She exploited dozens of teens

Not only did this author who made an entire career exploiting teens and their problems by publishing and embellishing their diaries, but she also exploited dozens of other teens by telling those she found to write down their stories for her.

Beatrice Sparks

1971 druggie diary ‘Go Ask Alice’ was made up by a suburban housewife

In 1971, young-adult classic “Go Ask Alice” shocked readers with its frank depiction of an American girl’s descent into rampant drug addiction.

Billed as the “real diary” of an anonymous, white suburban teen, the book starts with the 15-year-old dabbling in psychedelics before plunging into heroin, homelessness, prostitution and eventual overdose.

“Another day, another blow job,” reads one entry.

“Today I sold ten stamps of LSD to a little kid at the grade school who was not even nine years old,” reads another.

One of the most censored books in school libraries, “Go Ask Alice” became a rite of passage for young American readers, fueling the War on Drugs and spawning a gritty new YA literary genre. It received top honors, including the American Library Association’s Best Books for Young Adults. Several critics favorably compared the memoir to Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl.”

More than 5 million copies later, the book continues to shock a new generation on #BookTok.

But to some, the trajectory of Alice’s downfall — from one acid-laced soda to shooting speed before trying marijuana — seems like uninformed anti-drug propaganda.

Retired radio personality Rick Emerson is one such reader. He was floored by the book in high school, but it failed to pass the smell test as an adult. In 2015, he looked into the background of the book’s mysterious copyright holder, a UCLA-trained therapist named Beatrice Sparks. The result of his seven-year investigation is “Unmask Alice” (BenBella Books), out now —the first full unraveling of the “Go Ask Alice” myth. It’s a story of ambition, deceit and a gullible public, hungry for morality tales.

Born in 1917 in Idaho and raised in Utah, Sparks left high school her sophomore year to work as a waitress after her father scandalized her Mormon community by abandoning his family. Sparks landed on her feet, marrying an oilman, a fellow Mormon who parlayed his earnings into real estate investments, and had three children. The Sparks family bounced from Texas to California before returning to Utah, where Sparks unsuccessfully tried to break into publishing. – Source