I am extremely torn as to how I wish to approach this review. This book brings a lot to the table, much of which is extremely difficult to process. While I have taken great interest in the overall story that Unmask Alice strives to dissect, I cannot deny that Emerson's writing left a very bad taste in my mouth.

The writing style of this book is just bizarre. I grew increasingly more and more frustrated with Emerson's corny and juvenile writing tricks as the book progressed. He would end chapters with cliffhangers only to start off the next chapter by introducing entirely new subjects, typically not actually revealing the resolution to the prior cliffhanger until multiple chapters later. Using this method once would have maybe been fine, but utilizing this technique throughout the entire book was unnecessary. Emerson also has a nasty habit of inserting his own personal bias and opinions into the writing. I genuinely don't believe there was any point in which Emerson's personal commentary was warranted and at times it was just borderline offensive. When looking at the purposeful lack of citations, I can only be lead to believe that Emerson simply does not know how to write an academic piece of work. Any time you are putting together a piece of writing that seeks to educate, or in this case, "expose the truth" about real events and real people, it is absolutely critical that you provide proper and accurate citations to ensure credibility or else your work is entirely dismissible. Emerson states that he did not provide citations because "anyone can look up these facts on the internet". Sir, then why the hell did you waste your time writing this book?

Speaking directly to the topics discussed in Unmask Alice, I believe that there was a lack of empathy and understanding when depicting the acts of suicide that take place throughout the entirely of the book. I don't think suicide was necessarily the primary focus of the book but depictions of suicide and suicidal ideation are so heavily inserted that at a certain point, the reader starts to become desensitized. It deeply angers me that there was not more justice for Alden Barrett and his family. While extremely telling of the times, the consistent minimization of Alden's depression symptoms is absolutely insane and entirely devastating. My heart breaks for his poor grieving mother who wanted nothing more than validation and understanding from his suicide but was met with exploitation and harassment that spanned the rest of her life instead. There is nothing I wanted more out of this book than to see accurate representation of those suffering from mental illness, specifically suicide survivors and those who have passed from suicide, but once again, Emerson somehow managed only to further perpetuate harmful stereotypes by choosing to portray all of the negative behaviors and traits of those suffering from mental illness rather than shedding light on their positive characteristics.

As someone who has paid for an education in the field of mental health and has multiple years' experience working in the field, Beatrice Sparks is an absolute disgrace to mental health workers. I can not express how disgusted it made me to read about how this woman manipulated, lied, exploited, and ultimately profited off of the trauma, pain, and grief of the characters she fabricated and the lives of the real people she capitalized on. I was really holding out hope that maybe Emerson would give us insight on why exactly Sparks was the way she was but that never happened. It was stated that no one really knew her story, therefore maybe we will never get that insight, but I feel it would have given the book the nuance it lacked.

While I did enjoy reading this book, the ethical issues surrounding Emerson's writing are inexcusable. This book could have greatly benefited from being written by a credible author with a strong background in research, mental health, or social issues. Sometimes radio personalities are just that. Personalities. ( )

I loved this book. If you grew up in the US in the 1970s, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll find this as compelling as I did.

It’s the story behind the story of Go Ask Alice, the early 70s equivalent of “This is your brain on drugs” (cue sizzle of frying eggs). If you read Go Ask Alice at a particularly young and impressionable age, as I did, it may have shaped how you thought about recreational drug use for years. Older, more sophisticated readers saw through the plot holes more easily.

Emerson’s book is the deep back story about the plot holes and the woman who wrote Go Ask Alice and similar materials. Spoiler: it’s not really a diary of a young girl. I don’t want provide real spoilers, so I’ll just say it’s a fascinating and seemingly well researched exploration of this text and it’s role in larger contexts, such as US drug policies of the 1970s and the emergent Satanic Panic of the 1980s. I couldn’t put it down.

ARC copy provide by #NetGalley in exchange for honest review. ( )

Well researched book that was an enjoyable read. ( )

In the early 1970s, fueled by a moral panic about new hallucinogenic drugs hitting the streets, a purported "real diary" of a real girl hit the bestseller lists -- and it's stayed in print ever since. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous was a smash hit, and for several years, few questioned its raw authenticity. In the years since, it's become common knowledge that the book was actually written by Beatrice Sparks, a middle-aged woman who claimed to be a therapist working with troubled teens. In Unmask Alice, Emerson looks at Sparks and what can be known about her life. A compulsive liar, Sparks claimed to have attended universities that have no record of her and earned degrees that have never materialized. She tells a story of meeting "Alice" at a Christian youth conference and being given her diaries, but the timeline never matches up with the events of "Alice's" short, tragic life. When a grieving mother passes along her dead son's journal years later, hoping that her son's story can help other suffering teens, Sparks spins it into Jay's Journal, a sensationalized tale of witchcraft and Satanism that bears little resemblance to the life of the sensitive, struggling teen who wrote the original journal. This book comes out as Americans are ripe for the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and lends plenty of fuel to that particular fire. Why did Sparks create these "diaries" (and several others that she published over the course of her lifetime)? Was she motivated by a desire to help troubled teens, or was she in it for the money -- and the fame that continued to elude her as her publisher insisted that her name be left off Go Ask Alice? In either case, she told a lot of lies, and Emerson does not spare the blame for the damage her books (especially Jay's Journal) may have done. I found this a gripping and fascinating read -- I finished it in a day, after coming across an interview with the author. I never read any of the Anonymous Diaries, either as a teen or as an adult, but I'm always fascinated by nonfiction related to children's literature, and this one is a particularly readable example of its type. ( )

I'm endlessly fascinated by the 'memoir' genre because it seems so slippery. Who can forget Oprah scolding James Frey on national television about lying? Or how This American Life had to retract their story "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory," because it turn out it was all made up? (There's a long long long awkward pause in the retraction episode in which Ira Glass asks Mike Daisey why he lied and he says something like, "............(the world's longest pause).......because I wanted people to care.") Unmask Alice likewise deals with the issue of truth or untruth in memoir genre, which centers on the machinations of Beatrice Sparks. (And maybe Beatrice just wanted us to care too? That's the generous and charitable interpretation, I think.) I remember reading Go Ask Alice as a teenager and apart from all of the sex and drugs, she did manage to capture the emotional angst of many teenagers. I never read Jay's Journal, so can't comment, but if Emerson has got this right, the occult Satanic Panic stuff was invented by Sparks out of thin air but also hit a national nerve with the sweeping moral panic of the mid 1980s-1990s. That said, not everyone is going to like this book. Emerson has a sarcastic streak a mile wide but his outrage and incredulity about how so many people managed to unquestioningly swallow massive amounts of unbelievable stuff without any evidence at all is not misplaced. (Apologies for the adjective strings.) On the other hand, there's a whole contemporary conspiracy movement that has sucked in millions of people (also entirely without evidence) that has some eerie parallels with Emerson's subjects, particularly the Jay story, so his outrage and disbelief is justified. But the slipperiest subject of all is Beatrice Sparks herself, as she invents credentials, professional contacts, a work history, and the lives of 'teenagers' out of thin air in a relentless quest to *be* someone. And yet despite all that and compelling evidence of Sparks as the author of all of the 'diarists' she professed to 'edit' and her hard won success, she continues to exist on the margins as the 'editor' of these works, not as the author she imagined herself to be. This book feels like a looking glass (Alice reference intended) of truthiness or art imitating life imitating fake art imitating lies about life. All in all, interesting questions to think about and through. ( )