Reading Response: Go Ask Alice

       Go Ask Alice is a book supposedly by an anonymous diarist. This story goes through a 2-year downwards spiral of Alice’s life as a drug addict. We see how she fails to communicate with the ones who love her, takes advantage of the privileges  given to her and turns to drugs thinking it would end under her control. Somehow that results in a horrible life style in which she never could’ve imagined herself getting accustomed to. This leads me to think that the claim in this book is not only can drugs complicate your life but they can end it as well.

  This book gives a unique perspective on how drugs can complicate and completely change your life style.  For example, in the last diary entry before coming back home, Alice writes, “I have just read the stuff I wrote in the last few weeks… I could never have written things like that! I could never have done things like that! It was another person.” In Alice’s case, it came to a point where she couldn’t even recognize herself, or her thoughts anymore. It was just a big illusion or version of reality that she wanted to believe in. A version where drugs were normal. After a while Alice eventually admits to herself that, “After you’ve had it, there isn’t even life without drugs.” It then elaborates and explains than she’s either doing drugs or completely paranoid about even touching them. Then she ends up relapsing and the cycle begins. You start to stop trusting yourself and become completely reliant on the people around you without even realizing it. Which is horrible when you’re reliant on the wrong people for the wrong reasons, like Alice was. So it’s probably an understatement to say that drugs complicated Alice’s life.

Go Ask Alice also shows how drug addictions, to some limits, could end your life, symbolically and literally. For example, when she was actually trying to stay off drugs she wrote, “ I want to get in with the square kids [at school], but I don’t see how I’m going to do it with my reputation hanging over me.” Not only this time though, in this portion of the book she kept feeling like she didn’t belong anywhere, and her past kept haunting her throughout the process. It was only a matter of time before her suicidal thoughts came back. Then the epilogue came, which only stated, “ The subject of this book died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary [from a drug overdose].” That was practically all that was mentioned. All we knew was that she died from drugs. It could’ve been accidental, suicidal, or maybe the vengeful stoner kids, she thought were her friends before, came back to, once again, slip her a deadly dose. Either way, her death entirely started with drugs.

In conclusion, drugs will always find a way to complicate your life and result in the worst circumstances. I think this book portrayed this issue in one of it’s truest forms, and really showed that a life with drugs can never end well. If you think about it, this story could’ve saved a person from a lifetime that no one should have to face, simply from changing their outlook on drugs entirely.