What Just Happened? (IR 10 - #2, April 6 - Undated)

I'm extremely confused about the last part of the book. I understood everything that went on until Alice ends up in the hospital. I really don't get what happened. She was doing really well at home and everything and she really started to like herself more and she no longer hated everything that she was and everything she has done. The kids at school were harassing her because they want her to do drugs with them again. They keep putting blunts in her bag and in her locker so she continues to get in trouble but her parents believe her. They know that she's getting taken advantage of and bullied in school. So Alice seems to be doing fine, but the n she doesn't write for a while and there are undated posts after that. Apparently, someone put acid on the peanuts that she was eating while she was babysitting? I'm pretty much really confused because I have no idea how the acid would have gotten there. It honestly doesn't make very much sense to me at this point. It was really confusing to me hearing about her trip. Actually, it was more scary then confusing. She literally freaked out and started clawing herself everywhere because she thought that warms were eating her alive. The acid trip lasts for a really long time even when she's in the hospital. She continues to claw herself and hurt herself and pull out her hair. She can't remember exactly what happened while she as babysitting but apparently she locked herself in a closet because she thought she was going to hurt the baby? I'm just very confused by the whole thing because I don't get how someone else could have given her the drugs. Maybe she's lying? But she's also not the one telling people that, her father is. She thinks she knows who the person is but she is to afraid to say. At this point I'm just extremely confused. I wish I could piece together everything that happened because I would really like to understand it. In the end, Alice ends up ok and starts making new friends but then in the epilogue it says that she dies from an overdose 3 weeks later. They don't know if it was accidental or on purpose. I kind of wish Alice wrote more in her diary so everyone could understand. I'm left kind of confused and wondering what happened.

A Sad Story (IR 9 - #5, End of 1st Diary)

While reading about Alice in Denver, I was very moved by Alice's friend's story. Alice meets Doris at the health clinic that she is at. They quickly become friends, and Doris decides to let Alice stay at her tiny apartment with her. Doris quickly opens up to Alice about all of the troubles and sorrows in her life. I was extremely moved by Doris' story; it touched me and made me really sad. First of all, Doris is only 14 years old and she lives on her own in an apartment. Both Alice and Doris become very sick because of the impoverished conditions they're living in. They don't have enough food, and Alice is going through withdrawal. She really wants to do more drugs, but she can't find any. I feel really bad for Alice because I think that she really does want to get better, but she can't because she's so caught up in everything and she doesn't know who to go to for support. Doris decides to open up to Alice and that's when I was really moved. As it turns out, Doris was sexually and physically abused by her foster father and other members of her foster family which is why she ran away. This really upsets me because this probably happened to so many foster children back then because there weren't extremely intense background checks like there are now. Doris was expecting them to be a good family, but they only ended up hurting her. That really upsets me. She's so young and she's living all by herself in terrible conditions. Doris and Alice decide to leave and hitch-hike. They end up getting a ride with a truck driver but he is abusive to Doris. This just breaks my heart because the poor girl has already been through so much. She really can't trust anyone. I was just moved by this whole section in general because Alice starts doing drugs again and gets in the wrong crowd once more. At the end of her first diary she finally decides to go home and live with her parents again. She thinks when she grows up she wants to help children like herself. Alice decides that she has two choices. She can either commit suicide or spend the rest of her life helping others. I was moved by the fact that she's not going to take "the easy way out," and she's ready to spend the rest of her days making her wrongs right.

