Who really wrote the fabricated “Jay’s Journal” supposedly written by Alden Barrett, a Pleasant Grove teen who died by suicide in 1971? Beatrice Sparks, the same woman behind the false memoir “Go Ask Alice” that helped set the stage for the war on drugs.
In 1985, The Daily Herald in Provo ran multiple stories on Sparks and her work, publishing a weeklong series, “Satan Worship in Zion.” As recently as this June, in a case investigated by the Utah County Sheriff’s Office,“Jay’s Journal,” Emerson said, “infected the culture in all kinds of ways, and probably nowhere more than in Utah.” The type of fear-stirring that Sparks was able to capitalize on is a twisted, yet perfect formula to enrapture a small, religious and conservative town.
Sparks kept everything: Hotel bills, award pamphlets, clippings of health and religion magazines, royalty statements from her books and fan mail. She also kept carefully cut out newspaper clippings about her and her books from papers around the country — marked with green marker and red pens here and there, but mostly pristine.
A reprocessing note in one empty file reads “photocopies of materials used to edit and create ‘Jay’s Journal,’” which was removed by a student processor in September 2015. Hall, the guitarist, added that they know how damaging it is to feel that “all-encompassing judgment that’s everywhere from well-intended people.” The story, he said, has a redemptive quality for people on the fringes of society. “It gives a chance for people that are broken to be heard,” Hall said.
“Alden represents this figure that we all have in our lives,” Webb said. “Either we are the Alden, or we have someone who is close to us who is an Alden type.”
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