Biography
Beatrice Ruby Mathews Sparks was a native of Goldburg, Custer County, Idaho. She began working with teenagers in 1955, after attending the University of California at Los Angeles and Brigham Young University. She has worked as a music therapist at Utah State Mental Hospital and taught continuing education courses at BYU.
Critics have called the precise extent of Sparks' qualifications and experience into question. The editorial credit on some of the diaries published by Sparks identifies her as "Dr Beatrice Sparks, PhD". However, when journalist Aileen Pace Nilsen interviewed Sparks for School Library Journal in 1979, she was unable to find any confirmation of where or when Sparks earned her doctorate. Nilsen also wrote that Sparks was "vague about specifics" when asked about her counselling qualifications and professional experience.
Sparks claimed her experiences working with troubled adolescents made her want to produce cautionary tales that would keep other teens from falling into the same traps. Her first work, Go Ask Alice, was published under the byline 'Anonymous' in 1971. In interviews conducted over the next few years, Sparks identified herself as the book's editor. In her interview with Nilsen, Sparks said Alice consisted partly of the actual diary of one of her patients, and partly of fictional events based on her experiences working with other teens.
In 1973, Marcella Barrett, a Pleasant Grove, Utah woman whose son Alden had committed suicide at the age of 16, read a newspaper interview with Sparks and became convinced that she was the right person to bring Alden's diary to the public. The result was Jay's Journal, which tells the story of a teenage boy drawn into Satanism. Barrett's family were horrified by the book. They insisted that Alden had never been involved with the occult and that Sparks had used only 21 entries from his journal (out of 212 supposed entries that appeared in the finished book). Sparks has stood by the book, claiming that she got the extra material from letters and interviews with Alden's friends. (See Jay's Journal for a fuller discussion.)
After Jay's Journal, Sparks produced many more 'real diaries,' including It Happened to Nancy: By an Anonymous Teenager (dealing with AIDS), Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets (gang violence), Annie's baby: the diary of Anonymous, a pregnant teenager, Treacherous love: the diary of an anonymous teenager (pupil seduced by teacher), Kim: empty inside: the diary of an anonymous teenager (eating disorders) and Finding Katie: The Diary of Anonymous, A Teenager in Foster Care.
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