Beatrice Sparks Was a Bad Person

Go Ask Alice was BIG in my junior high.

Bless our school librarian for making sure we had high-interest schlock to read, because I remember that it took me SO LONG to be able to check the book out for myself, it was so popular. Kids who hadn't ever read for pleasure before checked Go Ask Alice out and tore through it, delighted, I'm sure, by all the discussion--IN WRITING!!--of sex and drugs and more sex and more drugs. 

I vividly remember discussing the book with all of my equally naive junior high friends, firmly taking everything that we read at face value. Yep, that's definitely what LSD feels like! Wow, what vivid and accurate depictions of sex!

And of course we all believed that it was true. I mean, obviously we did! Because here was the book cover!

Book cover image via Timeline

I've actually thought about Go Ask Alice off and on over the years, it was that vivid in my mind, and I've re-read it at least a couple of times. The first time I read it as an adult, I realized what crap it was, of course--inaccurate AND poorly written, with apologies to poor little tween me who loved it so. It's okay to read schlock, small Julie!

And then my turn for Unmask Alice finally came, and I read it in one day during a delightfully dull Sunday, and now I realize that 1) Go Ask Alice, and its popular companion book (that I never read) Jay's Journal, were crucial to lots of other stupid stuff that I experienced in junior high, and 2) the author of these books, Beatrice Sparks, was a monster. Just... a terrible person. Probably a sociopath. Perhaps a psychopath. Or maybe just a really, really, really shit human being.

Tangent: around the beginning of the pandemic (how has it been over 2 years since March 2020!?!? Have I seriously been consistently this stressed out for 29 months?), I became OBSESSED with the podcast You're Wrong About. Eventually I listened to it so much that I got sick of it, so now I only listen to the episodes that are of particular interest to me, but man, for a while I could hear Michael's and Sarah's voices in my head whenever I closed my eyes. My favorite episodes are the Wayfair one, Koko the Gorilla (apologies to the mom friends who then had to listen to me tell them, in turn, that Koko was a lie, Tonya Harding, and stranger danger. Other than Wayfair, their sweet spot for me was their revisiting and debunking some half-remembered and misunderstood something or other from my childhood. 

This episode on D.A.R.E., then, is perfect:

D.A.R.E. was SUCH a big deal in my junior high! The school used up so much of our valuable instruction time with D.A.R.E. pep rallies and motivational speakers and "Don't Do Drugs" campaigns. Some kids wore their D.A.R.E T-shirts around school, looking like absolute tools, and they would sometimes perform anti-drug skits during lunch, because god forbid the eighth-graders be permitted to eat their Lunchables in peace. 

You'll probably be unsurprised to learn that D.A.R.E. was a low-key scam, and it did not have a discernible effect on teenage drug use. How fitting, then, to learn from Unmask Alice that Go Ask Alice, itself a low-key scam, was largely used to justify all of those 1980s misguided War on Drugs tactics. I mean, I guess Beatrice Sparks isn't solely responsible for Black men jailed for life for possessing marijuana, but she's absolutely partly responsible! After all, she pretended to be a teen psychologist and pretended this diary full of absolutely bonkers drug usage hijinks was 100% real and could happen to any teenager. 

I want all those hours I spent being forced to sit in the basketball bleachers and chant "Just Say No" back, Beatrice!

I did NOT read Jay's Journal as a kid, which is a blessing because the animal torture would have upset me. I did check it out at the same time as Unmask Alice, though. I flipped through it instead of reading it, because it's both terribly written and loathsome.

The book purports to be another "true" teenager's journal. Jay's mother gave Sparks this journal so she could do for it what she did for Go Ask Alice. Jay was a typical teenager who got tangled up in Satanism and witchcraft, became possessed by a demon, and committed suicide. The journal chronicles his descent into darkness, and includes details about mind control, levitation, Satanic rituals, and other activities that I seriously cannot believe people actually bought into, except that this book, according to Unmask Alice, was at the forefront of the Satanic Panic.

Here then, happily enough, is a You're Wrong About episode on the Satanic Panic!

