You're Wrong About - Go Ask Alice Part 3 with Rick Emerson and Carmen Maria Machado

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

Sarah and Carmen complete their epic trilogy by meeting Rick Emerson on the edge of Mount Doom to discuss his book, Unmask Alice, and some of the story behind the diary that has captivated America—and informed its drug policy—for half a century. Digressions include multi-level marketing, Oceans Eleven, the Great Salt Lake. You can hear Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Here's where to find Rick and his book Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries:WebsiteHere's where to find Carmen:WebsiteSupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBonus Episodes on Apple PodcastsDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://carmenmariamachado.com/http://www.rickemerson.com/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttp://apple.co/ywahttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

Welcome to Your Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. Welcome to Go Ask Alice, Endgame. With me today is our friend Carmen Maria Machado, and with us also is super secret guest, Rick Emerson, the author of Unmask Alice. LSD, Satanic Panic, and the imposter behind the world's most notorious diaries. If you want to hear some bonus episodes from Your Wrong About, you can go to patreon.com slash your wrong about and hear them there. You can hear them on Apple subscriptions, or you can go see one-fifth of Maverick.

Okay, it's time for the conclusion to our story. I hope you enjoy it. I hope that solving mysteries always makes you feel like there are just 100 more mysteries out there for you. Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast for sadistic switch hitters and those who love them. With me today is Carmen Maria Machado, and our secret exciting mystery guest, stepping out from behind the crushed velvet curtain, Rick Emerson, author of Unmask Alice.

Hello, Carmen. Hello, Rick. Hello. Howdy, howdy. Hi. So, Rick, tell us about your book. I bet it has a subtitle. The subtitle because all books now must have subtitles that are four dozen words long.

The full title of the book is Unmask Alice, LSD, Satanic Panic, and the imposter behind the world's most notorious diaries. Can I just say here are my three favorite things, LSD, the Satanic Panic, and imposters. That's it. What do you want? Have I got the book for you? And I feel like this book is about like many slices of American history. It's like this cross-section of mid-20th century America, or mid-to-late really, that we get

by following the Go Ask Alice story. It's like a long, thin slice of pork belly. If you follow Go Ask Alice, it's going to take you through several decades of American history, several moral panics and quasi-social breakdowns, and a whole cast of just unbelievable characters and events, all of which are all the more astounding for really existing and having happened. Yes. So here's what I'm going to do.

Carmen Marie Machado, noted public intellectual, brilliant author who I forced to read Trash with me because you're a Philadelphia Trash raccoon, just like me. I'm going to ask an opening question, and then I want you to try and get as many questions as you can answered. Fantastic. So, first question, is this book a true story written by a real teenage girl who really died? Well, I mean, it really is, if nothing else, intentional or not, it's one of the most brilliant

marketing moves, certainly in literature and certainly in young adult literature. It's sort of like that prize in the box of cracker checks, which is like, well, how can you get kids of every era, no matter what else is on offer, to pay, you know, 5,000 percent markup for what is basically stale caramel corn? It's like, well, you put a prize in there, but they won't know what it is until it'll be a mystery. And it's almost two questions in one, because on the one hand, it's, is this book real? Is the diary authentic?

And then there's a secondary question, which is, well, leaving aside the issue of the diary's authenticity, did this girl, did Alice really exist? Leaving aside the question of Alice's authenticity, whole chunks of the diary, go ask Alice, of the book are just undeniably false. There's just no way around that. There's a lot of this stuff that probably a lot of people noticed on the first reading that it took me many, many readings to eventually catch on to, like, you guys did a great job of talking about this in the last episode, this sort of reverse drug escalation that

she goes on where she starts with LSD and then by the end is basically just shooting morphine into her eyeballs. And then finally says, now I should try this marijuana that the kids seem to be all about. I mean, it probably ranked false to a lot of people at the beginning. It took me a while to catch on to that or the fact that the diary's not even really consistent with itself. So for example, at the beginning, there's this editor's note that says, you know, names, dates, places and certain events have been changed in accordance with the wishes of those

involved, which is both overwritten and hard to deconstruct, but which essentially means we've changed some things for privacy. And yet there are all of these names that are just redacted when you could have changed them. So there's an example where she says, well, I met Fawn Blank at the store today and it's like, well, hang on, are we redacting names? Are we changing names? And if we're doing one, why are we doing the other?

So there's that leaving that aside, the timeline just doesn't work. Even if you make allowances for changing the dates and some of the events for privacy, there is just no practical way that certain things line up with reality. So Beatrice Sparks, who presented herself as the editor of this book, she was consistently inconsistent about a lot of things, her books, her background, her education, her training, and that extends to Go Ask Alice, you know, sometimes there was one diary, sometimes there was two, sometimes Alice died three weeks later, sometimes Alice died six months later. It seemed to change depending on what day she told the story.

But there was one thing that was fairly solid when she told this backstory. It was that she met Alice, the real Alice at a Christian Youth Conference in the summer of 1970. So for reasons I get into in the book, that immediately gives us a six week window. She had to have met Alice between June 15th and July 31st. And that in and of itself essentially dismantles the entire timeline. For starters, the diary doesn't mention a Christian youth camp or anything remotely resembling that.

Unless her parents letting her travel again, it's like, well, you've just had this psychotic break and most of your hair is missing and, you know, you're covered in gouges. Have fun. And your fingers are like hamburger or whatever. Exactly. I mean, also every time you leave the house, you seem to run away or end up with the worst people imaginable. So good day to you.