A Connection (IR 8 - #10, Feb 27 - End of 1st Diary)

Reading about Alice really reminds me of one of my old best friends. We aren't best friends anymore because of the choices she made, but we were really good friends at one point. Alice reminds me a lot of her especially in the section I just read. In this section, Alice gets fed up with her parents trying to help her. They have her meeting with a pshyciatrist becacuse they know Alice needs help and that she isn't doing too well. Alice rejects the help and she continues to do drugs behind her parents back and they really have no idea because she's hiding it pretty well. This really reminds me of my old friend because they same thing happened to her. She wasn't doing as intense, crazy drugs as Alice but she was still doing drugs nonetheless. When her parents tried to help her, she completely denied them. She also denied her friends because we tried to help her as well, but she got really annoyed so there was nothing else that we could really do for her. My friend definitely was not as bad as Alice in any way but she did try to run away much like Alice. However, she came back a lot sooner and she was staying at a friends house. Alice completely left home and went to Denver where she started living at a kind of halfway house. They wanted to contact her parents but she wouldn't let them because she knew that that would be the end of her doing drugs, and she did not want that to happen. I find what is happening to Alice extremely sad, and I think that it was probably so hard for her family as well because they had no idea where she was. For a while, my friend's parents didn't know where she was either and it was pretty scary because she could've been anywhere and something could've happened to her and no one would have known. It's scary. I definitely see some resemblance between my friend and Alice. Both also had low self-esteem and tried to change themselves for other people. My friend always felt as though she was letting everyone down, just like Alice. My friend wasn't as near as bad as Alice was, but there are definitely some similarities.


TEEN RUNAWAYS

Alice's Style (IR 6 - #11, Nov 23 - Feb 24)

I guess it's kind of difficult to comment on Alice's writing style considering she wasn't actually writing in her diary with the intention of anyone reading it. However, I think that this makes the book extremely easy to read and enjoyable. Alice definitely had no idea that her diary would we published anonymously and read by people all over the world. She was completely and totally honest and just wrote down everything she was thinking and feeling. Sometimes this gets to be a little hard to follow because you can't understand the way she's thinking or how her mind works, but for the most part, it's really easy to comprehend what's going on in her life and why she does what she does. For example, in class when we read "The Motorcycle Diaries" by Ernesto Che Guevara, I felt as though Che went back and edited everything in his diary. You could tell that he was trying hard to impress his readers. He knew that one day he was going to have an audience so he went over his original work, edited it, and changed things. I hated "The Motorcycle Diaries," and part of the reason was because it was so over-done. Che went back and re-wrote his original thoughts and added so many trivial details and unimportant events. He also tried to make himself look like some kind of hero, and in the end, he really wasn't. It bothered me that he tried to call that book a diary when he changed so much of what he originally observed and wrote. In "Go Ask Alice," you can tell everything's coming straight from her heart. She writes like any teenage girl with a diary would write. I like that because I could really follow along and she didn't hold anything back which makes the book suspenseful, interesting, and very much enjoyable. I know that Alice wasn't really going for any particular style or form of writing, but in the end, the way she wrote the book obviously worked out because people all over the world have bought it and read it. It's unedited, true, honest stories. It makes the book very interesting to read.

Get Your Act Together (IR 6 - #13, Sept 12 - Nov 22)

Alice is really making some bad choices, and if I had known Alice I would definitely have definitely gave her some sound advice. In this section, Alice completely starts to get seriously out of control. She knows what she's doing is wrong and she should really try and stop. I would also give advice to her parents because clearly, they're not giving her the help that she needs. How could they not realize that she is so enthralled and caught up in all of the drugs? It really has to be obvious if she's high on something all of the time. It's completely ridiculous that they haven't done anything about it. They've talked to her, but obviously that isn't enough. I would tell them to take better care of their daughter and give her the help that she needs. Alice makes a new friend Chris and the two of them are pretty popular in school. She continues to drop acid and do drugs. At this point, I would tell her to get a new group of friends because all of her friends are a bad influence on her and they're not into good things. She meets someone named Rickie and begins to have sex with him when she's high and on drugs and drunk. She's not using protection and she's always high so obviously this isn't a very healthy sexual relationship. Things begin to spiral more and more out of control when she starts selling drugs with Chris. She ends up selling LSD to a kid at an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL! That is absolutely crazy and sad to me. I can't believe that she would actually do that. She says that she feels sick to her stomach afterwards and she really should. That's horrible. She decides to leave and move out to Salt Lake City with Chris. She actually makes one good decision before doing this - she tells the cops about Richie and how he sells drugs. This is a good decision for her because she got herself away from something she knew was bad. In Salt Lake City, she lives in a crummy apartment with an okay job. At this point, I would obviously tell Alice to get back home. I think the advice to give Alice is pretty obvious. She should really try rehab and she should try to reach out to her family for her support. Her family should really try and search for Alice before it's too late.

