Beatrice Sparks

Beatrice Sparks, born Beatrice Ruby Mathews (January 15, 1917 – May 25, 2012) was an American writer and hoaxer who produced a series of books purporting to be the "real diaries" of troubled teenagers. The books deal with topical issues such as drug abuse, Satanism, teenage pregnancy, and AIDS, and are presented as cautionary tales. Her 1971 book Go Ask Alice (credited to "Anonymous") has sold nearly six million copies.

Although Sparks presented herself as merely the discoverer and editor of the diaries, records at the U.S. Copyright Office list her as the sole author for all but two of them. Later researchers have claimed that despite her claiming to be the editor or real teenagers diaries, she, in fact, invented the stories herself.

Biography Early life

Beatrice Ruby Mathews was born in Goldburg, Custer County, Idaho and grew up in Logan, Utah. Leaving home at 17 to move to California, she married LaVorn Sparks in 1937. The couple started a family, having three children (one of whom died in infancy) and were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After some early financial struggles, LaVorn Sparks became wealthy having successfully speculated in Texas oil during WWII.

After WWII, the Sparks family lived a very comfortable existence for nearly twenty years in Los Angeles. Usually working as "Bee Sparks" (though sometimes using the pen-name "Susan LaVorn"), aspiring writer Beatrice contributed to circulars distributed by local businesses and to church publications, and worked briefly as a stripper in her early teen years. In her self-written author bios of the period, she claimed variously to have studied at Utah State Agricultural College, or to have studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Utah.

In the early 1950's, she co-authored a play with Barbera called The Maid and the Martian, which ran in Los Angeles and was a moderate local success. (A pre-fame James Arness starred in one run of the play.) The play was eventually turned into the film Pajama Party in 1964, but after numerous changes to the idea and dialogue, Sparks' name was omitted from the film's credits.

Their kids having grown, Beatrice and LaVorn Sparks moved to a large mansion in Provo, Utah in 1964.

Beatrice Sparks had volunteered at a veteran's hospital in L.A., and continued her volunteer work at the Utah State Hospital in Provo. In later tellings by Sparks, she was a youth counselor at the hospital, as well as for a youth summer camp run on the campus of Brigham Young University -- this is where she alleges to have met the young woman who wrote the diaries that became Go Ask Alice. In fact, while it's possible she met a young woman there that was the inspiration for the book, her volunteer duties at the hospital and the summer camp were strictly administrative or organizational in nature, and did not include professional counseling.

Go Ask Alice (1971) Sparks claimed that her experiences working with troubled adolescents made her want to produce cautionary tales that would keep other teens from falling into the same traps. Her first book, Go Ask Alice, was presented by Sparks to a publisher as a diary that had been given to her by a young girl who subsequently died. Though Sparks received the book's author royalties, it was published under the byline "Anonymous" in 1971 at her agent's and publisher's insistence, as the publisher felt that by presenting the diary as the work of anonymous teen, the book would connect more strongly with the intended teen audience.. The book was presented as the diary of an unnamed teenage girl who became involved in drugs and underage sex, vowed to clean up, but then died from an overdose a few weeks after her final diary entry.

When Go Ask Alice became a bestseller with several million copies sold, and investigator Alleen Pace Nelson publicly questioned the book's veracity and verifiability. The result was Jay's Journal in 1979, which presents the purported diary of a teenage boy named Jay who was drawn into Satanism and then took his own life for ritualistic purposes. Later investigators suggested that Sparks added claims of Satanism so Jay's Journal could receive a promotional boost from then-current social concerns about that topic; conversely, the book directly influenced the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.

Doctorate claims and later work

Starting in the 1980s, Sparks claimed to be a licensed psychotherapist and youth counselor with a Ph.D. (variously described at different times as being in psychology, psychiatry or human behavior.) At various junctures, she claimed to have studied at UCLA, Columbia University and/or Brigham Young University; no records of her attending UCLA or Columbia have ever come to light, and BYU has only a record of Sparks attending a few months of undergraduate classes in 1989. Researchers have been unable to find any record of the Ph.D. she claimed on book jackets and in her resume. As well, although she claimed to be a practicing therapist, no records of her being licensed to practice in any state have ever been offered or discovered. One interviewer wrote that Sparks was "vague about specifics" when asked about her counseling qualifications and professional experience. Beatrice Sparks lived to the age of 95, and died in Provo, Utah in 2012.

Serious doubts about the provenance of the diaries and interviews that formed Sparks' work had been published as early as 1978, and the number of openly critical pieces only increased over the years, with Snopes denouncing Go Ask Alice as "manufactured hooey" in a 2003 article.

In the 2022 book Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries, investigator Rick Emerson presented evidence that most – if not all – of Sparks's works were hoaxes, made up of fabricated prose that Sparks claimed to be copies of real diaries from (or interviews with) teenagers who never actually existed; and in the case of Jay's Journal, significantly altered and padded prose from Alden Barrett's true diary.