Sunday, 31 July 2022

The Aging Student Debtors of America

Karin Engstrom standing in her garden at her home in Seattle Washington.
Karin Engstrom, an eighty-one-year-old retired career counsellor, who returned to school after getting a divorce, owes a hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars in student loans.Photograph by Jovelle Tamayo for The New Yorker

On a warm October evening, in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood in a baseball field in Pittsburgh, delivering an impassioned speech about passion’s improbable subject: the federal budget. “Sometime, somewhere in this campaign, I have got to talk dollars and cents, and it’s a terrible thing to ask you people to listen for forty-five minutes to the story of the federal budget, but I am going to ask you do it,” he told the crowd. In the back of the park, a two-year-old Black girl named Betty Ann sat on the shoulders of her father, Robert, as he strained to point out the man he was sure would become President. Robert was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican—his grandfather, an enslaved man from Virginia, had been emancipated by President Abraham Lincoln. Still, he felt compelled by F.D.R.’s message. Hard times had meant he had started to pay the reporters of Pittsburgh’s Black newspaper, which he ran, out of his own pocket. Much to his distress, his wife had taken to standing in relief lines in order to feed Betty Ann and her sisters. A few weeks later, when Robert cast his ballot for F.D.R., he wept, aghast to vote against the party of Lincoln. Thereafter, he became a devoted Democrat and jumped into local politics with fervor until he fell ill, five years later. He had two dying wishes: for his wife to take over his role as a Democratic ward chairperson, and for Betty Ann and her sisters to go to college.

The family made good on both: as ward chairwoman, Robert’s wife maintained the family home as a community backbone, and Betty Ann, who asked that she and her family members be identified by first name only, grew up with a steady stream of neighbors flowing through the house. Although her mother had no money, Betty Ann was a strong student and earned enough scholarships to receive a bachelor’s and master’s degree in education. In the next few decades, she worked as a public-school teacher in Pittsburgh and Harlem, in addition to raising two children as a single mother. But she grew increasingly frustrated by the marks of educational inequity—moldy lunches, low-grade reading materials—that plagued her classrooms. “I thought the only way that I could change things was to have a higher degree,” she told me.

In 1983, at the age of fifty-two, Betty Ann enrolled in New York University’s law school. As a middle-aged Black woman, she wasn’t exactly the typical N.Y.U. law student. Her white male classmates would slyly elbow her books off the long library tables, and once, while standing at her locker, a classmate waved a ten-thousand-dollar tuition check, signed by his father, in her face. Betty Ann had borrowed twenty-nine thousand dollars in federal loans. Today, she owes $329,309.69 in student debt. She is ninety-one years old.

Americans aged sixty-two and older are the fastest-growing demographic of student borrowers. Of the forty-five million Americans who hold student debt, one in five are over fifty years old. Between 2004 and 2018, student-loan balances for borrowers over fifty increased by five hundred and twelve per cent. Perhaps because policymakers have considered student debt as the burden of upwardly mobile young people, inaction has seemed a reasonable response, as if time itself will solve the problem. But, in an era of declining wages and rising debt, Americans are not aging out of their student loans—they are aging into them.

Credit supposes that which we cannot afford today will be able to be paid back by tomorrow’s wealthier self—a self who is wealthier because of riches leveraged by these debts. Perhaps no form of credit better embodies the myth of a future, richer self than student loans. Under the vision of the free-market economist Milton Friedman, student loans emerged in the nineteen-fifties as an outgrowth of “human capital” theory, which posits the self as, above all, a unit of investment. Lending money for people to be educated was not only a sound investment—borrowers were sure to get high-paying jobs that would allow them to repay the loan—but smart macroeconomics: more educated people would increase the nation’s G.D.P. Education would be an incidental benefit.

But the surge of aging debtors calls into question the premise of education for human capital. Eroding union density, declining wages, and skyrocketing tuition have all made college less a path to high-paying jobs than an escape hatch from the worst-paying ones. Those who have taken on debt are increasingly unable to pay it off; many haven’t even received diplomas. The student-debt crisis is particularly dire for Black borrowers. Racial wealth gaps mean that Black debtors borrow more to attend college and carry balances for a longer time, effectively paying more for the same degree than their white classmates. Four years after graduating, nearly half of Black graduates owe more on their loans than their initial balance, compared with just seventeen per cent of white graduates. As a researcher and organizer with the Debt Collective, the nation’s first debtors’ union, I’m well versed in the notion of debt as a poor tax—those who have the least end up paying the most. But it was a revelation to me when I realized that elders are the fastest-growing population of student debtors. Debt, I have since understood, is also a time tax—it seizes the future, and corrodes the present, wearing down health, wealth, and pursuits of happiness.