My family wasn't terribly devout, so the Satanic Panic only screwed up my life in a few small ways. The Southern Baptist kids kept trying to trick me into going to their churches with them to hear their various youth pastors lecture on Hell and Satan and the Apocalypse. I usually tried to get out of going, but I got Saved SO MANY times because once you were there, letting them Save you was really the most expedient route into getting to leave again. Truly. The whole fucking church would be singing and a bunch of people would be weeping at the altar and your friend, the youth pastor, and usually some other random people would be standing over you giving you the hard sell to offer up your soul to Christ or whatever. Ugh, it was so awkward! I blame my current social anxiety solely on being forcibly Saved inside every Southern Baptist and Pentecostal church in town when I was a child.

The other main way that the Satanic Panic screwed up my youth is that my high school D&D games were irrevocably made worse after my high school boyfriend's uncle came to visit one weekend, saw my boyfriend's epic and enviable collection of Dungeon Master Guides and various other D&D supplements, and convinced his dad to set them on fire in the backyard because they were "Satanic." We had to work from just the one basic Dungeon Master Guide after that, until finally another friend switched us to Star Wars roleplay instead. 

Okay, last weird thing: did anyone else spend hours laying on their stomachs on the living room carpet and watching Do You Know the Muffin Man?

Um, did those young actors' parents know that their children were going to be topless on TV, staging a faux Satanic ritual? How on earth were those kids not traumatized while spitting out their lines in the courtroom scenes? How on earth was *I* not traumatized watching this crap all by myself on a random Saturday afternoon? Seriously, why was nobody supervising me and engaging me in enriching socio-emotional learning or academic activities?

Okay, so playing into the War on Drugs AND the Satanic Panic caused minor annoyances in my childhood, but that's not why Beatrice Sparks was a bad person. She was a bad person because, according to Unmask Alice, she plagiarized Jay's Journal from the real journal of a child who struggled with mental illness and who died by suicide. That child's mother really did give her son's journal to Sparks so she could do with it what she did with Go Ask Alice, mainly raise awareness of childhood mental illness. And Beatrice Sparks turned that child's diary into a sensationalist, violent, disgusting narrative in which the poor kid becomes a Satanist and does terrible things. In her worst move, she took an entry in which the kid wrote about one of his very few genuinely sweet and happy experiences, pretend marrying his girlfriend in front of a statue in the park after a school dance, and she turned it into a Black Marriage scene, in which the couple's friends pour animal blood over the couple's naked bodies and they have sex in front of everyone. Then someone murders a kitten. 

It would be hard to think of a way to further profane that poor kid's precious memory of a time when he felt truly happy and loved. Sparks was a monster.

And to make it worse, Sparks plagiarized so closely that she barely changed any of the names and places in the diary, so much so that everyone from around there who read the book immediately figured out who it was about. And just like me and everyone else in Kimmons Junior High did with Go Ask Alice, everyone from this kid's area believed Jay's Journal completely. They believed that this kid, who'd died only three or four years ago, had been a Satanist. They bullied his siblings. People desecrated his grave. Kids claimed that his ghost was haunting various sites. Check out the saddest Amazon review I've ever seen. 

I read Unmask Alice weeks ago, and I still can't get over how specifically cruel that was. I've told everyone I know about it--twice in some cases! But here's the weird part. Today is October 13, for me. I'm standing writing this at my kitchen counter, finishing up baking the last of a quadruple batch of pumpkin cookies that my teenager and I started this afternoon, low-key watching out the window for my partner to pull up with the teenager coming home from Nutcracker rehearsal (Go, Team Mouse!), because as she hops out of the car, I'm gonna hop in and my partner and I are going to hit the gym while the teenager makes dinner. It's back day AND sheet pan quesadilla night!

So I'm standing here, and I Googled Alden Barrett's name to see if there are any updates now that everyone in his community should know perfectly well that it doesn't make any sense to burn black candles on top of his nice headstone and that obviously nobody ever saw him and Goody Proctor with the devil. I found his Find a Grave listing, which is just heartbreaking because indeed, his headstone is STILL broken, but intriguingly, the blurb also talks about a rock opera that a local Utah band, Grain, had written about him.

Well, you know how I feel about musicals, so now I'm off Googling and Spotifying and YouTubing to see if I can find a recording of this opera. And you are not going to believe what I found. Grain has revamped this rock opera, renamed it Pleasant Grove Rock Opera, and is holding its world premiere tonight.

Right now, in fact! Such a strange coincidence!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!