It was interesting to read the history of Go Ask Alice and Beatrice Sparks. I felt that some of the sections were a bit long and could have been cut down (for example, there was a ton about Jay's Journal and everything going on with Satanism at the time).

Very interesting read. I have not read go ask Alice but I was still intrigued by this story. I enjoyed it immensely.

Beatrice Sparks, aka Dr. B (or as I came to call her Dr. BS) was the author of two of the most notorious YA “memoirs” ever written, Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal. Rick Emerson immediately delves into the history of these books and the con artist who wrote them. He beautifully sets the scene of the 1970s and 1980s and the hysterias that these books helped perpetuate (drug/LSD and Satanic, respectively).

This book is divided into two sections. The first half discusses the creation and the after effects of Go Ask Alice. The second half describes Jay’s Journal and the horrific betrayal that occurred in its making.

While this book is non-fiction, it reads like a novel. Emerson writes in a way that often left me in anticipation of the next discovery. I am amazed at the depth of deceit and manipulation that Sparks was able to achieve. Emerson does a great job of laying the facts bare and revealing Sparks as the fraud that she was.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC ecopy of this book from NetGalley. This is my voluntary and honest review.

Unmask Alice by Rick Emerson

Unmask Alice covers the story of Beatrice Sparks… a woman so desperate to become a writer, she fabricates diary excerpts and puts them out as non fiction….

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries is a true story of contagious deception. It stretches from Hollywood to Quantico, and passes through a tiny patch of Utah nicknamed "the fraud capital of America." It's the story of a doomed romance and a vengeful celebrity. Of a lazy press and a public mob. Of two suicidal teenagers, and their exploitation by a literary vampire.

Unmask Alice . . . where truth is stranger than nonfiction.

This was what made me want to read this book so bad!

Go ask Alice was used to push the agenda on drugs during the war on drugs. The father of a young lady who ended up dying because of her life choices, made it his mission in life to vilify the drug LSD instead of blaming the choices his daughter made that led to her death. He needed something or someone to blame.
The second book Jay’s journal, came from a real boy… a real boy who committed suicide but she made his story into a dramatically version of events, making it seem like he was a devil worshipper.
Not only did she lie about being a psychologist, she used people to get what she wanted. She was the worst kind of bottom feeder.
These books helped fuel hysteria in the 70s and 80s. This book was a real eye opener on the dangers propaganda can have on the population. This is a problem we still see today. Politicians and the news feeding media hysteria to get what they needed. This book goes into details of what the president did to get what he wanted and it was never about public safety.
This is a cautionary tale of how you should always be mindful of what you are reading and whether you can take it for facts. You need to think for yourself and do research rather than blindly trusting.
The author did a ton of research and it was well thought out. I really enjoyed the way it held my attention. I actually had no idea about this woman and these books but now I want to know more.
4.5 stars for me!

