You’ve maybe heard of Go Ask Alice, and you’ve maybe known it was fake, but boy is it interesting to really linger on what kind of person makes that stuff up and why.

…mpromised by single-mindedness. Sparks, for all her fact-fudging, seems to have had a genuine conviction that young people in crisis needed adults to do more to understand them—a conviction so smothered by anti-drug and pro-abstinence propaganda that it’s hard to appreciate her sincerity fifty years later. Emerson’s belief that anything …

Reminds of that preface to Madame Bovary I’d read, explaining that the work’s excoriation of her adultery was still novel in its sympathy for the idea of occupying her perspective.

…te but suffered from depression. It also reproduces images and transcripts of all the entries in Alden’s actual diary; according to Scott, Sparks drew on only about a third of them, fabricating nearly ninety per cent of what she published, including entries about how, after being sent to reform school, Jay learned to levitate objects, developed E.S.P., attended midnight orgies, and was possessed by a demon named Raul. Alden’s diary does not mention t…

What details to add!