Older student debtors are not exceptional cases within the mounting student-debt crisis; their experiences are, in fact, indicative of its hallmark features. Mounting interest, looming balances, faulty relief methods, and declining wages all force borrowers to carry loans for longer and longer, pushing student debt across generations. Older debtors shuffle their income between credit-card bills, house payments, car loans; student debts, often the furthest from their day-to-day lives, get paid off last—or don’t get paid at all. For aging borrowers on declining incomes, the crisis is acute: student debtors over sixty-five default at the highest rates. In 2015, more than a third of borrowers in their age group defaulted on their educational loans.

“Years and years of erosion of labor rights has meant that wage power has not kept up with student debt,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me. As such, student loans don’t take people out of the working class; they merely change the accounting of people living within it. Fifty-year-old David Ormsby, for example, had been working at a Home Depot in Detroit for eight years when he decided to go back to school. “I wouldn’t call it a dead-end job,” he said, but he felt he wouldn’t be able to advance without a higher degree. In 2005, he began studying part time at a local university for a bachelor’s degree in supply-chain management, while also raising his two sons and working more than fifty hours a week. Today, he holds close to ninety thousand dollars in student debt. The degree helped him secure an auto-manufacturing job with higher earnings and more satisfaction than his previous work. Still, the five-hundred-dollar monthly loan payments are hard to manage. Ormsby has begun working a second job delivering groceries to make his loan payments. “Going back to school was a good thing,” Ormsby said, but he’s frustrated that he will be in his seventies before he will be able to start saving for retirement.

David Ormsby, fifty, has begun working a second job delivering groceries to make his loan payments.Photograph by Jarod Lew for The New Yorker

Although most older student debtors have borrowed money for their own education, approximately one-third have taken out loans on behalf of a child or grandchild. Unlike direct federal loans, which have borrowing limits, parents can take on virtually infinite amounts of debt—up to the full cost of attendance each year—to finance their children’s education through a program called Parent Plus. Parent loans often come with punishing terms, such as significantly higher interest rates and scant options for relief. Parent Plus recipients are only eligible for one type of income-driven repayment program, which requires loan consolidation; any opportunities for public-service loan forgiveness are extremely limited. Some parents are stuck paying for loans even if their child dies. Calvin Nafziger, who is eighty, pays two hundred and fifty dollars each month for private loans for his son, who died three years ago. “I’ll probably be dead myself before I finish paying those off,” Nafziger said.

Student debts can plague borrowers until their last breath, jeopardizing even the government’s meagre protections for those of old age: Social Security. Defaulted student loans can trigger the Department of Education to command garnishment for tax refunds, wages, and Social Security. In 2015, more than two hundred thousand student debtors over the age of fifty had their Social Security garnished. One of them was Olivia Faison, a retired analytical chemist who is now seventy-one. Faison studied biology, chemistry, and music at Queens College in the early nineteen-eighties. “I was very fortunate to be able to get a college education on very little debt,” she said, receiving scholarships that paid for the majority of her degree and borrowing approximately nine thousand dollars for the rest. Upon graduating, she worked in private industry for several decades. But, when her company downsized in the early two-thousands, she was laid off. As an older Black woman seeking a job in the sciences, Faison struggled to get her foot in the door at other companies. Many prospective employers required her to submit her undergraduate transcripts as part of the application. But, because she still owed money from her undergraduate degree, Queens College refused to release her transcripts. (cuny ended this policy, known as transcript ransom, last year.) “My way of getting employment after 2001 was very inconsistent,” Faison said; she worked mostly temporary jobs for the next thirteen years. As her income dwindled, her loan payments became sporadic.

