Public reception
Upon its 1971 publication, Go Ask Alice quickly became a publishing sensation[34] and an international bestseller, being translated into 16 languages.[2] Its success has been attributed to the timing of its publication at the height of the psychedelic era, when the negative effects of drug use were becoming a public concern.[35] Alleen Pace Nilsen has called it "the book that came closest to being a YA phenomenon" of its time, although saying it was "never as famous as [the later] Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games series".[2] In addition to being very popular with its intended young adult audience, Go Ask Alice also attracted a significant number of adult readers.[34][3]
Libraries had difficulty obtaining and keeping enough copies of the book on the shelves to meet demand.[36][37] The 1973 television film based on the book heightened reader interest,[37] and librarians reported having to order additional copies of the book each time the film was broadcast.
By 1975, more than three million copies of the book had reportedly been sold,[32] and by 1979 the paperback edition had been reprinted 43 times. The book remained continuously in print over the ensuing decades, with reported sales of over four million copies by 1998,[1] and over five million copies by 2009.[4] The actual number of readers probably surpassed the sales figures, as library copies and even personal copies were likely circulated to more than one reader.[38] Go Ask Alice has been cited as establishing both the commercial potential of young adult fiction in general, and the genre of young adult anti-drug novels,[1] and has been called "one of the most famous anti-drug books ever published."[7]
Critical response
Go Ask Alice received positive initial reviews, including praise from Webster Schott in The New York Times, who called it an "extraordinary work", a "superior work" and a "document of horrifying reality [that] possesses literary quality".[39] It was also recommended by Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and The Christian Science Monitor,[35] and ranked number 1 on the American Library Association's 1971 list of Best Books for Young Adults.[40] Some reviews focused on the realism of the book's material, without further addressing the literary merit of the book.[23][24][35][41] According to Nilsen and Lauren Adams, the book was not subjected to the regular forms of literary criticism because it was presumed to be the real diary of a dead teenager.[2][35] Lina Goldberg has suggested that the publishers were motivated to list the author as "Anonymous" partly to avoid such criticism.[26]
Years after its publication, Go Ask Alice continued to receive some good reviews, often in the context of defending the book against censors (see Censorship).[9] In a 1995 Village Voice column for Banned Books Week, Nat Hentoff described it as "an extraordinarily powerful account of what it's actually like to get hooked on drugs" that "doesn't preach".[42]
However, starting in the 1990s, the book began to draw criticism for its heavy-handedness, melodramatic style and inauthenticity, in view of the growing evidence that it was fiction rather than a real teenager's diary (see Authorship and veracity controversies).[1][6][43][35][44] Reviewing the book again for The New York Times in 1998, Marc Oppenheimer called it "poorly written", "laughably written", and "incredible", although some other writers have pointed to the material as being plausible or even appealing to young readers.[35] The portrayal of the diarist's drug use, progressing from unwittingly ingesting LSD to injecting speed within a few days, and making a similar quick transition from her first use of marijuana to heroin, has been deemed unrealistic.[6][26][45] The book has been criticized for equating homosexuality with "degradation", illness, sin, and guilt.[45] More recent analyses have expressed ethical concerns with the book's presentation of fiction to young readers as a true story.[2][26][44] Despite all these criticisms, the book is frequently called a young adult classic.[6][38][46]
Educational use
Although school boards and committees reached varying conclusions about whether Go Ask Alice had literary value,[32][33] educators generally viewed it as a strong cautionary warning against drug use.[33] It was recommended to parents and assigned or distributed in some schools as an anti-drug teaching tool. However, some adults who read the book as teens or pre-teens have written that they paid little attention to the anti-drug message and instead related to the diarist's thoughts and emotions,[43][47] or vicariously experienced the thrills of her rebellious behavior.[6][35] Reading the book for such vicarious experience has been suggested as a positive alternative to actually doing drugs.[48] Go Ask Alice has also been used in curricula dealing with mood swings[49] and death.
