The Fredösphere

The required reading list of an American high school student usually includes, along with works by Remarque, Knowles, and Salinger, a famously awful “anonymous” offering called Go Ask Alice. The book, billed as the real diary of an average Sixties teen, chronicles a terrifying descent into drugs and depravity. Picture Marcia Brady helping William S. Burroughs tie her off in a public lavatory and you’ve got the idea.

The thing is, it isn’t a real diary. Neither, unfortunately, are Jay’s Journal (descent into Satanism), It Happened to Nancy (descent into AIDS), or Annie’s Baby (descent into teen pregnancy). All of these penny-dreadful pseudographies were written by their supposed editor, an octogenarian Mormon former youth counselor and “music therapist” named Beatrice Sparks. You really can’t make this stuff up.

A delightful and unusual reference book, Brewer’s Rogues, Villains, and Eccentrics by William Donaldson, relates the story of Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770), “liar, exhibitionist, literary fraud, and by some accounts a genius”:

    Born in Bristol, and raised by his widowed mother, Chatterton had begun to “medievalize” himself by the age of 11, brooding over old parchments in Bristol churches. In 1763 he produced his first literary forgery, Elinore and Juga, allegedly the work of a 15th-century poet… . His greatest work was The Legend of Thomas Rowley, supposedly a priest of St. John in Bristol during the reign of Henry IV.

The public always has been obsessed with youth and with child prodigies, but, incredibly, nobody ever stops to wonder what a young man or woman—having experienced little but the comfortable world of academia—can possibly know about the larger world and the people in it. What happened to debuts written by people in their forties? Shouldn’t there be struggle? Why are those who’ve done and seen the least expected to tell us the most?

The kids harbor a strong belief that a man past the age of 45 should either be rich and in an executive position, or vanished from the workplace. I remember being introduced to my boss, a woman only a few years out of college, at my last job.

“It must be tough to be… you know,” she said.

“No, what is it that I am?” I asked.

“You know… a loser.”