on
21st of April,2000
Go Ask Alice is a story about
a drugaddict teenager and her attemts to escape from them.
GO ASK ALICE (summary)
Alice started writing
her diary shortly before her 15th birthday, because her boyfriend broke up with
her and she felt really down, unpopular, ugly and missunderstood by everybody
even by her parents. She decided to change and started to exercise every
morning and eat healthy. Later on, her dad had been
invited to become the Dean of Political Science in another city and the whole
family had to move there. Alice was very scared
of her new life in a new city,
she was wondering how she was going to make it up in a new school with new
kids. Finally the first schoolday arrived and it was like she had it always
expected. Nobody talked to her during the whole endlessly long day and during
the lunch period she fled to the nurse`s office and said she had a headache
just to stay away from the crowd of kids. Time went by and she kept being alone
without friends she didn`t bother about her look anylonger and felt rotten.One
day she met a girl on her way from school, who was really good looking but very
shy. The two girls became best friends, they shared everything together, problems, joy and all the stuff girls talk about when they
are alone. In the summer holidays Alice
visited her grandparents, she had a very good releationship with them, even
better than with her parents. She was delightfully surprised as Jill, who never
talked to her before or even knew that she existed, invited Alice to a Party at her place. Alice was so happy she
could cry the party was great everybody seemed to be
really nice and friendly. Jill winked at Alice
and told her that they were going to play a game called "Button! Button! Who
has the Button?" Alice
didn´t know what that means but she was afraid to expose herself if she would
ask. All the kids got a bottle of coke and they had to drink it, so did Alice but suddenly she
began to feel something strange inside herself it felt like a storm. The only
thing she could remember was that first she thought the kids at the party
wanted to poison her, but then she remembered Bill Thomson saying: " enjoy your trip, I`ll take care of you." For the first
time in her life she felt completely uninhibitited, when she began to come down
she was told that 10 of the 14 bottles of coke contained LSD. From now on she
began to date Bill and take drugs regularly, because she was curious at the
effect of different drugs. After Gramps had had a heart attack Alice began to cool down, she stayed at home helping with the cooking and so on. She decided to trip
a last time before going home and never try drugs again, so she went to Bill`s
place where already were other kids and took one last trip on acid, well the
trace of it was, she lost her virginity. One day before going home she met
Roger, her first and only true love, again, with whom
she built up a friendship even through she lived in an other city. Back home
she took Dexies to to stay high at school and at work and on dates, then she
had to take tranquilizers to bear up at home. She met Chris and the two became
best friends they had even taken the same job and she first tried pot with her.
The two met Ted and Richi who were already in college, they got stoned
tougether nerly every night and Alice
fell in love with Rich she even sold drugs to junior high school kids for him.
As Alice
realized that she wasn`t the one and only girl in his life she stopped selling
and turned Richi to the police. They decided it would be impossible to change
while they were in this city so they went to cut out and go to San Francisco. After hard work of searching
for a job both of them found a job in shops.The owners of the shops were very
understanding and nice. Shelia the boss of Chris invited them to a party, Alice couldn`t resist and
took drugs again but this time she tried heroin and as a result she got raped
without knowing it . She and Chris quit their jobs and
found a new appartment which they designed inside by themselves and a lot of
kids visited them regularly, but by the time Alice got homesick and called her
parents to pick her up and returned back home, everything seemed to be great a
happy new year party, a lot of fun and a loving family. All the problems
started when Alice
has to go to school again, she was pulled down by the teachers and kids no one
believed she was clean so she got one more time by group pressure into
drugtaking. After the police raided Chris`s house, Alice`s parents became
worried they started to babysit Alice as if she was a small child they even didn`t
let her go to the bathroom alone. The Pressure at home was so big that she
couldn`t stand it any longer and fled to Oregon
with some other kids who were also drug addicted. In Coos
Bay she met Doris, a 14 year old girl
who was raped by her stepfather and her brothers, she seemed to know everybody
here, she turned Alice
to baby prostitution, by the time she got more turned on girls then on boys.
