Surprise, surprise. I've already finished another book. It's a short book, but it was heart-wrenching nonetheless. "Go Ask Alice" is a young-adult title containing the diary of an anonymous teenage girl who finds herself swallowed up into the world of drugs and sex, causing her to run away from home, and eventually leading to her death.
See the title's inspiration here.
A girl I work with said she read this book in "like seventh grade." I'm not sure I would've been ready to hear about acid trips and rape when I was that young, but the diarist is just about 15 when she begins using. She starts out as your average teen, talking about a crush on a boy and trying to please her parents. Her first experience with drugs is at a party where the kids decide to play the button game with tainted drinks, and it's all downhill from there.
It's pretty interesting how quickly the events unfold when seen through a diary. You don't get the normal interaction of a novel, just pure introspection. I admit I read through it pretty quickly though -- it just moved so fast and was so easy to read. I didn't mark a lot of quotes, but a few.
On parents:
Page 25: "Oh, I do hope I won't have to be a nagging mother, but I guess I'll have to be, else I don't see how anything will ever be accomplished."
Page 29: "Parents really are a poor judge of character. Sometimes I wonder how they made it to the age they are."
Various memorable moments:
Page 34-35: She describes her first acid trip. It starts with colorful patterns on the ceiling, quickly moves to her words tasting like colors, and ends up with her seeing in 100 dimensions and possessing the "wisdom of the ages."
Page 46: "I must repent and forgive myself and start over; after all I just turned 15 and I can't stop life and get off."
Page 47: "Valley of the Dolls" flashback: "Finally he broke down and gave me the pills. Actually I don't need the sleep as much as I need the escape. It's a wonderful way to escape. I think I can't stand it and then I just take a pill and wait for sweet nothingness to take over."
Page 109: After returning home from running away: "But I wonder if I will ever feel completely new again. Or will I spend the rest of my life feeling like a walking disease????"
Page 111-12: "Then (the kitten) tried to nurse my ear and the feeling in me was so big I thought I was going to break wide open. It was better than a drug trip, a thousand times better, a million times, a trillion times. These things are real!"
I'm not sure I know exactly how to feel about this book. It is definitely a testament to the torment a teenage girl can experience. You're listening to what's happening in her head, but she constantly contradicts herself, promising to never do drugs again then giving in to peer pressure the next day. It's two years of on-again, off-again tragedy. Drugs change people, control them, sweep them off their feet. They kill people.
This book would make a really interesting study, and I'll have to read it more slowly one day. But I am feeling its effects days later, even just with the constant reminder of "White Rabbit" running endlessly through my head. "Go ask Alice, I think she'll know ... "
I leave for NYU SPI in a week. I am taking five books with me, four if I finish "Solipsist" by Henry Rollins this week, which I intend to, since it belongs to my brother and he wants to lend it to my other brother too. The other chosen few are "Anais Nin Reader," "Sex and the City," "The Singer" and "Searching for God Knows What."
2 comments:
My friend Erin made me watch "Henry & June," and ever since then I've been curious about ol' Anais.
We'll have to do a better job of keeping up, because I want to hear all about NYU.
I think I might have gotten my much-needed break ... I'm going back into radio. Print journalism can kiss my ass!
I read half of "Delta of Venus" before I left Nashville. Pretty crazy stuff but quite entertaining. Congrats on radio -- you're really good at that. And I will definitely keep you updated. I already have three assignments to do!
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