And Alice... Remember Alice? This is a Song About Alice...
Written: May 31 '00 (Updated Jun 02 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A whole lot more spunk than Pippi Longstocking.
Cons: Pippi didn't OD
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| cornelia's Full Review: |
Okay, so this isn't the coziest, most charming book in the history of the world. In fact, Go Ask Alice would more truly be classified as a Young Adult work, and a lot of people would think that's a stretch, too. Purportedly the diary of a fifteen-year-old girl who died of a drug overdose in the late Sixties, Go Ask Alice is possibly my very favorite childhood read.
I count it as a children's book because that was, in fact, what I was when I first encountered it. I raced through it when I was about eight years old, and would have to say that I've reread it an average of once a year since. That would make 29 readings, all told, and even if as I've heard in the last couple of years it was actually written by some editor in New York, it remains an amazing historical document.
Within the pages of this slender volume you'll find relatively frank (if obviously fictional to me at age 37) discussions of rape, heroin addiction, prostitution, runaways, speed, acid, mental hospitals, suicide, group sex, panhandling, homelessness, venereal disease, homosexuality, infidelity, and a plethora of other subjects in the same vein. One line in particular that has stuck with me through the years is of a young boy saying to his mother "Mama, Daddy can't come now. He's humping Carla." That would, of course, be the part where Alice and her friend Chris are living in the commune in Haight-Ashbury, but I digress.
This is a moving and thought-provoking look into the mind of a young girl who is gleeful to lose three pounds and angst-ridden when she eats french fries, and, in a perfect period touch, who confides her plans for a yearbook autograph party:
"I'm going to wear my new white pants suit, and I have to go now and wash my hair and put it up. It's really getting long, long, long, but if I put it up on orange juice cans I can make it have just the right amount of body and a nice large curl on the bottom. I hope we have enough cans--we've got to! We've simply got to!"
Much later in the book, of course, you'll get passages like the following, written when "Alice" was supposedly in a mental hospital:
"I can't close my eyes because the worms are still crawling on me. They are eating me. They are crawling in my nose and gnawing in my mouth and oh God... I've got to get you back in your case because the maggots are crawling off my bleeding writhing hands into your pages. I will lock you in. You will be safe."
I read on-line this afternoon that the book quite recently had been withdrawn from an eighth-grade class in Rhode Island who had read half of it and were mid-discussion, because the school principal, who'd never read it, caught wind of the subject matter. Obviously, it has lost none of its provocative flavor or shock value.
And yet, despite all its sensationalism, this was an important book for me. When I was eight years old, the cool grownups all got stoned, only narcs wore ties, and Republicans were the people who drove down the freeway in their Cadillacs throwing just-emptied bourbon bottles out the window while they told jokes about poor people.
The soundtrack of my home life was a lot of Hendrix and Neil Young and Joan Baez and Janis Joplin fronting for Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Puccini in the mornings when Mom wrote letters. In second grade, my favorite t-shirt was one Dad allowed me to pick out, when I was back East on a summer custody visit. This portrayed an R. Crumb sketch of a baby chick climbing wide-eyed out of a broken egg and was captioned, "Just Like Being Born Stoned." It looked excellent with my sky blue tie-dyed jeans and my suede moccasin boots that laced up the side and had fringe at the knee.
My teacher, Mrs. Boys, taught us Russian folksongs, so we'd "know what to sing when the Revolution comes." We planted willow trees on the river bank to prevent erosion, learned to write haiku and play the recorder, made tapes of our dreams, and were given blue glass marbles for Earth Day.
She was quite pleased with my first essay, on the injustice of jailing Angela Davis and the hypocrisy of the Christmas carpet bombing in Vietnam. I remember the act of writing it, carving out the words in dull pencil in my execrable handwriting, because it was the first time I used paper that was taller than it was wide--not the horizontal pulp stuff with the big empty space at the top for a picture and the four or five inch-high ruled lines at the bottom--but real honest-to-God binder paper.
That was the year that I made the mistake of saying to my stepfather Michael that I found Bewitched a compelling sitcom because even though they didn't get stoned and stuff, they were still cool because they had witchcraft and so they had, like, a secret that made them hip. I received an extended lecture over that dinner, beginning with the phrase, "Cornelia, some of my best friends don't get stoned."
It was that sense of a double life that hooked me on Alice, as hers was the only piece of writing available to me that understood it, delved into it, and, if it did not fully illuminate the schism, at least trumpeted its existence in no uncertain terms.
This was someone who would have gotten the joke of my grandparents in Oyster Bay buying me a pair of Bass Weejuns with tassels, to go with my newly-purchased kilt, for "school clothes." Or of my asking my other grandfather, the CIA admiral then on the board of Air America, what he thought of the Pentagon Papers over a luncheon of jellied consomme followed by peas and lamb chops. He did not choose to comment on my choice of topic, but I ate in the kitchen with the cook for the remainder of the visit.
God knows there weren't a lot of kids my age who could have enjoyed musing with me about it all. For the rest of my classmates, singing a rousing verse of
Marijuana, Marijuana
LSD, LSD,
Scienti-ists make it
Tea-ea-ea-chers take it
Why can't we? Why can't we?
was pretty much the acme of political consciousness.
"Goddamned stupid people," Alice would say, "I'd like to shove life down all their throats and then maybe they'd understand what it's all about."
And that's what I read her for, because you weren't going to get that clarity from Caddie Woodlawn or Ramona the Pest or even, God help her, Anne Frank--though I knew and loved them all.
Of course she was flawed, my Alice. She died, first off, and was stupid enough to mess around with too much acid, not to mention heroin. And then she could utter such patent idiocy as the following, about the guy for whom she's dealing at the high school and junior high:
"Richie is so good, good, good to me and sex with him is like lightning and rainbows and springtime.... He's going into medicine, and I have to help him any way I can. It's going to be a long hard pull but we'll make it.... I think I won't go on to college. Dad will just curl up and die, but it's more important to me to work and help Rich. As soon as I'm out of high school I'll get a full time job and we'll settle down...."
Even at eight I knew better than that, but of course Alice didn't grow up in a community of single mothers and boyfriends and stepdads and the child support checks that never came. I could have sat her down with my mom and some pals for a cup of coffee and knocked that lunacy right out of her head in about fifteen minutes, but poor Alice had "straight" parents, so she didn't know better and I had to cut her some slack.
Still today, she's the big sister I never had, though she was probably the pastiche of a snarky Williams guy at Prentice-Hall in real life, patched together from a few issues of Seventeen and some chick he sat next to at a Jefferson Airplane concert. I don't care. Alice is family--even if she doesn't live here anymore.
For many brilliant reviews of favorite kids' books, no doubt much more wholesome and heartwarming than this one, please read the posts of forkids, Leah, gracef, KristinThomas, caconti, conradd, stonehousellc, Grouch, auntnono, halfsweet, taurusmoon, DoubleCoog, caravan70, kcfoxy,
mshawpyle, sleestakk, kchowell, emlin, CurtisEdmonds, fdknight, WorkingMomof2, expono, kimmiko, Bonies7, pogomom, Redlass, poseidon, jrk,
sweetpaulie, ErgoPropterHoc--all of whom join me in this write-off endeavor, to honor Forkids' 400th opinion...
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
cornelia
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 - Top 1000 |
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Member: Cornelia Read
Location: Berkeley, California
Reviews written: 100
Trusted by: 333 members
About Me:
Disorganized mother of twins by day, crime fiction writer by... um... day.
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