Epigraphs are like little appetizers to the great entrée of a story. They illuminate important aspects of the story, and they get us headed in the right direction.
Go Ask Alice is based on the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old drug user. It is not a definitive statement on the middle-class, teenage drug world. It does not offer any solutions. It is, however, a highly personal and specific chronicle. As such, we hope it will provide insights into the increasingly complicated world in which we live. Names, dates, places, and certain events have been changed in accordance with the wishes of those concerned.
—The Editors
Woo-wee, this one's a doozy.
We don't want to burst your bubble, but this book is not an actual diary. It may well have been very loosely based on one, but we're going to go ahead and say even that is unlikely.
Go Ask Alice was written as a sort of cautionary tale, anti-hippie-culture propaganda directed at unsuspecting young teens. People were desperate to find ways to discourage drug use by any means other than the highly ineffective "Don't Do Drugs" speeches in health class. What better way to do this than by presenting this book as the true diary of a now-dead-from-overdose teen? Or so the thinking went for Sparks and her team.