This was one of those books I knew I just had to read when it popped up on Netgalley. At the same time, I wasn’t expecting much. I mean, how much is there to say about Beatrice Sparks? How much do we even know about her?
As it turns out, there’s plenty to tell, much of it fairly outrageous; not surprisingly, things get darkest when it comes to Jay’s Journal/Alden Barrett.
I was around eleven when I first read Go Ask Alice (basically in prehistoric times); I was young enough and its contents removed enough (both time-wise and culturally) that I thought it both plausible and fascinating, and of course terribly tragic. As a late teen I came across Jay’s Journal, which turned out to be a completely different reading experience – I already was a seasoned horror reader, so the more outrageous aspects of the story definitely appealed to me, while at the same time I couldn’t change the feeling of WTF. Surely this whole thing wasn’t meant to be taken seriously? I mean, cattle mutilations and demonic possession?! Come on! But there it was, this Jay apparently had been an actual person, so it couldn’t all be made up, even though I had a REALLY hard time getting my head around it. For context, I wasn’t living in the US at the time, and the whole Satanic Panic thing was just (very low) noise in the background – some weird questionable idea in a far-off place known for crazy ideas and strange fads, not at all relevant to the time and place I was living in.
With the arrival of the internet I started reading up on Alden Barrett and the true story behind Jay’s Journal, but there was frustratingly little to be found – I tried to get my hands on “A Place In The Sun”, the book by Alden’s brother Scott, but to this day I’m not 100% sure it even exists. Then again, it seems that Mr Emerson did manage to find a copy… and then some.
I would have been happy to finally find out what the real story of Jay’s Journal was; what Unmask Alice does is get to the bottom of that, AND the truly weird character that was Beatrice Sparks. And there’s a dissection of that in retrospect scarily wacky era where Satanism was everywhere, even though I’m not sure if I believe that it was all due to Ms. Sparks. There’s a history of LSD (AT. LENGTH.) and the War on Drugs, and Art Linkletter’s role in both (kind of), and some insights on the publishing world of the sixties and seventies, and Mormonism, and what seems like a 1970s pandemic of teen runaways. There’s even what sounds like a promising lead on who the inspiration for Alice might have been, as in, a real actual person. In short, there’s lots and lots and lots and stuff, and that’s what made this book fascinating and slightly exhausting at the same time, especially since not every aspect of every subject was of interest to me (no interest in drugs whatsoever, so I found the whole LSD bit on the taxing side). I also thought the writing style could be a bit extra at times; I’m not familiar with Mr Emerson, but I think it’s pretty safe to call him opinionated.
What irked me where the thoughts of contemporaneous readers of Alice and Jay, respectively, who get quoted at length and without real context as to how they fit into the author’s general narrative – so there were teenage girls in the early 1970s who saw themselves in Alice and made it known, but do we have to hear their whole life story, especially since none of it is relevant, not even to the author, who lets them drop out of the text right after quoting their anguish and determination? What exactly am I to make of the opinions of ‘70s librarians and book reviewers, quoted in their entirety? I was waiting for the longest time for some (or any) of these people to return to the narrative in some way (surely they’d become editors or politicians or writers or otherwise relevant, I mean why else mention them in the first place?), but no dice.
Another thing that might have been handled better was the way the author inserted himself into the story… which is, not at all. According to Mr Emerson, this was done on purpose, although the reasoning behind this escapes me right now. We only get some insight into the work Mr Emerson put into his project at the very end of the book; as it happens, the absence of any obvious authorial involvement led me to believe that Mr Emerson got the bulk of his insights, as well as all his quotes, from previously published sources, e.g. interviews and such, when in fact he did meet and/or talked to/Face Timed lots and lots of people.
So yes, Unmask Alice can be a bit all over the place, and you might not agree with everything the author has to say (because quite frankly he has a lot to say about a lot of things), but I still absolutely enjoyed finding out about Beatrice Sparks (that lady! My god), and the Alice phenomenon, and the Real Alice, and of course Alden Barrett, whose story, and his family’s, truly broke my heart, and changed the way I look at Jay’s Journal forever.
A big thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review an ARC of this book.

While I wasn't necessarily of the age to read GO ASK ALICE when it first came out, I have distinct memories of reading it (and a few of Sparks' other books) in the early 2000s. This deep dive into how ALICE came to be-- and even more heartbreaking, how JAY'S JOURNAL came to be-- was genuinely fascinating. UNMASK ALICE tells a bunch of different stories, from Sparks' strange biography to the stories of the War on Drugs' most powerful advocates, but I never found my interest flagging or lost the fundamental connection. Super interesting!

I was so excited to read this book because I read "Go Ask Alice" years ago and fell in love with it. I was a little disappointed however when I learned it was fictional unlike their claimed however surprisingly it didn't change my love for the story. This book takes a look at what actually happened behind the life of the author and how it molded her novel. I also found it interesting that a book that had as much drama and uprising behind it could still be as popular today as it was back when it was causing all of the problems. I think it helps show how a person should not believe everything that they read even if they are in print and to take things with a grain of salt because everything published even if it says its truth might not be that at all. This was a very well written book that I think everyone should check out. Very interesting read and I'm very glad that I got the chance to check it out.

Incredibly interesting read. I read both Go Ask Alice & Jay’s Journal in high school & I fell for them! I believed they were real.. with a few questions but still always believed these were true stories. When I seen this available to read on NetGalley I had to immediately download it!
What an eye opening book on how easily we can be lied to & manipulated & so many of us, especially as children/young adults, will eat it up as truth.
If you’ve read either of the books I mentioned & truly believed they were real published diaries/journals.. read this, it’ll blow your mind.

I could not put this book down, even with its annoying formatting issues (common for a Kindle ARC). I have never read Ask Alice but have always been interested in the Satanic Panic. You can absolutely read and enjoy this book without reading Ask Alice.

You can tell this book is Rick Emerson's passion project and he is not afraid to make it personal. Although his bias wit could rub some the wrong way, it echoed my own thoughts while reading about a self-righteous writer manipulating a mourning family for her own monetary gain.

Rick tells this story within the context of the Satanic Panic and War on Drugs, which he explains thoroughly and with such fervor. I also enjoyed reading about this research and editorial process, explaining his own positionality as a researcher.

