Who is Dr. Beatrice Sparks? Well, for starters, according to people who've done the research she's not actually a doctor at all. A devout Mormon, she probably had an undergraduate degree in psychology and worked at the Utah State Mental Hospital as a music therapist.
But she's best known as the force behind books like Go Ask Alice by Anonymous, Almost Lost by Anonymous, Annie's Baby by Anonymous, Kim: Empty Inside by Anonymous, and Jay's Journal also by Anonymous.
Fortunately for all those anonymous, and frequently dead, teenagers Dr. Beatrice Sparks will tell their totally 100% true stories of how not listening to their parents, disobeying the church, and getting involved with drugs, boys, eating disorders, running away, or Ouija boards led them directly to their dooms. The fact that the family which brought the diary of their son, real life teen suicide Alden Barrett, to Sparks in 1974 and asked her to do a Go Ask Alice on it to keep other kids from killing themselves basically imploded after Sparks pulled 21 out of 212 diary entries and fabricated the rest to produce Jay's Journal, turning the book into a Satanic Panic hayride from Hell, shouldn't stop us from enjoying the way Sparks turned the corpse of a 16-year-old into her own little moneymaker.
In fact, nothing has stopped Sparks from enjoying her own success.
“Jay, 16 1/2 years old," the 1978 book begins. "Had been into witchcraft, how deeply neither his mother nor his father ever expected, until after Jay put his father’s pistol against his right temple and pulled the trigger.”
Jay's just a sweet, mixed-up kid in Utah who loves debate team, drama club, and sports, and whose strongest epithet is "Oh, Judas." He also refers to people he dislikes as "she's a real turkey-tail." And when given a journal he writes in it, "Writing might be good therapy for me in a way, though. Indeed, a means of getting hostile things out of my system."
Q: What 16-year-old kid speaks like this?
A: An adult looking to cash a paycheck by imitating a 16-year-old kid.
Like a lot of young dudes, trouble starts brewing for Jay when he falls in love with the results of his own IQ test:*
"I had an IQ test in school today and it’s 149+. Man, that makes me so proud. A genius! Me, a genius!"
Later he decides to hide his high score from his two best friends, Del and Brad, because "well…it’s hard to be different." Then he falls for Debbie, the first foxy young lady to lead him astray. Jay writes a lot of poetry and of Debbie he rhapsodizes:
Love and respect are one
In the sun
That shines in Debbie's corn silk hair
Also, she makes him steal uppers and downers from his dad's pharmacy, compounding her crime by referring to them as "uppies" and "downies", and making him cover up his crime by refilling the capsules with powdered milk. Jay gets busted and sent to Pine Boys' School after his dad's pharmacy is caught selling adulterated pharmaceuticals to patients who wind up screaming in agony from their unmanaged pain.
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Would he? Would God even want me now?
At juvie, Jay meets Pete and, well, "Pete’s into Astara and all forms of the occult. It’s so far out it shatters my wavelengths. He talks so easily about intuition, meditation, ESP, auras, life after death, the oversoul, how much karma a person must erase before they are liberated, how they can better influence the world in the new age, how they can recognize their soul mate, mysticism, esoteric science, hidden teachings of the ancients, the equations of life, etc."
Sounds like marriage material. And Jay is definitely in love with Pete after this New Age blabbermouth moves a chair with his mind, psychically causes a wart on Jay's finger to disappear, and asks the real questions like, "Did Atlantis genuinely once exist? Does it still?"
Clearly asking questions about the possible existence of ancient Atlantis can only lead in one direction: STRAIGHT TO HELL. But the road to Hell is paved with family dinners and the second he's out of Pine Boys’, Jay attends a family Thanksgiving and tries to expand his cousins' consciousness:
"I tried to explain a little to them about Transcendental Meditation and Cosmic Realization for inner peace…Superficious old dumb squares…Oh God, how could they be so mean to me?"
It's pretty easy, actually, because by this point Jay is babbling nonstop about "O" (his code word for "the occult"), cosmic consciousness, calling auras "auwas" as if he has a lisp, and fooling around with Ouija boards. Also, he meets Tina, another young lady who immediately captures his heart:
Oh Tina
I love thee
And the sacred ancient truths
You've brought to me.
He really wants to get a summer job and buy a car and be in the school play and do debate team, but Tina wants him to take PCP and come to orgies where they screw animals. She tries to convince Jay that they'll only do white witchcraft but to make sure that she keeps her promise she needs to start her own coven with the two of them as leader.
Jay questions her reasoning and breaks up with Tina, but she destroys his life with witchcraft, and soon he comes crawling back and they keep doing kooky "O" stuff like moving coins with their minds, levitating each other, and using witchcraft to destroy his opponents in debate. "She felt as if our auwas had merged," Jay rhapsodizes, but being a respectful young man he knows that if you merge auwas with a girl you have to marry her.
The two tie the knot in a midnight ceremony in a graveyard "and it's fantastic" even though the officiant strangles a kitten on their altar and try as they might they can't use their auwas to bring it back to life. But kittens are kid stuff, and soon they're roaming the countryside in their van, mutilating cattle and baptizing each other in bathtubs full of bull's blood:
"All the blood was dumped into the tub and one by one we were baptized in it, washing the sins and imperfections of our pre-O life away! Our heads were anointed with a few drops of the urine we had milked out of the bull's dingy as he was laying there."
They're so powerful that Tina causes one kid's appendix to rupture so Jay can get “the Robert Redford part” in their high school production of Barefoot in the Park, but then Brad and Del make a deal with the devil and die in car accidents and Jay is all bummed out and sitting around his bedroom when a demon wearing a jumpsuit named Raul appears and kind of possesses Jay. It's very upsetting when Jay's little brother tells him he's not himself anymore, and he's totally planning to visit the Bishop of his church and tell him what happened when he decides that he doesn't want to get his hair cut or do any of the other normal things that normal people do and he shoots himself instead.
As a final kicker, he wills all his earthly possessions to Debbie. Suck it, Tina!
"DEAR ANYBODY - NOBODY - EVERYBODY!" screams the end of this book. "Please let Jay not have died in vain!!!!"
As Beatrice Sparks writes in her introduction, stories like this are super-duper important for kids to read because she's channeling the voice of so many "real" teens.
"The voice of every kid hooked on drugs, alcohol, or the occult joins the sad chorus, 'Not me! I didn't think it could ever happen to me! I WAS SURE I COULD HANDLE IT!'"
Of course, since none of this actually happened to anyone, the question remains.
What has Jay's Journal actually accomplished? Has it warned teens away from the occult? Probably not, but it did help Beatrice Sparks make a lot of money. And it resulted in everyone in the local community figuring out who "Jay" actually was.
That's the real Alden Barrett's headstone. Mistaking the fabricated journal for reality, people continue to vandalize it to this day.
You can read the full details of what went on between his family and Beatrice Sparks over here in the Salt Lake City Weekly. Sparks herself doesn't know what the problem is, however. After all, she sent Barrett's family a $75 check.
*I feel comfortable insulting Jay because while real-life Alden Barrett was probably a sweet, mixed-up kid in a lot of pain, Jay is a fictional creation of Dr. Beatrice Sparks, a not-so-sweet, sanctimonious con artist who made bank on the bodies of dead children. Mocking her creation makes a mockery of no one but her.