Just enjoy your trip to, you know, the Christian Youth Conference. Butterflies are free. I've been to Christian Youth Conferences. Some stuff happens there. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. So it doesn't really scan as they say, even if you assume that the meltdown happened after

the Christian Youth Camp. In other words, so Beatrice Barks meets the real Alice at a Christian Youth Camp and then the meltdown happens sometimes later. That also doesn't work because it doesn't leave time for everything that followed, including, you know, a month in the hospital. And at one point she makes a reference to the only reference that Alice herself makes to anything happening at, because this Christian Youth Camp was supposedly at a college campus. The only reference to that that Alice actually makes is when she talks about perhaps taking

summer classes at the local college the following year. So you know, the timeline just doesn't work, which is something that happens again and again in the other eight diaries that Beatrice Barks somehow discovered. Found. Just under a manual. Just the thing about troubled, dead teenagers' diaries is that you can find them just all over the place because on bus stops and in the bookstore and at the supermarket. It does seem to be the case that people who find one miraculous thing then just keep finding

miraculous things. Right? Like fossils? Yeah. Exactly. On a more basic level, some of the language just points to a problem. You know, there are certain phrases in Go Ask Alice that repeat word for word nearly in later books.

So at one point Alice is talking about a girl named Doris and she says, well, since then she's hopped into bed with anybody who would turn down the covers. A lot of maids. Exactly. And in Beatrice Barks' next book, a character says, as I wrote this down, a character talks about hopping from bed to bed with anyone who would turn down the covers. So it's very nearly the same phrase in Go Ask Alice. There's a May entry where Alice says, it's a good thing most people bleed on the inside

or this would really be a gory blood smeared earth. In Sparks' next book, a character says, depression only makes you bleed on the inside. Maybe that's a good thing because it would be a pretty slippery, red, gory, bloody world. Oh my God. So this happens throughout her writing slash editing career. There's actually one phrase. The phrase is, bad thoughts are like birds. You can't keep them from flying overhead, but you can keep them from making nests in

your hair, which I think we can all agree is sage advice. Oh, you can't. It's actually such sage advice that that phrase turns up in three different diaries edited by Beatrice Sparks and almost exactly the same word. I don't want to get too snarky about this right out of the game, but I will say that we'll get too snarky later because this is, you know, on some level, a kind of horrific story. There's a lot of really unpleasant aspects to this. So I didn't want to be too cavalier about it.

But I did in an early draft. I had this Beatrice Sparks drinking game. Please care it. Well, so this part is germane to our conversation right here because one of the rules was drink every time someone slaps nests any SS on the end of a word where it doesn't belong. Oh, that's so much drinking. Yeah. So I can go ask Alice is blondness, exoticness, delectableness. One of her later books has, you know, absoluteness, amazingness.

I believe there's a point in one of her later books where character talks about Idaho. It might be Montana, but I think it's Idaho. And he says, I just can't wait to see the rolling this Idaho. So just these two areas. That's great. Language overlaps and the timeline kind of negate the idea that we're dealing with, you know, an untrammeled diary. What if it's a Dalai Lama type situation and the same team keeps being born again

and again into new bodies? We don't know. Well, this is just so funny to me because, you know, as like a writer, I think a lot about, like, you know, how if you read all of my stuff, you'd be like, oh, like, here are all Carmen's bad habits. Like they are or whatever, or ticks or like, you know, linguistic tendencies. Like, you're just going to, this is how you know, right? It's like, you can look at the text and be like, oh, she does this kind of over

and over again, which is like normal for a writer to do. It's just funny to imagine it with like the one time it's like actually kind of a serious problem is when you're allegedly editing a bunch of different texts by different people and they just all are like exactly the same bro style. Yeah, I mean, somebody this is years ago. This is like a mid 90s reference, but a guy used to live with. He's talking about whatever the new Kevin Smith film was at that point. And he said, he said, you know, it's like this movie is amusing and all,

but he said the problem is all these characters are just Kevin Smith with a thesaurus and there's a little bit of that dynamic that happens here, too. That's true, which is often quite enjoyable. But, you know, yeah, I guess the moral is that, like, if you're going to pretend to have found diaries by multiple teens, maybe you have to be more creative, you know, or not possible. Or just don't do it. That's the other option.

And most of us are not doing that. So good job, everybody. It also doesn't seem to have been much of a of a hurdle for agents, editors, publishers, journalists, or most of the people who were responsible for getting these books into, you know, because it's not a one person operation. This is, you know, not a self publishing gig. So there were a lot of people who looked and like, good enough, stamp and just send it on out. There's so many interesting questions in that part of the equation.

Because, yeah, of course, it takes a whole team of people to bring a book into the world. But, Carmen, I want to turn it over to you, because I'm curious myself about, like, what your most burning questions are, having just finished our fascinated journey through the dark ride of this journal. I guess it's a real question of what was the path to publication of this book? Like, were they like, ah, yes, a teenager's diary? Or were they all just sort of like, you know, it's like, as a teen, it felt realistic as an adult human.

I'm reading it being like, this is so obviously not real. Like, were people having those thoughts in whatever? What was yours published? Seventy two, seventy one, September, seventy one, seventy one. OK, yeah, like in seventy one, were people like, this is bullshit? Or were did people buy it? Like, what was the publication process? Like, if we know and like, were people just like, yeah, this seems real.

Or were they just like, you know, doing that cynical publishing thing of just like, yeah, pushing it along? So it's interesting if you go on Amazon. I mean, the last time I checked, it was like two or three days ago, I went on Amazon and I was checking just to see, you know, Alice's stats. Because you can see not only where it's selling overall, but you can see what categories it's selling best in. Oh, sure. You know, so it's overall number one hundred and sixty thousand

of whatever of all the books they sell. But then Amazon is a book category called Young People, Adults, Facts of Life. And then the subcategory is drug and alcohol abuse. And I think go ask Alice as of this week was number three in that category in terms of current sellers. So helpful, such a helpful book. What I love about it is that it gives so much real world advice for how to deal with addiction as a teenager,

which is that you're just going to fucking die no matter what you do. And that's not a cumulative sales figure. That's the real time as of this week sales figure. And if you look at the reviews of Go Ask Alice right now, there's certainly no uniformity of opinion in terms of is this real, is this not? I would say that so working backward, I would say that right now, you know, there's about a 50 50 split in terms of just a general public and how they view it, maybe 60 40 in terms of it being a hoax or being anti drug propaganda.