Thank you NetGalley and BenBella Books for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Unmask Alice excels as a meaningful corrective in both restoring Alden Barrett's legacy & shattering Beatrice Sparks', although I'm not sure I'd throw the baby out with the bathwater on ol Bea just yet. Rick Emerson is justifiably harsh on her work concocting an early satanic panic tale out of Alden Barrett's journals, diving into the devastation it wreaked on his family in the aftermath of his suicide, but I do think Go Ask Alice, Jay's Journal, and the remainder of her lesser known books hold sociological importance, functioning as a sort of corollary to afterschool specials. I also won't lie I love a grifter con artist, A pretty compelling read!

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher BenBella Books for an advanced copy of this historical and biographical account of an author and her lies.

I was a lucky reader as a child being able to eschew a lot of books that parents and educators pushed on kids, at least that is what I tell myself. In reality I was a nerd, before nerds were cool, and considered probably not worth the effort to warn me of the dangers of drugs, Satan or anything the cool kids were doing. Not until I started working in bookstores did I hear about Go Ask Alice and if I remember correctly, we kept it in two spots fiction and parenting because of its contents. And those contents are a lie. Rick Emerson in his book Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries documents the making of Go Ask Alice and it's just as problematic Jay's Journal which muddied the waters for both parents and teenagers and led to the ruining of many lives and reputations.

Beatrice Sparks is probably the best known unknown author in publishing. With almost 5 million copies of her book in print, she was the writer that brought the truth about LSD and what could happen to an innocent young girl, right in the heart of America. White girl, by the way. Using the real life story of Art Linkletter's daughter death from overdose, Sparks wrote a clumsy, awkward book that probably wouldn't have been a good afterschool special, but hit at the right time when America was going through a lot of problems, youth in revolt being one of them. Sparks continued to steal by using a real diary of a boy who committed suicide, writing a book from his view, without giving credit, of financial payments. To make the book sell, she added Satan worshipping, sacrifices, and a whole raft of bad tropes to sell her book. This of course led to the Satanic Panic of the eighties, destroying numerous lives, occupations and trust between parents and children.

Emerson does a good job of piecing together the story and biography of Beatrice Sparks, which could not have been easy considering the amount she made up about herself. Lying and deceiving came easy to her, and it seems she had not guilt over how she came to success or the lives that she left behind, ruined and destroyed. The book is unlike Go Ask Alive not overwritten but written in a nice clear reportorial style, that is deeply sourced and footnoted. Emerson has done a very good job, laying blame where it should, giving life to those who stories were stolen from, and shaming publishers and industry types who looked to the money and not what the books were about or what they might do.

Recommended for people who read these books and said, hey wait a minute, and for educators who should do a little research to find out what these books are and why assigning them is a bad idea. I still see this on summer reading lists for a lot of schools, and while I understand republicans are banning books right and well maybe left and left is better, books like these do not belong on any assigned reading. They are anachronisms of a different age, but since this country seems to going back to the Puritan age, maybe this books will still be read.

Wow wow wow this book had me all in my feeling. I had no idea about a lot of this stuff. It’ was an awesome but also livd read.

This was a very intriguing book, I may be one of the few who has never read Go Ask Alice though (I could never get into it.) Since I never read the book this is about I learned a lot.

Informative, Eye Opening, and Fascinating.

Unmask Alice by Rick Emerson is the non-fictional exposure of the truth behind the diaries written by Beatrice Sparks. Go Ask Alice by anonymous aka Beatrice Sparks is a YA lit legend and was even made into a film in the 70s. I remember reading this in high school and being blown away by the story I thought to be true. Unmask Alice does exactly what the title states, and this will leave fans of Go Ask Alice devastated and disgusted. Many fascinating topics of the 70-80s are discussed such as yellow journalism, the war on drugs, the satanic panic, Mormon culture, the troubled teen industry, and media manipulation. Although being very informative, this book was never boring. Every piece of information had a part in this investigation. Reading this has furthered my resolve to fact check and to not believe everything I read. This book took years of research and is written eloquently without bias. I strongly recommend this to readers of Go Ask Alice and the anonymous diaries. Go Ask Alice and Jay's Journal are fraudulent and massive contributors to yellow journalism and the satanic panic. I plead with you to read this for the families and reputations ruined by Beatrice Sparks.

This book is amazing. One of the best books I've ever read. It traces the beginning of the Satanic Panic back to the original seed, sparing nothing. It was genuinely upsetting, especially when we learned that there were no repercussions for Beatrice Sparks's lies.

Fascinating nonfiction novel detailing the background of the book Go Ask Alice, I’d never read it but I knew of it and the general guess that it was fake, I went through this book so fast because it was informative, funny and handled the story with the respect it needed

Wow. I learned SO MUCH reading this book and I am so glad I got the chance to. I read Go Ask Alice when I was in high school and the story totally blew my mind - it also never occurred to me it maybe wasn't a real story. I had no idea of all the controversy and mania surrounding this book and the author. It was a very eye opening read that I really hope others are able to read and learn from as well. This book is housed in the Young Adult Fiction section of my library which I am glad for. It definitely serves a purpose in YA literature but by no means should be considered the be all end all of its' kind. Unmask Alice truly showed that.