After getting laid off, Olivia Faison struggled to get her foot in the door at other companies.Photograph by Morgan Levy for The New Yorker
Faison’s diplomas, one from Queens College and another from the University of Nebraska Medical Center.Photograph by Morgan Levy for The New Yorker

She took her retirement as soon as she could, scraping by on a combination of food stamps and Social Security payments. She knew her debt had reduced her Social Security benefits: Faison’s last decade of earnings were her lowest. But she was shocked to learn that the outstanding student debt had enabled the Treasury Department to garnish around ten per cent of her roughly one-thousand-dollar Social Security payments since at least 2014. “It was just plunder,” she told me.

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Furious, Faison set to work contesting the offsets. She dug through complex government Web sites, made phone call after phone call, sent letters across the country. The Department of the Treasury told her to be in touch with the Department of Education. The Department of Education told her to be in touch with the private agency in charge of collecting the debts. With the help of a legal aid service, Faison learned that the collection agency, Coast Professional, did not consider her eligible for hardship exemptions because a judgment had been rendered against her in the late nineteen-eighties. A judgment? This was news to Faison, who had not been informed of a proceeding held against her. A representative reported that he could provide no more information. In 2014, Faison wrote a letter to President Obama, detailing her situation. She reminded the President of his bailout policies that granted debt relief to big banks and corporations, and asked why she, someone who “worked hard and played by the rules” her whole life, couldn’t be shown similar decency. “Mr. President,” she wrote, “if the big banks and corporations want to have the same rights as the individual, then don’t I, as a real individual, deserve to have the same rights that they do?” She never received a reply.

For his part, Obama’s attempts to reform the student-debt crisis have, in some ways, worsened it. In the twenty-tens, as student-loan balances hit one trillion dollars, Obama expanded income-driven repayment (I.D.R.) options, a relief program that began in 1993. I.D.R. allows borrowers to reduce their monthly payments to a percentage of their income, rather than in proportion to the total balance; after twenty to twenty-five years of payments, the loans are eligible for cancellation. In theory, I.D.R. offers relief to lower-income borrowers by offering lower payments and an expiration date, while recovering full costs from higher-income borrowers. But the program has been an administrative failure, thwarting its redistributive promises and exacerbating the student-debt system’s underlying inequities. Lower loan payments allow interest to fester and capitalize, swelling balances to amounts far greater than the original. Meanwhile, banks and loan servicers are guaranteed profits from the federal government. And, owing to negligent bookkeeping, I.D.R.’s promise of cancellation has proved to be mere mirage: as of 2021, more than four million borrowers could have accessed I.D.R. loan cancellation, but only a hundred and fifty-seven had ever received it.

“The house of the mind” is what Ian Fitzpatrick, a fifty-seven-year-old lawyer with roughly eighty-four thousand dollars of student loans, jokingly calls his “student mortgage.” But at least with a mortgage one can walk into a bank and request records of the initial amount borrowed, number of payments made thus far, the remaining balance, the interest rate. The Department of Education—effectively one of the country’s largest banks, thanks to its 1.6-trillion-dollar student-loan portfolio—is unable to provide such accounting for its forty-five million clients. Just this spring, the Government Accountability Office released a bombshell report revealing the vast disarray of student-loan bookkeeping. Five years ago, the Department of Education drafted bookkeeping requirements for loan-servicing companies, out of long-standing concerns about accuracy, but ultimately abandoned such regulations “due to cost and complexity.” As loan-servicing companies open and close, and interest rates skyrocket, student debtors are left to navigate the system mostly on their own.

The lack of information around student loans infuriates borrowers and social scientists alike. “I’ve never seen a nationally known topic that is so void of information,” Daniel Collier, an assistant professor of higher and adult education who researches income-driven-repayment programs, said. But, perhaps more profoundly, a lack of clear information has allowed the system to operate without accountability. The sociologist Louise Seamster reminded me that, although we know the total amount of student debt, we have no idea how much of that number is capitalized interest. (The Department of Education reports that, of the 1.6 trillion dollars in student debt, a hundred and sixteen billion is interest, but that number does not include interest that has been capitalized into the principal amount.) The public is told the measure of the suffering, while the profits have remained obscured.

The older debtors I spoke with—many of whom I met through my work with the Debt Collective—find the system both impenetrable and humiliating. Several grimaced when I asked if they would be willing to share their names, unaccustomed to speaking publicly about debts they’ve carried silently for years. “Oh, my, this is like a coming-out!” Karin Engstrom, who is eighty-one, exclaimed the first time we spoke. When I called Engstrom on a recent day off (she still works as a substitute teacher), she answered the phone, laughing; I had caught her gardening, and the audiobook she was listening to, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” had broached a good part. But her tone changed when I asked her specifics about her debt. No chuckling, no mellifluous lilt, no warm commentary, just terse syllables that dropped like pellets from her tongue: a hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars. She was quiet for a few moments, then repeated the number, as if the figure was story enough.