If you go back to when it was released, it was absolutely viewed. I mean, almost across the board as being absolutely authentic. I mean, there were a few outliers, but the outliers really were the exception that proved the rule, I would say 90 percent of media reviews. In other words, people who are reviewing this either in a newspaper or magazine or on television treated it as absolutely authentic. And to some degree, that becomes I think it's a self perpetuating thing because, you know, there was three networks for if you count a PBS.

There was two news weeklies and then there was whatever your local paper was. But your local paper also pulled a lot of things from the New York Times and from the Associated Press and UPI. So there were a lot of outlets, but very few main channels feeding those outlets. So conventional wisdom solidified pretty quickly and also just on a more basic level, not to be too sweepingly historic about this. But, you know, it was pre so many of the things that I think calcified the idea of media and government

and especially government and media together lying to you. I mean, it was pre Watergate. It was free so many of these scandals and before so much of the worst coverups about things like Vietnam had come out. And even now, if you talk to people about Go Ask Alice or any book like this, you know, one of the things they will say, I mean, my mother actually said this and my mother is nobody's fool, but she said, you know, I thought they couldn't say it if it wasn't true. Yeah, it says real.

How could they say that if it's not real? That's truly what I believed about books as a kid. Yeah, that really brings me back to that. And I really it's funny because I'm so disabused of that now. And I spend so much time thinking about hoax nonfiction. But like, yeah, I believed and I believe that books have the power to just have truth in them almost all of the time. I mean, one of the things I think people don't realize is how flimsy

publishing's apparatus is and I guess always has been for ensuring truth. Because my understanding now is that if you write a nonfiction book, you basically have to have it independently fact checked. Like your publisher doesn't provide a fact checker, which is incredible to me. Like that's unbelievable. It is one of the things. So I have a chapter called Don't believe the truth, which is all about this sort of thing.

Because going into this, I mean, I had, you know, some knowledge. I mean, I'd written a book before, but it was definitely different than this. And I'm certainly not a publishing veteran. So I still had a lot of ideas about, you know, again, it's the well, there must be somebody somewhere who looks at this and says, no, no, no, this has to be labeled blank or this fails the test to be labeled nonfiction or memoir or whatever. But the thing I learned is that, you know, in the United States,

you know, where most products, nearly anything you buy, I mean, advertising can be somewhat deceptive and it can be somewhat misleading. But when you go buy a can of soup, you know, I'm not saying there are no bad actors out there, but when you buy a can of soup, essentially that can of soup has to tell you what's really in it. I mean, now sometimes they'll mask it with sort of, you know, made up verbiage or they'll have like some gigantic long chemical name that you don't really understand.

It's just horse hooves or it's, you know, it's like when you buy a twinkie and it says cellulose fiber and you're like, is how is that different from sawdust? You know, but essentially the product has to tell you what it contains. And books are a towering exception because the publishing industry essentially runs on an honor system. And the thing about honor systems is honor systems only govern people who don't need it. I mean, if you're going to follow an honor system, guess what? You don't need the honor system.

And there's also just the economics of it, which is that the publishing industry has always run on really thin margins, especially now. And so when you write a book and you submit a book, I actually talked to one of her editors later in her career, and it took me quite a long time to get her to finally just flat out say like she was her own fact checker. I mean, that's just how we go with things. And so when people wonder, how does this keep happening? How do memoirs keep coming out?

And then they turn out to be mostly or completely fabricated. That's why it's because there's no regulation and no apparatus in place to control it, and there's not much motive because it doesn't seem to have much impact. Yeah, it's like, why do we keep having white color crime? It's like, well, because nobody gets punished for it. And when they do and it's the same with publishing, we're like, occasionally there'll be a famous hoax memoir and you have to go get scolded by Oprah. But it happens so rarely and so relatively meaninglessly that like, who cares?

And even in that case, so in the case of James Fry and a million little pieces, which is probably the case that people know the most. If you look at the proportionality of that scolding, I mean, I'm certainly not trying to exonerate or exempt James Fry from this because he's the one who wrote it and turned it in and said, you know, but by all accounts, first of all, he submitted it as a novel to begin with. Right. And so he said, hey, here's this thing. Here's this thing that kind of draws my life, but is basically fiction.

And they're like, fiction. Why are the paragraphs so short? God damn it. I did not know this. This is this is news to me. I mean, I knew that it was like a hoax, but I didn't realize that they had submitted it as fiction. And what is the publisher like pressured him into just like. So starting around 1991 with the novel with the with the memoir,

actually, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, that is when the memoir explosion. I mean, if you look at a pie chart of publishing memoirs really, really over the last 30 years have become an increasingly large part. It's just become whether it's a phase or a trend or just a natural direction of the way the publishing goes. Memoirs really started selling like gangbusters. And so they were like, you know, you know what people love? They love those memoirs. What do we just novel? No.

How about a memoir by James Fry? So if you look at what happened there, James Fry submitted this book, but there's a long list of people, as with Go Ask Alice, who had to sign off on I mean, a book passes through dozens of hands between the time somebody turns it in and the time it hits the shelves. And he received a lot of that scolding. His editor, Nantalease, got some of it, although she was decidedly unrepentant about the entire thing.

