How It All Goes Down
The diary begins right before Alice's fifteenth birthday. She is a pretty typical teenage girl in the late 1960s—she's mostly concerned with school, boys, her hair, and fitting in (okay, that's pretty typical for any decade).
When her father's new job causes her family to move across the country, Alice is thrust into a new school at a time when she is at best sensitive, and at worst extremely insecure. At first she flounders; she can't seem to make any new friends and just gives up on everything, including her hygiene. You know you're depressed when you just stop washing your hair.
Although she eventually makes a friend in Beth, a Jewish girl, plans are already in motion for her to go back home to stay with her Gran and Gramps for the summer. There, she falls in with the "in" crowd, who invite her to a party and then spike her soda with LSD. Even though her new friends drugged her without her consent, she loves the experience and can't wait to do it again.
From there, Alice is set on a path of hippie-era enlightenment: She takes uppers, downers, hallucinogens, and marijuana, treating drugs the way most of us would treat a bag of Halloween candy (read: inhaling the goodies and then looking for more). She even loses her virginity during a drug-fueled orgy, but she barely bats an eyelash.
When she goes home for the new school year, she pretty much abandons her BFF Beth for new friends Chris, Richie, and Ted, who share her love for getting high. She is eventually coerced into selling drugs to younger and younger customers in order to fund their habit, and although she's disturbed by the fact that a nine-year-old boy would want LSD, she's so "in love" with Richie that she continues to do it. That is, until she and Chris walk in on Ted and Richie in flagrante delicto. They vindictively report Ted and Rich to the cops and run off to San Francisco to start up a jewelry boutique and follow the hippie dream.
As you can only imagine, things start to go pear-shaped when they enter the drug scene out in California. After experiencing a brutal sexual assault, they try to make a go at it with a clean slate out in Berkeley, but once again Alice and Chris find themselves lonely, broke, and homesick, and eventually call their families so they can go home.
This process becomes a cyclical pattern for Alice: She gets clean and vows to never touch drugs again; then she—oops—finds drugs and enters a spiral of self-harm, drug abuse, and prostitution; eventually she gets tired of being hungry, poor, and taken advantage of and calls home to be rescued yet again by her patient, loving family.
Just when we think she's finally going to make it—she has herself a good, clean, up-standing boyfriend; she is invested in her schoolwork; and she is actually effectively communicating with her family—a vindictive friend from her druggie days spikes a bowl of chocolate-covered peanuts with LSD while she's babysitting a neighbor's infant. The resulting overdose leads to a severe mental breakdown and her family is forced to admit her to an insane asylum for treatment.
There she learns just how good she's always had it compared to some of the other addicts in her program. At least she wasn't abused by a stepfather at the age of eleven and forced to become a "baby prostitute" in an upscale brothel. Now her battles with her parents regarding her hairstyle seem kind of paltry.
She is eventually released back to her family, and on the eve of her seventeenth birthday everything seems to be coming up aces. She has friends that don't need needles to have fun (these are the best kind of friends), her boyfriend Joel is almost too good to be true, and her schoolwork is finally back on track.
She decides that diaries are for babies, though, so the entries stop and the book abruptly ends with an epilogue that reveals her mysterious death from overdose.