Engstrom, pictured at her home in Seattle, Washington.Photograph by Jovelle Tamayo for The New Yorker
A stuffed animal at Engstrom’s house.Photograph by Jovelle Tamayo for The New Yorker

When F.D.R. took office nearly a century ago, he fulfilled his campaign pledge to remake the federal budget. In addition to the New Deal’s array of social provisions, such as a public-pension system for elderly Americans, it catalyzed a new method of government aid: credit. Of the New Deal’s thirty-one major programs, fifteen extended federally backed private capital to Americans looking to buy homes, farms, and insurance. Decades later, historians have revealed the racist discrimination that laced these credit programs, which excluded Black families from wealth accumulation and, later, locked them into predatory contracts—all while enriching banks and creditors. In retrospect, F.D.R’s legacy is at least two-fold: on one hand, universal programs like Social Security, and, on the other, insuring profits for financial firms at the expense of Black and brown families.

Today, the architecture of the credit-based welfare state remains. The United States’ higher-ed financing system, for example, is built on this model: a social-safety net that is cast on credit, reeled in by debt. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden likened himself to the next F.D.R., a President who would act boldly on behalf of America’s working people. But which of F.D.R.’s legacies calls to Biden? The F.D.R. who issued universal relief programs for struggling Americans, or the F.D.R who secured profits for creditors? In today’s credit-spun safety net, in which people debt-finance everything from their health care to their higher education, bold action demands nothing short of releasing Americans from their debts. Recently, I asked Betty Ann what Biden’s proposal to cancel ten thousand dollars of student debt would mean to her. She laughed. “It’s nothing!” She laughed again. “It’s absolutely nothing. Like, excuse me! You are not helping. And I voted for you.”

Betty Ann and I spent an afternoon in early July poring over the thicket of loan statements and letters she had amassed from the Department of Education, guaranty agencies, and various loan servicers. Her payment history has been poorly documented; the partial records available to us showed $11,507 of payments since 2010. Years ago, she sold her family furniture to make loan payments, and the apartment she now rents in suburban Pennsylvania remains sparsely decorated: a coffee table doubles as a bookcase, and a wobbly dining table served as her home office during the pandemic. (Until she retired a few months ago, Betty Ann spent the last thirty years working full time at a nonprofit for near-minimum wage.) At one point, we tried to set up her online federal student-aid account: over and over, Betty Ann would read me her information as I typed it into the computer, only to have the systems glitch and freeze.

As the sun lowered on the apartment blocks and sounds of dinner filled the courtyard, I leaned back and asked Betty Ann what she made of all of this, this puzzle of paperwork and the ominous threats that wafted from it—the ensuing damage to her credit, the rising fees, the warning of more letters to come. “Oh, I never expected it would go like this!” she told me. She hadn’t anticipated that her dream of getting a law degree would crash so directly into the realities of being an older woman of color on the job market. My mind flashed to Robert’s wish for her and her sisters to attend college, his belief that education was the most powerful tool for Black women to thrive in an unjust world. What would he make of his retired daughter spending a summer day squinting at her student loans?

Betty Ann’s debt, in some ways, casts a shadow over her life, inviting doubt to hover over her decisions to pursue law school and leave a bad relationship despite its financial securities. She wonders if, without debt, she could have stayed in the home she once owned, rather than spending her final years in a rented apartment that needs new carpet and a paint job. Could she have retired earlier and caught up on her reading? Could she have finally written her family history, a story which blazes through the Trail of Tears, Reconstruction, and redlining? These matters are material.