But there was essentially no blowback for his publisher. And in other words, James Fry took the brunt of that punishment. And I can't really disagree with that at the same time. The people who are ultimately responsible for putting it on the shelves are the ones you know, because the public doesn't, you know, when I go to buy a book, I don't really care who the publisher is for the most part. It doesn't really matter to me. So the author is the one who kind of gets tagged with that.

The likelihood of an author doing that twice or three times in a row is pretty low. The likelihood of a publisher doing it again is really high. And so we're holding the wrong people accountable. I have so many feelings that I cannot say on this podcast about like publishing, acting badly and like authors taking the brunt of the punishment. Not even I mean, in the case of things like, you know, James Fry, et cetera, et cetera, but also like, I feel like I've seen it with other situations as well,

where like, yeah, publishers kind of like skirt by and just like do it again and again and again. And like, yeah, certain authors just get like burned so bad, they just are never heard from again or whatever, you know. So this is this is not surprising to me at all. And publishers are usually indemnified by contract as well. You know, it's usually in the deal in the paperwork between an author and a publisher. I mean, the publisher essentially says like, hey, if it turns out that this is a hoax, like it's all on you.

It is like white color crime. It's like, oh, it's interesting that this trader at this famously cut throat hedge fund decided to like indulge in some corporate espionage. I wonder why he did that. And it's like, well, for his boss and for money and to not get fired. That's why. Yes. Well, then OK, so then my follow up question of that is like, has Beatrice Sparks ever like admitted to this being a hoax?

I'm assuming not, right? Or like, what is her relate? I mean, is she also is she alive? I don't even know she is. She is no longer with us. OK, OK. And has she ever like admitted to it, said anything publicly about it? Sort of the opposite. And when I say sort of, I mean, decidedly the opposite. Just like dug in and didn't know. Well, as we've learned like a tortoise, I mean, I try not to be a person

who just ties everything back to the event of the last six years. But hard not to as I think we have learned again and again. I mean, as the author, Max Brooks, once said, you know, Americans are great at not learning lessons and, you know, but in the last few years, we've seen that just strategically speaking, just in terms of pure tactics, the best approach is just never apologize, never explain and just double down because that seems to work. And I feel like there's this sort of villainous Malcolm McLaren version of me

in some alternate reality where I'm like a crisis manager for people that have just been caught lying about things because, you know, for example, you know, I remember when Lance Armstrong finally copped to, you know, blood doping or whatever it was he was doing. And he sort of and he finally went on Oprah and said, and, you know, I remember watching that and just thinking like, you are such a fool because it's like 20 percent of this country thinks we never went to the moon. And, you know, people are like, well, the science proves it.

I'm like, look around this country. Does it seem like we're a group of people that really like embrace science wholeheartedly? So if he had just stuck to his guns, there would have been some core of people that never would have abandoned Lance Armstrong, especially against the French. I mean, let's be honest. I mean, there's some section of America that would have been like, I'm not trusting the French, I'll trust this guy.

Right, right. We hate the French. We're going to craft singles until the day we die. So she, as time went on, really just became more and more invested in this. And I should say for the record, you know, I'm not trying to diagnose anybody, but it does seem like it might have been Aristotle who said the thing about, you know, what you pretend to be, you will eventually become. So you have to choose your mask wisely. And if you tell that story of meeting Alice at a Christian youth camp

and then she tragically dies and you get this diary and it's on scraps of paper in the backs of grocery bags or whatever. It's Carmen's favorite part. That is my favorite part, honestly. If you tell that story again and again, and especially if the New York Times embraces it and repeats it as gospel. You know, after a while, that starts to be a thing that sounds real even to yourself.

And so I guess that's a long way of saying that no, it really was quite the opposite that she sort of dug in further on that. So then I guess my next question. And again, I'm so excited for this book when Sarah told me that you were the secret guest and that you would read this whole book. I got so excited because there's nothing more than I love than like a big specific book about like a weird thing that I'm obsessed with. So I'm just like, I'm very excited for this book, by the way.

Glad to hear that. I guess I'm also sort of wondering just reading it with a critical eye. I feel like it's pretty easy to discern like moments where you can tell that there's like something since it's all it's all allegedly real. So like it's reflecting something interesting about the author, who is, again, like not this young girl. But like I kept thinking, OK, so the drug stuff, like she's clearly never done a drug in her life has no sense of like

the inner workings of like drug culture or anything like right. And that seems pretty obvious to me. But I was shocked by the amount of like gay stuff in this book and like not just the like homosexuality is shortcut to Satanism, like homophobic, gay panic stuff, but like actual moments of like same sex attraction that was clearly confusing and complicated, like complicating her life and like was confusing her. And we both just kept I feel like the whole time we've been like doing this

podcast there and I like we just kept every moment we're just like, gay, gay, gay. Like there's so much gay stuff in this book. So yeah, like, do we know like what Beatrice's relationship with Gainis was? What's she queer? Do we know like I just feel like there's I mean, and maybe we don't. I don't know. Anyway, so that was that's my like big question, honestly. Well, and that is it is a distressingly common theme in the books that she, depending on one's view, you know, wrote or edited.

