identity, but it was an iterative process, with each draft of a story changing more details. Fortunately, Tobi was/is something of a pack rat, and those early drafts—while never published—give detailed accounts of the Brenda/Tobi/Youth Academy saga. What’s more, they were written soon after the real-life events, before time (and fallible human memory) could warp them. Tobi’s writing not only corroborated what I’d already heard, but took the story from gray scale to Technicolor. That’s something I never could have planned for, and even now, I boggle at the sheer good fortune of it.
Second, in her quest to understand Brenda’s headspace, Tobi hand-copied certain portions of Brenda’s letters, and some of those excerpts survived the parental purge.
Q: Alden died at sixteen—how do you know his life and/or thoughts?
A: Scott Barrett’s 1996 book, A Place in the Sun, was a massive help. Written over many years and self-published on a modest budget, A Place in the Sun has its rough edges, but in terms of raw info, it was a solid, early guide, and gave a structured look at Alden’s life, especially his final few months. Alden’s writing, his drawings and poetry, his often atrocious spelling, and his fractured, mercurial moods—all are on full display in Scott’s book. Without it, my job would have been much harder, and the road to completion much longer.
Though several of Alden’s friends died young, many are still alive, and were generous with their time and recollections. Others died in middle age, but lived long enough to speak with Scott Barrett. Taken together, these interviews gave insights into Alden’s life and stated beliefs, and those of long-ago comrades. Likewise, many of the quotes in Part Two came from Scott’s own published conversations with Doyle, Marcella, and other key figures; those excerpts added immeasurably to this book, and I am deeply grateful.
Side note: The Pleasant Grove High School yearbook for 1971 (the year Alden died) shows a student named “Richard Emerson.” No, it’s not me. Yes, it weirds me out a little.
Q: How could you know Beatrice Sparks’s thoughts about [whatever]?
A: In terms of events, Beatrice Sparks was—to put it mildly—an unreliable source. (When I spoke with her son, LaVorn Jr., he opened with a disclaimer: “No one knows her story . . . including me.”) In terms of outlook, however, she was far more consistent. In Sparks’s personal letters, in her essays and speeches, and in numerous interviews across several decades, she voiced a fairly stable set of beliefs—about drugs, about religion, about her career/success, and about divisive social questions. (Sparks on the school-busing issue: “People only get burned in a melting pot.”) Though “intractable” is too strong a word, her opinions were deep-set, and a lot of things weren’t up for debate.
Certain statements, especially her aphorisms (e.g., “if you’re not happy, you’re doing something wrong; change it”), came from Sparks’s correspondence with readers, her nonfiction writing, and her classes at Youth Academy. Other specifics came from business documents, sometimes as color commentary: Sparks occasionally put notes in the margins, a final attempt at molding the truth.
Sparks’s first book, Key to Happiness, gave a surprisingly clear window into her thoughts, especially her determination to rise above the past. “If you have any misgivings about your background or your family,” wrote Sparks, “don’t let them stand in the way . . . you are not going to be judged by what your family did or are, but by what you do and are!”
Beatrice Sparks wasn’t alone in modifying her backstory. People tend to paint themselves in the best light possible, and shameful or awkward moments are minimized or reframed. We all do this; it’s part of the human impulse. What’s more, we often do it unconsciously, airbrushing our memories to match our current beliefs and self-image.
We also do it to fill in the gaps, and gaps are unavoidable. Human memory is insanely flawed, and anyone who says different is deluding themselves. Nearly everyone involved in this story has wavered on some point or other, and certain things that should be clear-cut are mystifyingly vague. Alden shot himself in a room adjacent to several other rooms, and the flat-panel walls would have amplified the noise, yet Scott and Elaine Barrett seemingly didn’t hear it. Maybe it was a quirk of the house’s layout, or of the pistol’s small caliber combined with the rainstorm. Maybe it didn’t “sound” like a gunshot, so they heard it but filtered it out. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter, but it’s puzzling all the same.
Likewise, there’s a minor debate about Alden’s suicide note, specifically its final line. By some accounts, it read, “One last request—all my worldly possessions go to Teresa as my wedding present.” At first glance, this seems correct: a reference to Alden and Teresa’s midnight wedding. Scott, however, remembers things differently, and says Alden left everything to John Lundgren, one of several friends engaged to be married. The original note, which Marcella shared with Sparks, went missing some years ago; rather than guess at the answer, I omitted the line, preserving the rest. As with the gunshot acoustics, this doesn’t alter the day’s basic outcome, but it puts another blur in the film.
