"Go Ask Alice" is a novel that is market as a diary made into a novel for everybody to enjoy! Ya, I don't think this book is an actual diary written by a fifteeen year old girl throughout her struggle with drugs, and I looked it up on Snopes.com and they agree with me too! A diary is written only for the writers sake. When one writes a diary he or she does not expect anyone else to be reading it because it's supposed to be an account of one's most personal and deep feeling, but this book has great linear progression, a wonderful use of diction, and her style of writing never evolves over the two year period that the narrator supposedly wrote it over. While reading one can see the growth and expansion of her charater as she goes through of all of her experiences, but it doesn't seem that her writing style matures or changes. I know that if I read something that I wrote my freshman year of high school now, it would be much different than my current blog entries (actually just read a blog I made for my algebra II class freshman year, it was pretty hilarious). Then throughout the novel she barely mentions her relationships (both romantic and platonic) other than the fact she has them, but then she goes into heavy detail about her drug trips and apparent need for drugs. It is also never explained how this chick is going from San Francisco to Boston to Oregon and so on, without a drivers lisence or any real means of transportation. Even one night she literally just got high and found hereself in Boston with no explanation. I'm not sure if I buy that. This has many "teachable moments" too. For example the narrator tells a 4 page long story about some girl named Babbie, that just conviently had the moral of how things aren't as bad as they seem. Why would someone put such a long story about somebody else in there own diary though, especially since she never even mentions her again? My favorite mistake in the book is when the narrator says "After all I've just turned 15 and I can't stop life and get off" but she turned 15 eleven months ago according to the date of the diary entry, I don't think any teenager would forget his or her own birthday or age. The one thing that the author did get right was the great insight into the feelings and thoughts of the narrator, but that still doesn't make it a believable diary.
This novel was obviously either heavily edited or frabricated out of the imagination of the "editor" Beatrice Sparks who has written multiple other stories of teen drug abuse simular to this one. The book was  created to teach kids to just say no to drugs and tell the incredably tragic story of an unsespecting teenage girl, and of course to earn the author a good about of money based on its popularity. The whole anonymous authorship seems to just be a kind of gimmick used to help get the story across, add a feeling of realism to the story, and get people interested in the "true" story of an unfortuate girl. However, I don't think this is a truthful story, I do think it is a good one that deffinating holds a reader's interest and I would reccomend it.
I actually did find the Snopes article relly interesting too so heres a link to it : D
http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/askalice.asp