I mean, that does that is one of the many sort of horrible threads that runs throughout her catalogue. This is where knowing about Beatrice Parks really does help bring some things into focus, because even more than most Christian faiths in Latter Day Saints do really seem to have a conflicted and, you know, complicated fixation on sex. You know, the church full name, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which most people call Mormons or in Utah, actually,

the common term is LDS. But as I say, at one point, I mentioned LSD like 5,000 times in this book. So that seems like a recipe for hilarious confusion. But the church teaches that and I have this quote here, because this is a thing that they say repeatedly. The church teaches that sexual purity is youth's most precious possession. And this is the part that you can lay a lot of trouble with the church's doorstep for this, that a young person is, quote,

better, dead and clean than alive and unclean. And that's not just premarital sex. I mean, that's obviously same sex activity. That is even masturbation. And, you know, one of the ways that and I talk about this in a later section of the book, one of the ways they reinforce this, you know, purity is something called a worriedness interview. And I want to say for the record, I'm not singling out Latter Day Saints

just out of malice. I mean, it's just this book is rooted in Utah County to a large part and Utah and in that culture. So that hence the focus. But they do this thing called a worthiness interview, which is something that's required to take part in temple activities. And in a worthiness interview, you go sit in a room with your local bishop and it's a one on one thing, just you and him.

And it's, of course, always a him. And he asks a lot of really detailed, awkward questions about your life and your behavior, you know, things like, do you tithe properly and do you avoid caffeinated beverages? Et cetera. But a lot of times that includes sexual questions, like whether you masturbate and what you do. Well, when was the last time and what were you thinking about? And have you become unshaced with someone?

Have you engaged in sexual activity? And if you say, yes, it's like, well, so I know someone who went to a worthiness interview and, of course, it's, you know, you're raised to think this person is speaking to you for God and essentially interrogating you on behalf of God. And it was, well, have you have you, you know, have you engaged in heavy petting or whatever he called it? And she said, well, yes, I have.

And then his next question was, well, what kind of underwear were you wearing? And now I'm not saying that type of that type of question happens every time, but that's the point is that bishops have broad latitude in what they ask, how they ask it, how detailed those questions are. So my point is that they're simultaneously this fixation on sex. And yet this depiction of sex, especially sexual sin, is something that can literally be worse than death. And there's another layer to this, which is that the church, and they don't talk

about this a lot because it kind of makes nonbelievers sort of roll their eyes. But the church teaches that Satan is essentially always trying to take control of your body. One of the teachings is that he's a spirit who doesn't have his own temporal form. And so he is always trying to sort of hop into you like a kind of bipedal taxi. Like glory on season five. Yes, exactly. But he's always trying to take control of your mind and your actions.

And that Satan controlling your mind and your body is the cause not just of sin, but the cause of a lot of physical ailments and or mental and emotional ailments. And so if you then zoom out and you look at the nine teenage diaries that Beatrice Barks produced, there's a lot of recurring elements, but more than sex, more than drug abuse, you know, more than anything else. These teenage diarists seem to be haunted by this specter of mental illness, you know, a mental upset, tumbled. And it comes in a lot of forms, but it's always there.

And if you come from a culture where sin, especially sexual sin, is not just worse than dying, but is paired with mental illness as something caused by the devil, then you're going to be hyper vigilant about it. And that's a very long way of saying that whether we're talking about a girl named Alice or whether we're talking about a woman named Beatrice, I'm not saying she was crazy and I'm not saying she was secretly gay, but it would make a horrible, strange kind of sense for her to fixate on one or both of those possibilities. Interesting. Oh Beatrice.

I know, because she's not explicitly Mormon. I mean, Alice is not Mormon. Is she in the book? Do we ever, because of right, there's no real, like I'm not, not like thinking back to like, I feel like there's a part where she's like naming lack of religion as one of the incipient problems in her life because she has her first friend who she's obsessed with, who's Jewish. And then she's like, I wish I knew about our family's religious traditions, but I don't even know. Okay, bye. It's not as explicit in Go Ask Alice as it becomes in some of her later books. There are some signifiers in there, you know, so at one point, I mean,

she does talk about visiting the Great Salt Lake, which as I believe Carmen mentioned, is a hideous place that looks beautiful and take it out of the car. And then he's like, why am I here? I got so many messages on Instagram, people being like, yes, the Great Salt Lake is disgusting. It just, it smells like a sewer and it's covered in Brian flies and it's, I mean, it's awful. You know, but there are some references there to what we might broadly call Mormon culture. And there are some things that are not there that become more apparent in later books, but it is also worth noting that, you know, one other recurring element in these teenage diaries. So Beth Baum, which is, so that's the girl that Alice,

you know, gets this sort of crush on or however she would describe it, you know, is it possible I'm in love with Beth Horrors, you know, whatever she says, there are a lot of Jewish characters that show up in these teenage diaries. And so Jewish culture plays a big role. And the reason that kind of significant is because in Mormon culture, they really view themselves as having this very strong connection. They view themselves as essentially being one of the other, you know, lost tribes, one of the other tribes that has been, you know, that is in North America. In fact, so much so that, you know, within Utah itself, the nickname for Utah is Zion. That's what they call it in Utah. So they very much perceive this

interwoven aspect between Judaism and Latter-day Saint culture. So there's that's another connective thread sparks herself in multiple interviews explicitly said that Alice was, you know, Mormon or that she met her at a, you know, sometimes she says Christian Youth Conference, sometimes she says Mormon, but that's a thing that, you know, it's there if you're looking for it. Interesting. So what do we know about Beatrice? Do we know much like about like who she was as a person? Like, do we have any like biographical insight into her in any way? Or is she sort of like a little bit of a black box? The way that I sort of describe her is that I sometimes say she's not just the unreliable narrator of other people's lives. She's the unreliable narrator

of her own life. Oh, interesting. I will say out of the outset that it's so well, first of all, this book took me far longer than I expected to write. I mean, I think part of that is my instant karma. I think the universe is teaching me humility because my first book went from idea to published in like 19 months. I was like, this is easy. Who are these people who take seven years? What are they? Oh, yes, you're definitely getting punished. Oh, yeah. So when I started this book, the universe is like, all right, Jackass, how about we punish you for your overconfidence? So the thing about writing about anybody who is, you know, an unreliable source is nothing can be taken at face value. I mean, everything has to be when I interviewed one of her children,

his opening line to me was nobody knows her story, including me. And so part of that, I think is generational in the sense that, and I think there was definitely an undersharing or anti-sharing aspect to people who grew up in the Great Depression, especially because A, a lot of times people and Beatrice Parks included lived through an era that was just objectively terrible in many ways. And not just because things had not evolved socially to the, I mean, it was obviously a much different era in a lot of ways, but also there was the Great Depression. And then there was a world war and then another world war. And it was just a whole lot of things people wanted to forget. And I think there was very much an element of like, that's in the past,