As one of the multitude of people who was a teenager when Go Ask Alice was at its most popular, I was eager to read about the truth of this book's origins. While I had heard rumors that Go Ask Alice wasn't a genuine teenager's dairy, I didn't appreciate the level of deception and greed for glory that was involved. Unmask Alice explains how Go Ask Alice came into being (Who would have thought Art Linkletter played a role?) in addition to the motivations of the author and those who promoted the story as unvarnished truth. Unmask Alice is an excellent read for anyone interested in US history during the 1970s through the 1990s as the author explains how social fears lead to the creation and unquestioning acceptance of Go Ask Alice, as well as other titles by the author.

I grew up with my mother talking about Go Ask Alice as a cautionary tale, warning me about the dangers of drugs as though by means of some higher power. It was impossible for her to believe in that book any more, and I never read it because her constant regurgitation of its contents made it unnecessary.

Reading this book was not only enlightening for someone who just willed Go Ask Alice and all it’s contents out of their minds (or I guess also has never read it, but it was funny, engaging, and I couldn’t help but consume it.

This was a rabbit hole I thoroughly enjoyed, and I will be putting Rick Emerson on my autobuy authors list.

Thank you to NetGalley for my eARC.

If you’re of a certain age like me, you likely read Go Ask Alice when you were a teenager. This book purported to be the real diary of a real teenager who fell victim to drugs and who ultimately died due to her addiction. This book used to be everywhere; I’m not sure I knew of many people who didn’t read it. I was probably around 12 when I first read it; I don’t remember too much of my reactions to it, but I’ve always been aware of its prevalence in American literary and pop culture. So when I saw Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson (BenBella Books, 2022) up for offer on NetGalley, I. Was. IN. As someone who had looked into the story of the woman behind Alice before, I knew this book was going make some waves. And now, having read it, I’m even more certain that this book is going to be huge.
In the 1970s, the war on drugs began to rage, and parents were terrified. What could they do? How could they even begin to talk to their children about the dangers of drugs and how easily their lives could be ruined? Suddenly, a book appeared on the scene that answered all their questions: a diary, written by a real-life teenager, whose life was destroyed and ultimately ended by drugs. Teenagers saw themselves in it. Adults saw their children in it. Go Ask Alice was impossible to keep on the shelves (whether due to selling out or due to panicked legislators banning it), but it opened pathways to communication between parents and children.
The only problem: it wasn’t true. None of it was. Go Ask Alice was the creation of a con artist, a Utah housewife named Beatrice Sparks who claimed to be a psychotherapist who worked with teenagers, but who, in reality, had been desperately trying to reinvent herself for years. And while her lies about young Alice may have lead to some positives, her next offering, Jay’s Journal, quite literally destroyed lives in a multitude of ways.
Rick Emerson has penned a well-researched eye-opener about a cultural icon whose effects are still being felt today, both the positives and the negatives. Beatrice Sparks was a scammer of the highest order, in multitudes of ways that would be much easier to verify these days, but back in the 70s, information wasn’t quite so easy to come by. Her religious housewife façade allowed her to ooze through the cracks and cause incredible harm to grieving families, along with setting the stage for what would eventually become the Satanic Panic of the 80s (and which would ultimately lead to people wrongfully convicted of various crimes and spending decades of their lives in prison). With humor, pathos, and empathy, Rick Emerson tells the story of a book that so many of us grew up with, but about which we never really knew the truth.
Whew. This is an absolute page-turner, and an incredible story. I absolutely flew through this book, because the story spreads so far and wide, and I was absolutely incredulous that one woman’s scamming had so many devastating consequences. I hadn’t known that Art Linkletter’s daughter’s suicide had set the stage for Alice to be published in the first place; I had no idea that Jay’s Journal (which I read in 2005 and immediately pinpointed as a whole entire load of horse dung) set the Satanic Panic into motion (the story behind this book is absolutely heartbreaking). It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Beatrice Sparks had some sort of diagnosable condition, such as narcissism or sociopathy; she had absolutely zero empathy and hurt people with wild abandon. Monsters come in all shapes and sizes.
I hope to see more from Rick Emerson in the future. Beatrice Sparks’s story is both horrifying and fascinating, and his voice absolutely added to my enjoyment of this book. And this is the third book I’ve read in the past few years from BenBella Books that I’ve really enjoyed. They’re definitely a publisher I’m going to have to keep my eye on!