Listen now | This is a big one! One my literary heroes, John Dolan aka Gary Brecher aka The War Nerd comes onto RITTOM to discuss Rick Emerson’s “Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries” and the broader topic of literary forgery and fraud. You may have read some of Beatrice Sparks’ fabulisms in middle school, maybe even got assigned such dubious classics as “Go Ask Alice” without having been told it wasn’t a real druggie diary, but the fabrication of a supremely frustrated middle class Mormon housewife. John and I get into the broader history of literary forgery, why people produce and believe them, and some dirty truths about the reader-author-publisher relationship. “Unmask Alice” is a great book and this was a fantastic discussion, if I do say so myself.
I like Strange Aeons' stuff