I don't want to think about it. I don't want to talk about it. I'm looking at the future. And now this is me sort of just speculating slash diagnosing, but there's a weird great Gatsby element in the sense that, you know, there's this American idea of, you know, self-invention and recreation. You know, you can, a thing that we obviously know is not true, but that we are still told and that we on some level want to believe, which is the idea that in America doesn't matter who you are, where you're born or whether you're rich or poor, you know, you can become whatever you want. And the phrase there is become. We in America tend to really lionize reward or even worship success. At the same time, you know, we tend to gloss over a lot of

the self-reinvention, which is sometimes another word for deceit that goes into that, you know, we tend to value a lot of things, but, you know, we don't want to know how that sausage is made. And so to some degree, there was a lot of, you know, I'm going to pretend to be the person I want to be and I'm going to pretend to be that person until I become that person. It took quite a long time to unravel her life and her background. And I'm sure that there are things that are probably not known to anybody. And a lot of that seemed to be by design. And so, you know, if you are unhappy with who you are and you're desperate to become somebody else, you're probably not going to be forthcoming about a lot of that. What do we know? Like, are there indisputable

biographical facts? Yeah, she was born in Logan, Utah, which is now and was even more so then, a very small, very, very, very Mormon place. I mean, even contrasted with the rest of Utah. When she was in her teens, she moved, I mean, you want to talk about a culture shock. So she moved from Logan, Utah to San Francisco. San Francisco, California. Oh, this makes, this makes a little more sense. That's very interesting. Well, another, if you want to do another Beatrice Park's drinking game, and you drink or, you know, have, you know, some Jell-O or whatever it is you want to do every time a character mentions or goes to San Francisco, that seems to be a thing that turns up quite frequently. And San Francisco in the mid to late 30s was, I mean, it's obviously,

you know, kind of a tumultuous chaotic city, you know, at all times, but especially then, because it was just in addition to the actual real literal earthquakes, there was a lot of social upheaval happening in San Francisco at that moment. And so it is hard to imagine actually, like a greater contrast going from tiny town Utah to San Francisco. I mean, I cannot even imagine, even going to someplace like Manhattan or Las Vegas, I think would not be quite the same. Then by the mid 60s, she's back in Utah. She's married. She has family. And she moves to a place that is often called the fraud capital of America, which is Utah County, which effectively means, you know, Provo. Provo is the heart of that. So just a couple of miles from BYU.

Is that why those twins are from Provo and Oceans 11, but like this idea that it's like the designated American capital of con artists? At one point, I don't have the stat in front of me here, I have to do it from memory, but I think this is true. At one point, I believe the, so I guess it would be the FTC that did this investigation, I think. I believe at one point, they estimated that something like, and I think the number was literally two thirds, that two thirds of investment in securities fraud had traced to Utah County in some way, that it was in some way based there. What? If you want to do a real life drinking game, actually, you can just drink every time you find a multi-level marketing company

that is based in Provo or Utah or that has very strong roots there. So unique, for example, the makeup company, they're the most recent example that I can think of, but multi-level marketing stuff is gigantic. It is enormous in Utah County, which tells you a lot. I feel like now we're like really on a thread or we're super off topic, but I'm just, I'm like, is the multi-level marketing thing because Mormon women are supposed to be at home? I don't want to, like, I feel like, like, is that or is it like, is there some other connection? Is it like Delaware where the laws are weird? That's a good question. I can really only speculate on that. I mean, I think it's

probably a mix of things, a confluence of factors, but I would say off the top of my head. I think the idea that, and again, I do apologize to anybody who feels like I am perhaps picking on their faith. I'm really not, but that just happens to be what we're talking about. So, I mean, on the one hand, again, you've got this strange dichotomy where the church, I mean, it's a prosperity faith in many ways, you know, and there's some rational interpinning to that that they, I mean, to be fair, Mormons were undoubtedly, undeniably, you know, persecuted for a long time. I mean, at one point, I believe it was Illinois, actually, the governor signed a thing called the Mormon extinction order with an executive order signed by the governor saying

like, we need to exterminate Mormons. And so there is like a well founded to some degree sense of solidarity against the outside world and self-reliance, the idea that like, we need to have our own money and our own economy, you know, because things might go south for us again. At the same time, women are not exactly encouraged to be independent or to work outside the home or to do anything that takes them away from raising the family and so forth. And if you can, in theory, make money, you know, pushing cosmetics to your friends on Facebook or whatever, that, you know, that's splitting the difference, you know, for some people, I think also Mormons are, again, according to a government report that I have a copy of somewhere Mormons are especially ripe for what

they call affinity fraud. And affinity fraud just means that you're likely to believe the claims of somebody who's in your same social group. That's so interesting, because most people, like a lot of secular people kind of suburban moms in America just like, don't have a social group, and that's one of the big problems they face. So that that's depressing. And if you are predisposed to just, you know, somebody in your church says, Hey, so, you know, so I've been, I've been making some money. I don't know why I always become this anonymous guy from Brooklyn. I've been selling this Lularo pretty good product. Yeah, you know, and it's, you know, the same sort of, they'll strike up a conversation at a barbecue or something and say, Yeah, so I've been really,

