Beatrice Sparks

Beatrice Sparks was born in Goldburg, Idaho, and died in 2012. She worked with teenagers from the mid-1950s, trained in part at UCLA and Brigham Young University, and described herself as a youth counselor. She was also a Latter-day Saint. Her papers are held at Brigham Young University. Critics have questioned how far her qualifications and experience really went.

She is known for a single, odd kind of book: the "real diary" of a troubled teenager, published anonymously and framed as a warning. The subjects were topical and alarming, among them drug abuse, Satanism, teenage pregnancy and AIDS. Sparks always presented herself as the person who found and edited the diaries. The U.S. Copyright Office, however, lists her as sole author of all but two of them.

Go Ask Alice is the best known, credited to "Anonymous" and still widely read and argued over. Jay's Journal and Annie's Baby followed the same formula with new subjects. The journalist Rick Emerson later examined her work in Unmask Alice, which argues that the diaries were her own invention. Treat that as his claim, though the copyright records point the same way.

Start with Go Ask Alice, the only title of hers listed here and the one that defined the genre. Read it as a period piece and keep in mind that its claim to be a genuine diary is disputed. If you want to see how she reused the format, Jay's Journal is the obvious second book.