From October 1969 until his death four decades later, Art Linkletter answered literally thousands of questions about Diane’s suicide. His responses (about the role LSD played, for instance) sometimes shifted with his mood or in response to the interviewer’s own beliefs. When speaking with religious or conservative figures, Linkletter took a stronger tack on enforcement; when speaking with physicians or counselors, he emphasized the need for treatment.
Other contradictions were starker, if more understandable. Most accounts of Diane’s suicide have Art hearing the news from his son Robert. On at least one occasion, however, Art said the call came from his lawyer (who had presumably been contacted by the police). It’s possible that Robert and the lawyer phoned together, or that they made separate calls at around the same time. The evidence suggests it was Robert, and that’s how I wrote it, but all three men are dead, and there’s probably no one left who can say for sure. Such is life, and such is history.
I give these examples for one big reason. There’s a world of difference (to me, at least) between knowing you’ve printed some factual errors and knowingly printing a factual error. The former is painful and nearly unavoidable; the result of countless drafts, revisions, conflicting accounts, delayed corrections/discoveries, and simple human fuckups. The latter is actively wrong and arguably evil—a willful abuse of the reader’s trust.
I’ve undoubtedly made mistakes in this telling. I have to live with that. I also have to live with myself, and except where privacy outweighs exposure, I’ve written nothing in this book that I know to be false.
Moralizing is dangerous for someone with a checkered past; I spent a lot of my life as a jackass radio host, and that doesn’t lead to moderation or middle-ground. Most of my offensive and/or juvenile statements are out there, floating around. They’re not hard to find, and you may or may not take them seriously. Ultimately, this isn’t my story, and until the very end (literally and figuratively), I worked to keep myself out of it. The final stretch, where I talk with the women at the Pleasant Grove Library, required my presence, and that’s only fair. We’re all part of history; only the viewpoint changes.
Speaking of history: two of my benchmarks for accuracy and style (and the blending of one with the other) were Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City (New York: Crown Publishers, 2003) and Nick Bilton’s American Kingpin (New York: Portfolio, 2017). Larson shames me with his meticulous research, and Bilton turns facts into jet-propelled drama. I hate them both, but in the good way.
Finally: a great many people spoke with me for this book. For some, cooperation carried an emotional cost—like grief, or guilt, or the resurgence of long-buried anger. For a few, the cost was arguably higher, and meant confirming or revisiting their own mistakes or misdeeds.
To paraphrase the activist Bryan Stevenson, we are more than our worst transgressions. Whatever their particular path and history, each person I interviewed played a part in telling this story. They are counted.
Thanks for reading . . . and thanks for reading.
—Rick Emerson
Portland, Oregon, USA
* I assume most people experience some version of this. The clinical term is synesthesia, and it’s like augmented reality without the goggles, but mine is usually linked to music; it’s almost never from an idea.
Appendix
Tobi Hudson’s participation certificate for Brigham Young University’s “Youth Academy for Girls,” summer 1970. (Courtesy of Tobi Hudson; Brigham Young University.)
Like most modern libraries, the Library of Congress stores its catalog data in both plain language and a machine-readable code called MARC. In MARC, the thirty-third character of field 008 tags a book as “fiction” (the numeral “1”), “not fiction” (a zero), “poetry” (the letter “p”), and so on. The above catalog entry (for Avon Flare’s 1982 Go Ask Alice paperback) has a “1” for fiction, yet also says “Flare autobiography.” Further down, the “fiction” label reappears. The physical book, meanwhile, says “A Real Diary.”
As of this writing, the catalog entry for Simon & Schuster’s fiftieth-anniversary edition of Go Ask Alice is tagged “0” for “not fiction.” (Courtesy of Library of Congress online catalog, 2021).
A page from Go Ask Alice’s original copyright application, and a perfect example of systemic vagueness. While Section 3 lists “Beatrice M. Sparks” as Alice’s author, it also states that “authors may be editors, compilers, translators, illustrators, etc.” In other words: you’re on your own, kids. (Courtesy of Library of Congress, Copyright Office.)
The original copyright application for Jay’s Journal (also known as “a federal document in which no one shall knowingly make a false representation of material fact”). Section 2, line 1 describes Beatrice Sparks’s contribution as “entire text” and as neither anonymous or pseudonymous. (Courtesy of Library of Congress, Copyright Office.)
From my contract for this book. It stipulates that fact-checking is my responsibility, and that I solemnly swear not to lie. (Courtesy of BenBella Books.)