After she had discussed the Problems with some kids who were stoned she went to
a church and talked to a priest who called her parents and Alice decided to
return home and wante to start work as a social worker to help drug addicted
kids to solve their problems without drug taking.She promised to her self to
stay off drugs. From this moment on she had a very hard life, ther were two
groups of kids at her school one of them were the kids who never took drugs and
hadn`t even thought of it and the other one was the doper gang who started to
manipulate Alice.Alice began to study a lot just to stay at home and prove that
she can manage it to be good at school again and also to prove herself that she
can mange without drugs. She started to go the university library where she met
Joel. They met every day at the library and got very familiar to eachother but Alice didn`t tell him the
whole truth about her former life. A big effect on her further life and her
mental constitution had the death first of her grandpa and then of her grandma.
She couldn`t put up with the situation and suffered from the thought how the
dead bodies of her loving grandparents were eaten by the worms. She was also
blamed by the drug gang that the police raided their last party, and arrested
some of them. From now on she her life turned into a
nightmare. The kids swore to avenge themselves on her ,
she was pursued by them offended and abused. Nobody talked to her anymore and
by the time the drug gang seemded to loose interest on her. In the holidays she
started to babysit at a friend`s house but something had happened, she didn`t
know what she only knew that she woke up in a hospital and a lot of worms
crawled on her body, her hands had combustions and she had bleak places on her
head. She could remember eating some peanuts then she felt sick an saw her grandfather in all colours. He tried to help her
but his body was eaten by worms wich crowled over on
her. After a two weeks Alice
was released from the hospital she got a new hair cut to hide her bleak places
on her head and the doctor said that her hands will get totally ok doubtlessly
in a year. But that wasn`t the end of the bad dream, some kids from the drug
gang had turned her to the police for selling drugs to them and she was sent to
an insane asylum. It was the worst thing in her life,
she had to accept that she had a problem to go to school. She talked to the
kids there about their problems and why they got there. She found a friend with
whom she spent most of her time. Finally her parents get her out of that hole
by resud the gang to signe Alice had never sold drugs to them. At her
birthday she was surprised by Joel, she was really in love with him. She
decided she was now old enough to discuss her problems with human beings and
didn`t need to keep a diary any longer. Three weeks after her decision not to
keep a diary, Alice
died of an overdose.
Alice is a typical
teenager going through her teenager years, all teenagers have the same problems
it only depends on the parents and on the children themselves how they are
going to manage their problems. It is easier for people who are selfconfident
than for kids who are afraid of telling their problems and talking to other
people. Alice
is a kid who suffers from her loneliness and taciturnness. Sometimes she sees
her problems but she doesn`t want to change or she wants to change but she
can`t because she is not selfconfident enough to look in the mirror and say:
"That`s me! I´m as I´m and the others have to accept me like that!" The only
way make her to feel good is to take drugs.She escapes from her world into an
other dimension which makes her forget her problems and makes her feel free,
only there she can behave as she wants to. If you read her diary you can see
how she feels only by reading the words she uses. While she was in Oregon her Language
became very rough, and she uses words which are mostly used only on the street.
She had accepted that she has a problem and she would wish to live a life like
other kids but she is not strong enough to keep off drugs so she needs several
tries before she finally kept off drug taking, but the drug gang got afraid
that she could go to the police or they were just jealous that she could resist
the temptation. So they tried to get her off their way or turn her in again. Alice is a very naive person, she needs somebody who can
listen to her and share his problems with her, because Alice is a very understanding person but she
got used several times so she needs a friend who would never try to use her for
his own advantages. Such people are hard to find but in the end she found some
one whom she could trust but it was already to late
for her. The mistake her parents made was that they hadn`t seen her problem as
something important they thought she could manage it on her own so they didn`t
try hard to help her or to talk to her. When they firs reallized that she had
big problems with the students in her school they should have let her live with
her grandparents or move to an other city where she could visit another school
and build up a new reputation, they missed this chynce and their daughter.
The problems of the kids with
whom Alice has
spoken seem to be the same. Most of them ran away from home because they had
troubles with their parents, were raped or just because their parents naged
them, the most reason was that the parents wanted them to do things the didn´t want, because of
such small misunderstanding they ruined their lives.
+ sehr ausführliche Inhaltsangabe, Charakteristik und
Interpretation, sehr gutes Englisch
- einige
Tipfehler