this is working out really well for me. Yeah, I might be able to, might be able to go into business for myself. You know, Sarah, you seem like a real go-getter, a person who really, you know, really wants to make. Oh my goodness, I am. So, I mean, I, you know, I can't no problem, I could maybe bring you in on this. I mean, if it's something you're interested in, I could talk to, I mean, it's, you know, people are, there's a long line. Create a sense of urgency. Yeah. But if you're really, I mean, if you're really willing to give it a hundred percent, I can make a few calls for you. Just, you know, I love giving a hundred percent. Carmen and I also were very charmed by the section

of the book where inexplicably our girls, Alice and Chris start a small business. That is very much part of, in my experience, at least that is very part of the Latter-day Saint culture. It's, you know, the idea of business acumen, self-reliance. This makes more sense in this context. Yeah. And it tracks also with how that church operates in terms of their COVID has impacted this obviously, but in terms of their outreach, because, and I say this with, I'm not passing any judgment, but really, you know, missionary work is sales work and sales work is missionary work. And if you're good at one,

you're going to be good at the other. So then my next question would be, I feel like my final question is going to be like, is Alice real or like, was there a real Alice? But before that, I also wanted you to speak a little more broadly to like the role this book served in the culture of the moment it came out in. So obviously, like in the subtitle of the book, you mentioned the satanic panic. Obviously, there's like a drug, you know, moral panic happening and like a sort of a way that America is responding to drugs and to mental health. And there's like all these. So yeah. And like also, I mean, at some point, she's in an asylum, which like I mentioned during our last episode, I was like, when did asylums get like shut down in the US? But like, it was a

moment where like you would, you could end up in like this situation freak worth, if you will, a freak worth exactly. So like, yeah, where does this book like, where did this book sort of land culturally? And like, what was sort of the impact of that in the moment that it came out? I was listening again to the first installment you did about this. And it was, you really made some really insightful points that, you know, things that I've been kind of thinking about for a long time in that why it has such cultural currency and such ongoing currency, because even today, I try never to say like, you know, here's what the young people are talking about. But I do know that like you go on Tik Tok, for example, which I try not to do. But if you do,

I mean, they're a 15 year old today reading this, not because somebody wanted them to or not because an adult told them to, but because it speaks to them, it resonates with them in some way. And I mean, there's a reason it's never been out of print that a 50th anniversary edition just came out last year. So, so I'll do that in two parts. The first is that the social part with Go Ask Alice adults tend to respond to and be horrified by the specific events, the things that she does. So it's, you know, this girl runs away from home and she has sex with men she hardly knows and she, you know, is consuming drugs and she's, you know, and it's just all of these. And I'm certainly not telling anybody that Alice is a model, you know, on which to base your life. She's taken pills like

fistfuls like Jordan Allman's Easter. I'm not trying to downplay the seriousness of the activity she's taking part in, but the interesting to me is that adults fixate on, on the things she's doing young readers tend to fixate on the character herself. In other words, adults are like, I'm horrified by the things she's doing. And young people say this girl breaks my heart, you know, or this girl could be me. Yeah. That means I'm still young. Yeah. For all of the books fakery, it's like, you know, Beatrice at some point was obviously at some point was herself a teenage girl. And so like, there is like an unavoidable reality to just like, you know, like, knowing what it's like to be a young woman in the world, which obviously had changed in all times since

she'd been a young woman. But also like, it's like, yeah, you can't even really fake that. Like, maybe that's why the teens, because it's like, yeah, at some level, there is like a real a feeling of realism to just like, that's just being in this like deeply transitional sort of deeply like, I hate to use the word liminal, I overuse the word liminal. This is how you know, you'll know my work. That's my tell. That's my drinking game. But yeah, like she's in this like weird just moment of ambivalence and like strangeness and like the sort of these minor traumas of just being a young person in the world. And I feel like that part, there are moments of the book that do resonate in a very real way, even if like the drug stuff is like

so obviously fake. Absolutely. And it's it really does capture it is kind of lightning in a bottle because it does capture the way it feels to be a teenager. Now again, it's been a long time since I was a teenager, but I think that the evidence, you know, the proof is in the pudding. It's the reason why it continues to sell and continues to resonate. And you know, when you're a teenager, a lot of things are true at the same time. So you are simultaneously convinced that you are going crazy and that you are the only sane person on the planet. Just this massive rush of just strange conflicting emotions often coming at the same time. And I think that is why there's this split of young people resonating, you know, with the tone resonating with them and adults though fixating

on the but the drugs and the and the sexing and the so forth. Another good example, a comparison is the book Carrie by Stephen King. But the reason why Carrie resonated with young people and with a lot of people, it's not because she had telekinesis, it's because of her home life and the relationship with her peers and her mother and her school. And she's sexualized, but is also repressed. And she's all of these strange things at once. Carrie and go ask Alice to me or some, they feel a little bit similar in that way. So in terms of the societal impact and why it was such a big hit, it came at a really propitious or a word like that propitious, I think moment in that a the number of runaways have been increasing every year since the late 50s and not increasing by a little bit

evident doubling in some years. And by 1971, the average American runaway was a white suburban girl who was barely 15. And that was a change because it had never been that way before. And if they become, I think by 1970, I think the number of teenagers who vanished long enough to be declared missing was 400,000. Society was not prepared for that, especially not when they looked and saw like, but they're from good homes and they're from the suburbs, which of course is code for their white. Like that lovely squeaky from. Exactly. Yes. So there's the runaway aspect and then there's the LSD aspect because the number of users of LSD have been going up every single year and 1970 marked, there's no way to avoid drug puns here, but it was the peak or the high