But the debt is also an abstraction—something incomprehensible and alien to Betty Ann’s daily life. How does one possibly understand the mutation of a modest loan into a figure more than ten times its original size? As Betty Ann’s balance has grown exponentially larger, the servicing companies and guaranty agencies have made profits many times the amount of her original loan. The colossal sum being demanded from her bears little resemblance to the sum she took out nearly four decades ago. It is now something else entirely. ♦

How a Mormon Housewife Turned a Fake Diary Into an Enormous Best-Seller

Photo of Beatrice Sparks hidden behind ripped pages of a diary.
Beatrice Sparks always insisted that there was a real teen-ager behind “Go Ask Alice,” whose journal she “edited.”Photo illustration by Jaya Miceli; Source photograph by United News / Popperfoto via Getty Images / Getty Images
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If you had twenty dollars and a few hours to spare during the fall of 1970, you could learn about “The Art of Womanhood” from Mrs. Beatrice Sparks. A Mormon housewife, Sparks was the author of a book called “Key to Happiness,” which offered advice on grooming, comportment, voice, and self-discipline for high-school and college-aged girls; her seminar dispensed that same advice on Wednesdays on the campus of Brigham Young University, a school from which she’d later claim to have earned a doctorate, sometimes in psychiatry, other times in psychology or human behavior. “Happiness comes from within,” Sparks promised, “and it begins with an understanding of who and what you really are!”

Such an understanding seems to have been elusive for Sparks, who was then calling herself a lecturer, although she would soon enough identify as a therapist and occasionally as a counsellor or a social worker or even an adolescent psychologist, substituting the University of Utah or the University of California, Los Angeles, for her alma mater, or declining to say where she had trained. But, wherever she studied and whatever her qualifications, Sparks was destined to become best known for being unknown. Although her book on womanhood was a flop, she went on to sell millions of copies of another book, one that even today does not acknowledge her authorship, going into printing after printing without so much as a pseudonym for its author. “Go Ask Alice,” the supposedly real diary of a teen-age drug addict, was really the work of a straitlaced stay-at-home mom.

When “Go Ask Alice” was published, in 1971, the author listed on the cover was “Anonymous.” The first page featured a preface of sorts, an authenticating framework as elaborate as those written by Mary Shelley and Joseph Conrad, explaining that what followed was “based on the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old,” though names and dates had been changed. The diary, according to its unnamed editors, was “a highly personal and specific chronicle” that they thought might “provide insights into the increasingly complicated world in which we live.”

The narrator is unidentified, too. She is not named Alice; the book’s title, chosen by a savvy publishing employee, comes indirectly from a reference in the diary to “Alice in Wonderland” and more directly from the lyrics of the Jefferson Airplane song “White Rabbit.” Early entries dutifully record the nothing-everythings of teen-age life. The narrator frets over diets and dates; wishes she could “melt into the blaaaa-ness of the universe” when a boy stands her up; and describes high school as “the loneliest, coldest place in the world.” She’s from a middle-class, overtly Christian, ostensibly good family, with two younger siblings, a stay-at-home mother, and an academic father whose work takes the family to another state.

Almost a year passes before anything really happens. The narrator gets mad at her parents for making her move, at her siblings for adjusting more quickly than she does, at her teachers for being boring, and at herself for being bored. She washes her hair with mayonnaise; she makes gelatine salad. But then she goes to an autograph party, where, instead of passing around yearbooks, the partygoers pass around Cokes, some of which are spiked with acid. “Dear Diary,” she writes on the morning after, “I don’t know whether I should be ashamed or elated. I only know that last night I had the most incredible experience of my life.” It turns out that the things she has “heard about LSD were obviously written by uninformed, ignorant people like my parents who obviously don’t know what they’re talking about.”

After acid, the narrator tries marijuana and shoots speed, then starts popping dexies and bennies when she gets tired. The drugs are great (“like riding shooting stars through the Milky Way, only a million, trillion times better”), but life is complicated: her Gramps has a heart attack, her Gran falls apart, she has sex (sublunary, apparently, compared with drugs, merely “like lightning and rainbows and springtime”) and worries that she’s pregnant, then realizes that her dealer is sleeping not only with her but also with his roommate (“I am out peddling drugs for a low class queer,” she exclaims). When he forces her to push LSD to grade schoolers, she drops out and runs away to San Francisco.

