Go Ask Alice
This book is actually a real diary, written by a 15 year old American girl who is tossed into the world of drugs. The girl has the "perfect" life but is forced to change from a child to an adult virtually overnight. She develops a crass attitude, and becomes paranoid, all because of her newly found lust for drugs.
It didn't just happen overnight. She started to take sleeping pills and tranquilizers to fall asleep but friends slipped her LSD and from then on she was hooked. She felt insecure and alone, so when the "popular group" invited her to join them she leapt at the chance. She fits right in by being introduced to drugs such as Speed and torpedos. She starts to experiment with more use of drugs and pre-marital sex.
She starts pushing drugs at school for her new boyfriend Ritchie which will give her a rep she won't be able to shake off father on down the road. It turns out though, that Ritchie is gay as she soon finds out, she was used and feels terrible so…..
Feeling her life is depressing, with her parents harping at her about her looks and grades, and her peers ignoring her at her new school, she runs away with a girl a year older than herself, Chris. They go to the city of San Francisco to escape it all. They live in a one bedroom dirty apartment, saving their money until they can open up their own little boutique. They find jobs with wonderful bosses who invite them out. One is a wonderful old man with a large family who accepts them as their own. The other boss is a very wealthy woman who loves to throw parties and lets the girls crash at her place. They think everything is wonderful until one evening they are sitting with her and her boyfriend and they try heroin and then speed and then are brutally raped. They are disgusted with this lifestyle so they head out to start a boutique for themselves.
After a while with the boutique the two are over with it and decide to head home, she calls her mother and is picked up the next evening at the airport by her families warm embrace.
Christmas time has come and she is happy as can be. No more drugs, happy to be with her family and ready to get rid of her old life and on with the new.
Connie, a stereotypical fifteen year old girl, views her life and her family with dissatisfaction. Jealous around her twenty-four year old sister, June, despite June’s outward plainness, and tense around her irksome mother, Connie escapes to the mall with her friends. She and her clique of friends feel like they own the place, and the rest of the world: “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home…” (1-2). The sense of freedom intoxicates them.
The book is set in Reno, Nevada. Kristina gets clean for her baby but only a couple of short months after she has Hunter, she starts getting bored again. Het mother and step father have agreed to look after Hunter if she gets her GED and goes to college. Kristina decides to hit up her old party buddy, Robyn. Sneaking around her parents back in Crank, has made Kristina's parents put her on restrictions and be watched at all times. But Kristina's mom thinking it's a "college fair", agrees to let her go. While at Robyn's, she meets Trey. A roommate of a friend who would become the love of her life. Due to college, Kristina only sees Trey every few weeks and gets a phone call or two a week since Trey is always "busy". She gets a job shortly after at 7/11 so she can support her "old" habit, which she claims she can still have a great life and not become addicted by smoking small quantities. To everyones surprise, Kristina's father deci...
The first coming-of-age aspect both girls have is an epiphany. After running away from home, Lily finds herself and her black housekeeper living
...her father’s intense racism and discrimination so she hid the relationship at all costs. Connie realized that she could never marry an African American man because of her father’s racial intolerance. If she were to have a mixed child, that child would be greatly discriminated against because of hypodecent. One day, Connie’s dad heard rumors about her relationship so he drove her car to the middle of nowhere, and tore it apart. Then, he took his shotgun and went to look for Connie and her boyfriend. Connie was warned before her father found her, and she was forced to leave town for over six months. Connie’s father burned her clothes, so she had to leave town with no car, no clothes and no money at sixteen years old. Connie had lived in poverty her entire life, but when she got kicked out she learned to live with no shelter and sometimes no food at all.
Maggie, the protagonist, lives in a slum on the lower East side of the Bowery in NYC. She lives in the tenement housing with her mother, Mary and her brother, Jimmie. It’s the turn of the 18th century and this Irish immigrant family is poor. Mary is a drunk and her brother, Jimmie drinks and fights with everyone. Maggie doesn’t go to school because everybody has to work. She works in the sweatshop, sewing clothes. Her life is filled with poverty and gloom. Maggie meets Pete and she is impressed that Pete wears nice outfits. Pete likes her too. He takes her to the live theater plenty of times. She’s sees his clothing as a symbol of wealth and that he takes her out to places where she never been before. She sees Pete and the money he spends on her as a way out of her dreary life. She leaves her home and goes to live with Pete to have a better life. She thinks he loves her, but she has gone to devil. Soon after Pete meets Nellie and he dumps Maggie. She has nowhere to go and so she goes home. Her family doesn’t allow her to come back. Mary tells her she is a disgrace and they ridicule her in front of all the neighbors. Even the little children are warned to stay away from her. Maggie leaves with nowhere to go. Pete tells her not to bother him; he doesn’t love her, now he’s in love with Nellie. No one is kind to her and so she begins to walk the streets. She turns to...
In society, many kids are exposed to drugs at a very young age such as Baby. Since Baby’s father is a heroin addiction, she would always experience Jules under the influence of drugs. Jules influenced Baby the most by exposing her to drugs which made her lose her childhood innocence. “I was very firm on the idea that I would become a drug addict too now. I didn’t care what drug I was going to be addicted too” (O’ Neill 72). Baby does not have any knowledge about drugs. She believes that her knowledge of drugs comes from her father and her father’s friends; majority of them were “junkies”. Jules’ addiction eventually got worse and he began to release his problems by abusing Baby; the relationship between her father and her becomes more distant. She feels that if she tries heroin, she will be able to become closer to her dad. At this point in time Baby is very vulnerable because she’s basically raising herself on her own; her dad is not there for her which leaves Baby with no choice but to let go of her innocence, due to adult temptation.
