Okay, the title of this book is just a hint of what the book is going to cover. And the title of the book is a lot, which make sense because this book is often a lot. Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson covers exactly what the title suggests.
As a general note and content warning, this book contains extensive discussions of drug addiction and self-harm. One section, in particular, was especially disturbing, prompting me to put the book down and take a break
For those unfamiliar with the “true story” of the book Go Ask Alice is a book from 1971 presented as the diary of a teenage girl who develops a drug addiction and spirals out hard. Pre-teen me read this book in the mid-1990s and didn’t have the critical thinking skills to ask questions about the authorship; instead, I was very affected by the events of the book. While there is no author assigned to the book (or wasn’t to the copy I read) it turns out was Beatrice Sparks, who according to Wikipedia “was a Mormon youth counsellor, author, and serial con artist, known primarily for producing books purporting to be the “real diaries” of troubled teenagers.”
Unmask Alice focuses on Beatrice Sparks and the various diaries she authored, primarily Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal. It also does an interesting job of looking at what was going on in the United States at the time of the various books publications, and how the books fed into general societal insecurities and helped fan the flames of panic. Based on the parts of the book written about Beatrice Sparks I wished the book spent a bit more time on her because I love the story of a con person. I get why it didn’t (from what I could gather it was hard to validate a lot of what Sparks got up to) and I think it was more important to share the true story behind Jay’s Journal, and the young man who served as “inspiration” for it.
While the book does talk about the “real” Alice, or at least a figure who may have been an inspiration, the book spends a fair amount of time on Alden Barrett, whose diaries got …very very rewritten into Jay’s Journal. Alden took his own life, but not as Jay’s Journal would have you believe because he was a practicing Satanist, but because he was a young man with untreated mental health issues. Yes, Jay’s Journal came about right at the right time to lean hard into the satanic panic era.
I was not familiar with Jay’s Journal, but I am glad that I now know about Alden Barrett. I feel restoring his story to him is important. I liked that it showed how his story was taken by Sparks and she just ran with it. Rewriting his life to fit what she wanted to publish, a shocking “true” story about witchcraft and satanism in Utah in an “it could happen to you/your kid” style.
What I again, wish this book spent more time on was how Sparks got away with all this. Yes, this was before we were all connected via the internet and it was easier to pass yourself off as having credentials you didn’t. But the woman made up quotes that she attributed to fictional doctors that were used as blurbs on her “true story” diaries. (Becasue yes, she kept going after Jay and Alice… even writing herself into It Happened to Nancy, appear gin there as a confidant to the young woman who allegedly penned the diary. A young woman who the dairy shares is dying of AIDS, in fact, contracted AIDS after she was date rapped). Red flags were raised along the way, and people did some poking around but it never seemed to go anywhere. Which I get! But for me that is part of the story I wanted to spend more time on.