In high school, I had to read a book titled “Go Ask Alice”. It was a book composed of journal entries of a young woman who get addicted to drugs and experiences a lot of misfortune before ultimately dying from an overdose.
One of the interesting things about it was during the class discussion, we talked about how the book wasn’t actually real and that the accounts in the book might be a composition of different stories put together. An allegory of what could happens if you do drugs.
I used to think that something like that would do the opposite of keeping kids off drugs. Once you know that “Alice” wasn’t real, then what else isn’t real in the story.
It was disingenuous.
A similar book recently came out about “A million little pieces” and it was worse as the author at first claimed it was his own story and was even in the Oprah Winfrey’s book club.
But, now I think I can look upon these works from a different view point.
These stories don’t have to be 100% accurate.
It’s because we see them time and time again. Different names, different faces.
Same out come.
My daughter was telling me about a classmate at her school who was bragging about how she was high during school.
Does it matter if her name is “Alice”?