watermark or whatever you want to say. In 1970, 800,000 Americans tried LSD for the very first time, which is the biggest number ever. And it was illegal, but nothing seemed to be happening. And the Nixon White House was just bent on criminalizing drugs and not just criminalizing them, but like hella criminalizing them. I mean, you know, to the, you know, classing LSD alongside heroin. And so Richard Nixon is gearing up to launch his war on drugs, which requires whipping the American frenzy, the American people into this frenzy and really getting them amped up for yet another losing war. And so go ask Alice emerges at exactly the right moment. Come on, folks, you love those. And they did. They, and the American public was ready to get behind that

because they associated drugs with, you know, lots of things with hippies and with Charles Manson and with losing, you know, your identity, which to an American is just, you know, that strikes at the core of the American ideal. And plus it's menacing, you know, the flower of American womanhood and a book that came out and told you why you should be frightened and angry about those things. That was well timed. Yeah. I mean, I feel like Sarah made this really great point in the first episode just about how like ironic it was that LSD is like the, you know, the almost like the primarily demonized drug in the book, but also like, you know, Alice is also clearly depressed and like probably LSD would be like kind of a helpful drug for her to take. And it's just weird

that there's something about like the insisting on demonizing like this drug in particular, like at the expense of almost all the, it's like weird. It's like pot and LSD are like the really bad drugs. She tries heroin once and she's like, not for me because it moves on with her life. Right. And it's just like ironic because it's like, right. LSD and pot, it's like the most sort of harmless of the bunch. And like the ones that like, you know, like, it's just so, it's so interesting that that would, that that's the thing that she wanted to focus on. Somebody one time described silence of the lambs as being perfect because I think it's like Roger Ebert or somebody said that it's like they made a list of all of the most common phobias and like jammed them into one movie.

It's like fear of the dark and fear of insects and fear of whatever. And you know, if you think about go ask Alice, I mean, there's, you know, being uprooted and moving and losing your friends and having to go to yet another school and the fear of being pregnant and body shame and feeling torn between desire and, and the shame that is sort of implanted in you. There's also a couple of weird, a couple of weird things that I'm tempted to, I don't know, I don't want to read too much into things, but there's that moment where you, I think you mentioned this Carmen where the, today I had six heavenly mouthwatering delectable French fries. There's a weird religious almost self-denial and then indulgence, maybe overindulgence aspect of that. It's the ascetic,

I will deny myself every form of pleasure so much so that these six French fries just taste like manna from heaven. And it's a weird, almost fasting, binging, you know, so in these sort of threads of all of that emotional tumult, you know, run through every corner of the book. Yeah. Okay. So my last big question, which like, I don't know how much this you want to answer, because obviously like everybody should read this book. I'm so excited. I am like literally going to leave this conversation and immediately purchase this book. So, you know, I hope everybody does as well. But my big question is, was there an Alice or like, was there any version of Alice who existed, which part of like any of this diary actually came from, or was it just invented

whole cloth by Beatrice? Well, Carmen, that's an interesting question you pose there. I will say that, and I'm not trying to be coy about this when I say that, you know, when you go to see a movie and somebody, we've all had this happen, you go to see a movie and somebody says, okay, just be better if you don't know anything about the movie going in. If you just don't look up, trust me when I say, just don't read anything about it. Obviously, that's not the case here, because I mean, we're talking a lot about it. And a lot of people know about not only Go Ask Alice, but also, I mean, a lot of the stuff, I mean, it's not like I discovered the name Beatrice Parks. Obviously, a lot of the stuff has been floating around out there. You know, even before

Google, it was findable. And especially now you can Google Go Ask Alice and find, you know, I mean, the copyright records and stuff have been around for a long time. I will say that initially, as we talked about earlier in the early days of this book, certainly for the first decade, probably 90% of the coverage treated is absolutely authentic. You know, this girl lived, this girl died, this girl left a diary. That was sort of the whole thing. Later, you know, by the time 2000, 2005 rolled around, you know, that it really split to where half the people were like, well, this is absolutely true. And the other half are like, this is absolutely, you know, whole cloth nonsense. I will say that neither of those assessments is entirely true. And so without

without saying too much here, I will say that there is an answer to that question. This is not going to be like one of those DB Cooper books I buy where on the last page, the guy's like, still don't know, sorry. There is an answer to this question. And at the end of the book, I lay out, you know, the backstory of what really happened. And I will say that while it is not what I expected, and I know that I'm sounding coy, even as I'm trying not to know, this is so good. It's not what I expected, but but it actually does make a lot of sense. So the question is answered at the end of the book, and it is not what I expected, but it actually does all kind of fit together. Rick, I feel like you just sold so many copies of your book. That was amazing.

That was excellent. That was such a perfect answer. I have like burning with desire. Like, I can't even tell you like how much I want. I'm so excited. I'm going to read the book immediately. It's too late to have you blurb this. Hold on. Let me just Here's the plan. Everybody buys unmasked Alice. Money goes into publishing. Publishing hires fact checkers. Thank you. Yes. Truth prevails. America heals. The end. Good night. That's all I hope so. And that's our story. We found it written on paper bags, and we've done our best to edit the grammar. But we haven't changed any of the spirit. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for amazing editing. Thank

you to Carolyn Kendrick for amazing producing, as always. Thank you to Carmen Maria Machado for going on this weird odyssey with me. I appreciate that so much. I feel like we've been on a camping trip through a fraudulent writer's brain, and I have enjoyed every second of it. Thank you to Rick Emerson for writing a fantastic book and coming to tell us about it. Thank you to you, the listener. See you in two weeks.