Go Ask Alice Research Paper

As teenagers travel through adolescence, they mature at different rates. Their gaps in maturity often lead teens to insecurity. Causes of mental disorders and diseases can be as simple as being rejected by a girl, boy, or group of people. The word of mouth is a huge antagonist of the deterioration of one’s self efficacy. Girls have always felt the need to be thought of as beautiful, both physically and mentally, but it has become increasingly more important to girls of younger ages. If a teenager does not feel normal, welcomed, and included they are more likely to think something is wrong with them rather than just finding someone that they do fit in with. In the books Go Ask Alice, Letting Ana Go, and 13 Reasons Why, two anonymous authors …show more content…
The anonymous author of Go Ask Alice depicts a frightening, yet realistic picture of the teenagers “ragged descent from the tame ecosystem of late-’60s suburbia to the edgier pleasures of acid and speed and finally into the grim realities of full-fledged addiction itself”.(Jamison) The anonymous character of Go Ask Alice feels pressured to fit in and finds herself unknowingly dropping LSD at a party. When the girl, “Alice”, realizes that she had been given LSD without knowing, she feels pressured by her peers at the party and decides to do nothing about the fact that she just took illegal and powerfully addictive drugs. Lauren Adams wrote “this diary depicts all the confusion, loneliness and rebellion associated with adolescence” and she could not be …show more content…
Her parents are the quintessential parents of the 1960’s; they are happy go lucky people asking their three children how school was each day with a smile plastered on their faces. Although Alice’s parents seem quite perfect they lack the most important quality of good parents. They cannot communicate with their kids and most importantly their teenage daughter. We know that Alice doesn’t feel comfortable talking to her parents about her everyday life let alone her sex life and use of drugs because she feels the need to confide in her diary about such things as a way of catharsis. It is because of facts like these that we wonder if Alice’s parents are to blame for her “drug use and sexual conduct”? (Sova). In a lot of cases such as the book “Letting Ana Go” “parents and coaches receive a good deal of blame for praising the cosmetic benefits of weight loss, heedless of the consequences”(Kraus). In “Letting Ana Go” the main character of the diary is asked by her coach to keep a book of what she eats. Ana “starts obsessively keeping track of her caloric intake after her father leaves her (overweight) mother”(Gershowitz). “The father in this book is not a great man, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that the main character (whose name is never revealed) believed that the reason her father left her mother was because her mother was overweight.”(Pulse). The main character associates the traumatic event of her father leaving (whether