YMMV / Go Ask Alice

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• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Are the narrator's moments of attraction towards other girls solely because of the drugs like the text implies, or is she a lesbian or bisexual and in denial?
  • Sarah Marshall and Carmen Maria Machado discussed the book on the podcast You're Wrong About and posited the theory that the narrator is gay and struggling with her sexuality, and suffering from clinical depression. They point out that the narrator shows signs of depression even before she did drugs, and that her friendship with Beth (again, pre-drugs) has romantic implications. Machado also notes that the narrator's feelings for boys are pretty shallow, mostly coming down to the boy seeming nice, rather than her feeling anything for him, and that she only has sex with men while high, which could point to her being a lesbian in denial.

  • Fridge Brilliance: In light of this interpretation and in the context of '60s-era views on homosexuality, you can apply a modern spin to the idea that the narrator's drug use led to her same-sex attraction. Namely, the drugs did not cause her to become gay, but they did cause her to lose her inhibitions about her sexuality at a time when she would have been expected to stay in the closet.

• Anvilicious: The book does all but hang up a neon sign reading "Drugs Are Bad", with the narrator often lamenting how everything bad in her life is connected to drugs somehow.
• Angst? What Angst?: After Shelia and Rod sadistically rape the protagonist and Chris, the protagonist quickly moves on with her life. She feels happy and chipper, without any fear, anger, or nightmares that might normally result.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: For an anti-drug book, this book makes drugs sound downright magical. The narrator devotes pages of detail to her experiences with LSD and marijuana—much more detail than she gives to any other aspect of her life.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Since the protagonist's relapse and death is shoehorned into a tiny paragraph on the last page of the book, it's easy to pretend it just never happened in order to retain her character development, since the epilogue comes off strongly as a Very Special Episode reminder that Drugs Are Bad — as if the reader couldn't have figured it out already. Moreover, the last sentence of the book (in which the author reminds the viewer how many people die from using drugs) pretty much hammers in the message rather than wrapping up the protagonist's story in a satisfying way.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The entire book, once you know what the epilogue is: the protagonist's innocence and dreams of a happy future; her love for her parents and siblings; her desperate attempts to get off of drugs.
• I Am Not Shazam: "Alice" is not the protagonist's name. Officially she's "anonymous," though a quote from a drug dealer's child indicates her name is possibly Carla. ^note As she's writing about an unpleasant man who supplies her with heroin in exchange for oral sex — "another day, another blow job" — she comments "Everybody is just lying around here like they're dead and Little Jacon is hollering "Mama, Daddy can't come right now. He's humping Carla." How she is writing while, not after, having coitus, only Beatrice Sparks knows. There is a minor character named "Alice"; however, she isn't the protagonist.^note When the narrator is getting ready for her parents to come and get her, she asks various people what they feel they want, and Alice says she doesn't know if she's running to something or away from something, but at heart she wants to go home. The Made-for-TV Movie adaptation goes ahead and gives her name as Alice, presumably because Viewers Are Morons.
• It Was His Sled: The narrator dies. Understandable due to this book being used as both Scare 'Em Straight material and high school curriculum reading for years.
• Once Original, Now Common: Nowadays, the book comes off strongly as moralistic, preachy anti-drug material that mostly invokes a seen-it-all-before response from most young people who read it. But when it debuted in the '70s, it was so shocking that it was censored almost immediately (this didn't keep it out of many high school and middle school libraries, and even as assigned reading, even in the Bible Belt). In the early '80s when book-challenging parental groups began raising hell at school board meetings, Go Ask Alice was often #1 or #2 on the list. More at the Go Ask Alice Project.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Both of Carla's reunion with her parents qualify, as well as the deaths of her grandparents.
  • The ending, though abrupt, can also bother you for a long time after reading it.
• Values Dissonance: Carla's bicuriosity is strongly implied to be a result of her drug habits. Try getting away with that nowadays.

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