Tag Archives: Hoaxes

When a lot of you were in the seventh grade, your parents or teachers made you read a book called Go Ask Alice. It’s the collected diary entries of a young, typical Utahan in the 1960’s who is given LSD during a round of the Farm Game at a party with some hip youngsters. From there, she tries pretty much every other drug ever made, is raped three or four times, wanders the street poor and homeless, and eventually is killed by her dealer when she tries to turn her life around. It’s a downward spiral story that got a lot of attention because of how moralistic and conveniently structured the life events described in it seemed to be. Eventually, in the mid-1980’s, two parents came to the compiler of Go Ask Alice, Beatrice Sparks, asking for their son, who struggled with depression and had recently killed himself, to have his diary entries published to commemorate his life. Sparks used only a handful of the boy’s actual writings in her book- the rest were fabricated. The new story she created, Jay’s Journal, told that the boy became depressed because of his loss of Mormon faith, descended into Satanism, and eventually mutilated cattle and killed himself because he believed a demon named Raul was haunting him. This was obviously about as “commemorative” as taking a shit on the kid’s grave, and so the parent’s rightly investigated the author. They found that the “Alice” from the first book never existed, Sparks could not produce any of her diary entries when asked to, and that the US Copyright department showed her authorship of the novel and listed it as a work of fiction. Since this debacle, Dr. Sparks has had a successful career writing other completely made up epistolary stories about troubled youth, tackling issues such as AIDS, teen pregnancy, and gang life, and these new ones basically drop any pretense of truth. One book, Almost Lost: The Story of an Anonymous Teenager’s Life on the Streets literally ends with the diarist beginning therapy with Sparks and turning their life completely around because of it. Go Ask Alice is now considered one of the most blatant but obscure literary hoaxes of the twentieth century, and it goes to show one thing: people don’t usually do a lot of research on what they read or see, even if it’s bullshit. A good recent example is Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel’s two hour long “documentary” Mermaids: The Body Found, which 3.2 million human pairs of eyes watched. And just in case you did not realize this despite the fact that it’s about mermaids, I’ll let you in on a little secret: it’s all a lie.

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