While reading the short story “Clean” by Amy Reed I came to a better understanding on substance abuse, and what causes it to start. In her novel Reed portrays ordinary teenagers, then demonstrates how drugs and/or alcohol becomes such a factor in an average teenager’s life. In the beginning of the s...
... consideration, such as her age, family life style, religious belief, social economic and cultural differences, in conducting our assessment. The reasoning for a young girl to feel the need to use substances as an answer for life is a difficult challenge. Going forward with help start with the adolescent, she must have the desire to walk away from the atmosphere of drugs. Putting the necessary steps into action also begins with the family, their cooperation and willingness to walk the extra mile is another key to the recovery process. The adolescent and her family working with the social are instrumental in the social worker using all of the resources available to start them on the path to recovery.
In the United States, the feminist movement was a civil rights issue that sought to establish equality for women. The movement aimed to transform the lives of women in American society and exerted a profound global effect throughout the twentieth century. Today, individuals who support this movement are identified as feminist: an ideology that all individuals should identify with. Feminism is the doctrine that advocates women 's rights which advocates political, economic, and social equality in comparison to men (“feminism”). This movement for equality is a rational and logical idea that the Bill of Rights and the Constitution should be expanded to accommodate the other half of the human population, promoting inclusion, individual identity,
Drugs are used to escape the real and move into the surreal world of one’s own imaginations, where the pain is gone and one believes one can be happy. People look on their life, their world, their own reality, and feel sickened by the uncaringly blunt vision. Those too weak to stand up to this hard life seek their escape. They believe this escape may be found in chemicals that can alter the mind, placing a delusional peace in the place of their own depression: “Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly halucinant,” (52). They do this with alcohol, acid, crack, cocaine, heroine, opium, even marijuana for the commoner economy. These people would rather hide behind the haze than deal with real problems. “...A gramme is better than a damn.” (55).
Jean Paul Sartre's philosophy is one of the most popular systems of thought in the school called existentialism. Sartre valued human freedom and choice, and held it in the highest regard. To be able to live an authentic existence, one must take responsibility for all the actions that he freely chooses. This total freedom that man faces often throws him into a state of existential anguish, wherein he is burdened by the hardship of having to choose all the time. Thus, there ensues the temptation for man to live a life of inauthenticity, by leaning on preset rules or guidelines, and objective norms. This would consist the idea of bad faith.
In her sophomore year, when her parents get divorced, she is thrown into emotional turmoil. Unable to cope with the idea of a disloyal father, she lashes out against her best friend, Katya, who plays a significant role in helping Gretchen discovery her sexuality.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland follows the story of young Alice trapped in the world of Wonderland after falling down through a rabbit-hole. The rabbit-hole which is filled with bookshelves, maps, and other objects foreshadows the set of rules, the ones Alice is normally accustomed to, will be defied in Wonderland. This conflict between her world and Wonderland becomes evident shortly after her arrival as evinced by chaos in “Pool of Tears” and Alice brings up the main theme of the book “was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I am not the same, the next question is who am I?” (Carroll 18). After Alice fails to resolve her identity crisis using her friends, Alice says “Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here til I’m somebody else” (Carroll 19). Hence in the beginning, Alice is showing her dependency on others to define her identity. Nevertheless when her name is called as a witness in chapter 12, Alice replies “HERE!” without any signs of hesitation (Carroll 103). Close examination of the plot in Alice in Wonderland reveals that experiential learning involving sizes leads Alice to think logically and rationally. Alice then attempts to explore Wonderland analytically and becomes more independent as the outcome. With these qualities, Alice resolves her identity crisis by recognizing Wonderland is nothing but a dream created by her mind.
Although the novel is notorious for its satire and parodies, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland main theme is the transition between childhood and adulthood. Moreover, Alice’s adventures illustrate the perplexing struggle between child and adult mentalities as she explores the curious world of development know as Wonderland. From the beginning in the hallway of doors, Alice stands at an awkward disposition. The hallway contains dozens of doors that are all locked. Alice’s pre-adolescent stage parallels with her position in the hallway. Alice’s position in the hallway represents that she is at a stage stuck between being a child and a young woman. She posses a small golden key to ...
Alice in Wonderland belongs to the nonsense genre, and even if most of what happens to Alice is quite illogical, the main character is not. “The Alice books are, above all, about growing up” (Kincaid, page 93); indeed, Alice starts her journey as a scared little girl, however, at the end of what we discover to be just a dream, she has entered the adolescence phase with a new way to approach the mentally exhausting and queer Wonderland. It is important to consider the whole story when analyzing the growth of the character, because the meaning of an event or a sentence is more likely to mean what it truly looks like rather than an explanation regarding subconscious and Freudian interpretations. Morton states “that the books should possess any unity of purpose seems on the surface unlikely” (Morton, page 509), but it’s better to consider the disconnected narrative and the main character separately, since the girl doesn’t belong to Wonderland, which is, as Morton says, with no intrinsic unity. Whereas, there are a few key turning points where it is possible to see how Alice is changing, something that is visible throughout her journey. Carroll wants to tell the story of a girl who has to become braver in order to contend with challenges like the pool made by her own tears, or assertive characters, like the Queen.