Reading Nonfiction Is Always a Matter of Trust
A review of ‘Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries’ by Rick Emerson
A review of ‘Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries’ by Rick Emerson
My wife reads me a few books each year. She chooses the book, there’s no theme.
She is one of those gifted individuals capable of just putting a book down, sometimes for weeks, sometimes forever. I don’t have that skill. From the time I crack a cover, the book dominates my life until I’ve reached the end.
We read at different paces.
Our reading started out as a kind of therapy. She would read for half an hour and that would be it. I’ll admit I finished The Accidental Tourist behind her back, but other than that, I have learned to be patient. Still, I need to know how a story ends, even if it’s poorly told. Recently, I found out that she did as well, but in a different way.
We were reading The Terror, Dan Simmons historical fiction about a doomed polar expedition. Once we were about halfway through, she started annotating it for me as well. So compelled was she by the story that she did outside research to see what was true, what was plausible, and what was pure fiction (besides the monster).
I don’t open books for information, I open them for stories, the journey taken by someone who spent an ungodly amount of time with all of the information. I want to know what it means, not what it is.
It never had occurred to me that people could fact-check along with the writer as they went. Having written nonfiction, and undergone the legal cross-examination my publisher arranged, that people read with their phones (or computers) nearby, trying to get more out of a story than was being presented somehow had eluded me.
People aren’t looking for spoilers so much as for improved context, a sense of what “really” happened.
My take on it always has been: trust the author. You paid for a story and you’re getting it. If you find it unsatisfying, don’t buy any more. Information is everywhere.
I don’t open books for information, I open them for the stories, the journey taken by someone who spent an ungodly amount of time with all of the information. I want to know what it means, not what it is.
So when Rick Emerson opened his introduction to Unmask Alice with an admonition against Googling while reading, I was on board immediately.
He knew that most of the facts about his work were out there and that having access to them could ruin the effect. This wasn’t a lack of confidence in his interpretation, it was a friendly warning: Don’t diminish your experience with flat facts.
[If] you buckle in and let the story take the wheel, I think you’ll be glad you did.
So much of true crime is in the presentation. We don’t read true crime to find out what happened. We read it in hope that the author will make good on their promise to make sense of it, to tell us what it might mean.
In this case, Emerson goes beyond even the story’s broadest implications to question whether there is and should be a difference between fiction and creative nonfiction. Then he finds the real-world Alice.
Why Nonfiction
Although he would never argue that Go Ask Alice is in any way a work of merit, over the course of his book Emerson illuminates the effect one mediocre book had and still is having on our culture. The War on Drugs and the Satanic Panic are among them.
I haven’t read Go Ask Alice, but as Emerson says early on, even if you haven’t read it, you know the highlights: An anonymous girl gets involved in drugs and documents her tailspin in graphic, sometimes salacious, detail. Some people say it is a fake.
It waxes and wanes in popularity, but for the latter part of the last century, it was a reliable seller in the young adult market.
My own daughter read it in this century as part of a school assignment. Whether or not you’re familiar with any part of the story, its editor, and the occasional scandals associated with Go Ask Alice, I can’t recommend following the author’s suggestion enough.
No amount of shade thrown at Truman Capote is going to undo the effect In Cold Blood had on American life and literature.
Unmask Alice is less an account than it is a story of investigation and discovery. To approach it as anything else will devalue the experience, and that would be too bad because it is a hell of a story.
This is the kind of book that would be undermined by a synopsis and even a peak around the corner could take some of the fun out of it. Emerson clips along, short paragraphs in short sections that make up longer chapters and even longer parts.
About a third of the way through I worried that the last half of the book would be padded.
It’s the downfall of many nonfiction books that the second third can feel long as the author works to justify the larger implications of the premise, and there is a moment in Unmask Alice where I’ll admit to worrying I’d hit that kind of plateau.
Then the bottom fell out, and once the descent began I was along for the ride, even as I was flabbergasted at its implications.
There was a point where I was certain that this was closer to an anthology, a demonstration of how disparate events told us something about Nixon’s war on drugs and the rise and fall of several other cultural manias that plagued us then. That plague us now.
When tied together, the combination of outrage and mild admiration at the audacity of unchallenged authority does the heavy lifting. It is a gut punch that you can feel coming but can’t prevent.
Unmask Alice reveals the truth behind the fraudulent diary and challenges our notions of what nonfiction is supposed to do.
Writing True Crime
In every true story we tell, there’s this temptation to elaborate beyond our bounds, especially when we’re the ones who have all or most of the facts. Whether a story is true or not, in the end, only matters to the writer.
No amount of shade thrown at Truman Capote is going to undo the effect In Cold Blood had on American life and literature.
This urge to tell the big-T Truth even if it isn’t supported by the facts hovers over the left shoulder of even the most diligent investigator. Overcoming it is difficult but critical.
Still, we want to believe in the investigatory process. We want to know that the author is not inventing the story from whole cloth because that is what we go to nonfiction for.
We want to say that in real life, it doesn’t matter if the story is true as long as the lesson is real. Emerson goes a long way toward undermining that common-sense thought.
We want someone to give order to chaos, to provide an answer that is little-t true even if it is unsatisfactory.
Regular readers of true crime are used to the difference between the story that is initially reported and the story that eventually shakes out.
Emerson points out how time and again, our fascination with If It Bleeds It Leads lets everyone off the hook except the victims. To watch honest objectors steamrolled because their true explanations aren’t sexy enough only enhances the frustration.
Unmask Alice challenges us to take the question of research and authority seriously, to ask ourselves what we want from our nonfiction and whether it really matters.
We want to say that in real life, it doesn’t matter if the story is true as long as the lesson is real. Emerson goes a long way toward undermining that common-sense thought.
What we read affects our actions. What we expect affects our decisions about what to read. The larger point is that our public conversation has to be about more than desired outcomes. That approach has not only eroded trust but called the need for truth-telling into question.
The Go Ask Alice phenomenon, as revealed by Emerson, is that we want simple explanations for complex problems. Our culture doesn’t want problems solved so much as it wants someone to blame for them.
This is a fact well known to the world’s most effective bad actors.
Nuts and Bolts
Emerson’s voice is clear, honest, and personal. He takes us along at a good pace. The few qualms some readers might have is that he asks for a lot of trust he hasn’t earned yet in the first half of the book.
Knocking on 350 pages, the work leaves the reader to take themselves over the precipice. I have to reiterate that when the book slows and the story seems to flag, keep reading. There are more and better twists ahead.
My only other quibble is more a formatting peeve than a serious problem. There are a lot of newspaper passages where summaries would have done just as well.
In the endnotes, Emerson explains that (for excellent reasons) he shied away from over-citing in the text, but a few sections of excerpts may make the book longer than it needs to be without adding proportionate context.
For my part, I read it in a sitting, compelled by the promises made and kept. I uttered “Oh, no” aloud at the final twist which was satisfying enough to justify trust Emerson asked for at the start.
Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson is published by Penguin Random House
Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.