Wow! (IR 5 - #4, July 20 - Sept 10)

This section seriously surprised me so much! I figured that Alice would get turned on to drugs and maybe just smoke some marijuana and drink, but she's seriously taking this to a whole new level. It's actually getting kind of scary. She's completely becoming dependent on the drugs. She starts trying speed, and she says that she feels as though she's a completely new, better, and different person. When I heard that I knew that she would obviously continue to take the drugs because she feels better about herself when she's on them. I'm very suprised about all of the drugs that she's trying and doing. However, I realized during the time the book takes place, the drugs were much more readily available and easy to get. Still, the drugs are extremely intense and definitely mind-altering. Alice's LSD trip from the last section I read was insane. She said that she was hearing music and that she was surrounded by a ton of colors and she could hear what was going on next door. This was very suprising and crazy to me. I can't imagine ever having that experience; it seems so surreal. Alice keeps talking about how she feels bad about doing drugs and she knows that they're really bad for her and she shouldn't do them, but she keeps going to parties where they're readily available. She goes to her friend Bill's one night and drops acid again. She then spends the entire party staring at her hand. She then loses her virginity to Bill while on acid. Her life pretty much keeps getting crazier and crazier. You can tell that she's not really going to be able to pull herself out of the hole that she's got herself into with all these drugs. I just really can't believe everything she's doing to herself and all the drugs that she's become dependent on...she can't even sleep without sleeping pills! And she can't be alert during the day without uppers so she has to take the uppers to stay awake and then she's needs to take the sleeping pills to go to bed because she's so high strung. It's getting so bad. I'm suprised that everything happened so incredibly fast. Now, she doesn't even have Beth because they both changed so much over the summer. Things really aren't looking to good for Alice.

DRUG ADDICTION

I Was Right! (IR 4 - #6, April 10 - July 14)

As it turns out, I was right about my predictions that Alice would start to use drugs. However, I wasn't thinking that Alice would find a new friend, but she did! When Alice goes to stays with her grandparents for the summer, she finds a girl that she gets along with on her grandparent's block. Her name's Beth and she seemed to be a very good influence on Alice. Beth's Jewish and Alice becomes extremely fascinated by this because she's never really met or had an in-depth conversation with anyone who was Jewish before. Alice and Beth really hit it off, and I definitely wasn't expecting this at all. I thought that it would just be Alice and Greta sticking together and Alice wouldn't branch out, but she did. She didn't really branch out that much considering she only made one friend, but Beth seems to be much of a better friend then Greta. Beth and Alice decide to go on a double date with these two Jewish boys, but the guy Alice goes with turns out to be kind of a creep. This really bothered me because I was kind of excited for Alice to find a new guy and it definitely would have been a good suprise if she did! However, that isn't the case. In the end, Beth ends up going to a Jewish summer camp and both the girls are extremely upset because they've really grown close. One day in town, Alice makes a new friend Jill. This is also another unpredicted thing. I really didn't think Alice would meet anyone else or want to hang out with anyone else for that matter because of all her insecurities. Jill's really popular and pretty and she invites Alice to a party. At the party, someone slips some LSD into Alice's soda and she trips. I knew that Alice would start doing drugs. After she gets home she's extremely freaked out about what happened but she decides that she wants to try marijuana. I was right with my prediction. Alice is going to start to turn to drugs as a form of entertainment and self-destructiveness. She was mad at herself for doing LSD, but now she wants to try marijuana. She knows it's wrong but she still wants to try it...it's self destructive behavior.