Point of View

Because this book is presented as a diary, it is written exclusively from the first person past point of view, giving the reader an immediate, visceral and highly evocative sense of what Anonymous is going through. This technique manifests with particular effectiveness in several of the book's key elements, including Anonymous's loneliness, her struggles to resist the temptations of drugs, and her determination to transcend the wreckage that drug use has brought into her life, right into the reader's own realm of experience. In short, reading Go Ask Alice is very much like being in the middle of Anonymous's experiences. It's interesting to note that this point of view gives that sense of immediacy and intensity to Anonymous's accounts of her various highs as well as to her experiences when she's not using. Her encounters with acid and marijuana in particular are narrated in extraordinary detail...