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That’s just the first half of the book, which reads like a collaboration by Dr. Phil, Darren Aronofsky, and McGruff the Crime Dog. In the next hundred or so pages, the narrator is gang-raped; loses both her grandparents; turns to prostitution to support her drug habit (“Another day, another blow job,” she writes in one of the most accidentally ridiculous entries. “The fuzz has clamped down till the town is mother dry. If I don’t give Big Ass a blow he’ll cut off my supply”); goes to rehab after getting arrested; suffers acid flashbacks; goes straight with the help of a priest, only to slough off her sobriety; suffers a psychotic break after eating chocolate-covered peanuts laced with acid while she’s supposed to be babysitting a newborn; and finds herself in a mental institution, where she helps to reform “a baby prostitute” and reconnects with her soul mate.

She finally heads home to begin a third-time’s-the-charm life, and kicks the last of her bad habits: keeping a diary. Then comes the final, tortured twist, in the form of an editors’ note, which strips whatever thread the screw had left:

The subject of this book died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary. Her parents came home from a movie and found her dead. They called the police and the hospital but there was nothing anyone could do. Was it an accidental overdose? A premeditated overdose? No one knows, and in some ways that question isn’t important. What must be of concern is that she died, and that she was only one of thousands of drug deaths that year.

As a line on the back of some editions puts it, in equally melodramatic terms, “You can’t ask Alice anything anymore.”

The story behind the story of “Go Ask Alice” is the subject of Rick Emerson’s new book, “Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries” (BenBella). According to Emerson, when Beatrice Sparks presented “Go Ask Alice” for publication, she explained that she had “found” a teen-ager’s diary, claiming that she’d “edited” or “assembled” it, but always maintaining that there was a real teen-ager whose story she was sharing, and that this girl, or, in other versions, the girl’s parents, had handed over an actual diary on which the book was based, even if Sparks had added details from other teens she had counselled.

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Whatever the resulting book’s provenance, millions of people read it. One of the mysteries of its wild success is how so many readers could tolerate the book’s excess of adjectives, punctuation, profanity, and slang. The diarist dates a “nice, young, clean-cut gentlemanly young man” and eats fries that are “wonderful, delicious, mouth-watering, delectable, heavenly,” but has to live in a “whoring little spider hole” while “low-class shit eaters” take turns raping her, and later wonders “how much Lane really knows about Rich and me?????” Some readers found the style laughable, and questioned the book’s veracity. But others—including a reviewer for the Times, who called the book “a document of horrifying reality”—saw it as evidence of the diary’s authenticity.

Emerson unfortunately mimics some of Sparks’s tics, compulsively dating chapters and sections as if history itself were a diary, dramatizing scenes and what he calls “inner monologues” without clear editorial markers or consistent sourcing. Most unsettlingly, in the final, hurried chapters of “Unmask Alice” he insists that he has found the girl who inspired the diary, a teen-ager whom Sparks met while working as a counsellor at a Mormon summer camp—and then, for privacy reasons, declines to identify her. “I know how that sounds, especially after three hundred pages explaining why truth is fiction, war is peace, there is no spoon, etc. If you choose to doubt, I won’t blame you,” he writes, in a tone representative of the book over all, somehow simultaneously too serious and too unserious to be taken seriously.

Emerson’s new book and Sparks’s old one have something else in common: both demonstrate how good intentions can be compromised by single-mindedness. Sparks, for all her fact-fudging, seems to have had a genuine conviction that young people in crisis needed adults to do more to understand them—a conviction so smothered by anti-drug and pro-abstinence propaganda that it’s hard to appreciate her sincerity fifty years later. Emerson’s belief that anything bunk should be debunked is undermined by the Torquemada-like zeal with which he tries to hold one huckstering grandmother responsible for international moral panics and the dishonest tactics of the publishing industry.

Beatrice Ruby Mathews was born in 1917, in a mining camp near a railroad running through the southeastern Idaho wilderness. Her mother, Vivian, went into labor on a train, told a porter to look after her two older children, and fetched a medic to help deliver the baby. Vivian and her husband, Leonard, had two more kids, raising their family mostly in Utah before scandalizing the neighbors by getting a divorce.

Left supporting five children, Vivian went to work at a restaurant, where Beatrice joined her after dropping out of high school. By eighteen, Beatrice had made her way to Santa Monica, where she took another waitressing job and fell in love with a Mormon from Texas named LaVorn Sparks. They married and moved to his home town to start a dry-cleaning business. LaVorn made a lucrative investment in prospecting the Permian Basin, and, awash in oil money, the couple moved back to Los Angeles, where Sparks raised her younger sister and three children of her own. She started publishing poetry, plays, and even comic-book advice columns, sometimes under her own name and sometimes as Bee Sparks or Busy Bee or Susan LaVorne.

After their son started college, at B.Y.U., Beatrice and LaVorn moved into a mansion in Provo, Utah, reputed to be the fraud capital of America; the state is estimated by some to boast a Ponzi scheme for every hundred thousand people. Sparks went to work for a multilevel-marketing scheme, writing essays that were recorded on vinyl by the likes of Pat Boone and Art Linkletter and sold in five-album sets by the Family Achievement Institute. Would-be salesmen were lured with the promise of making sixteen grand a month by hawking the records, which were filled with wholesome content about how to maintain family unity or teach your children character.

Linkletter, who was famous for “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” made Sparks rich, but not with those records. The project was short-lived; Sparks and Linkletter reconnected after his youngest daughter committed suicide, in 1969. He blamed the girl’s death on LSD, and began a campaign against psychedelic drugs, which he took all the way to the White House, where a desperate Richard Nixon was happy to turn private tragedy into Presidential agitprop for what soon became the war on drugs. Sparks, who had been volunteering at a local hospital and taking an interest in troubled youth, sent the grieving Linkletter a manuscript that she was calling “Buried Alive: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager.”

“I think I’ve caught that cold that’s going around.”

Linkletter’s literary agency sold the book to Prentice-Hall. Sparks had hoped the book would appear under her own name, but she acquiesced to the publishing house, which thought that acknowledging her role might compromise the book’s success. “As you already know, Mrs. Sparks is dedicated to assisting young people,” her lawyer wrote as the book contract was being finalized, “and is willing to remain anonymous in order to get the message before the public.”

“Go Ask Alice,” published not long after Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” and Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” was part of a wave of literature marketed to young adults. That category had scarcely existed in the previous decades, but the explosion of high-school and college graduates in the postwar era effectively increased the number of years between childhood and adulthood; into that gap, advertisers poured hopes, dreams, and millions of dollars of marketing money. While Linkletter promoted “Go Ask Alice” at corporate conferences for groups like the National Wholesale Drug Manufacturers Association, Prentice-Hall packaged the book for teens.

Controversy was the engine by which “Go Ask Alice” became a best-seller, and controversy is a renewable resource. Teen-age readers delighted in the depictions of sex and drugs, and adult censors decried those same passages as pornography and depravity—leading still more teen-agers to seek them out. The book’s various covers added to the mystique: the shadowy, sullen face of a young woman on one; a pile of drug paraphernalia on another; a cascade of crazed faces on a third, spruced up after the book was adapted for an ABC movie starring William Shatner as the diarist’s father and Andy Griffith as the priest who gets her off the streets.

“Go Ask Alice” became one of the most widely banned books of the seventies—which only increased its popularity, first by attracting kids eager to read what their parents found objectionable and later by landing the title on lists of censored books. The books on such lists are promoted by libraries and bookstores, and some schools ask students to select among banned books for assignments. The revanchist canon this produces can be reactionary in its own way. For every social conservative who objected to the language in “Go Ask Alice,” there was a social liberal who balked at its insinuation that all drug use led to prostitution and death. Plenty of readers thought that the book, whatever its agenda, was simply poorly written fiction, not worth its spot on a syllabus or in a library.

Soon, the libraries that stocked Sparks’s work needed more shelf space. After several years of stewing privately over having to remain unknown amid the success of “Go Ask Alice,” Mrs. Anonymous quickly published two books, both of which came with her name on the cover and a round of publicity revealing her as the editor of the earlier book. The first, published in 1978, was titled “Voices,” and, instead of a single diary, it offered four teen-age testimonies: Mark confesses his suicidal thoughts, Jane reveals what it was like to be a runaway dragged into sex and drugs, Millie describes how a teacher took advantage of her and introduced her to lesbianism, and Mary tells the story of being brainwashed into a cult and then deprogrammed. Sparks claimed that the narratives were constructed from interviews with hundreds of kids in dozens of cities, but the four voices were similar to one another, and to the supposedly singular voice of “Go Ask Alice.”

A few months later, Sparks was back in the diary business with “Jay’s Journal.” She claimed, in the book’s introduction, that a woman had read an article about her and then called to ask if Sparks might take the journal of her son—a deceased sixteen-year-old who’d had a genius-level I.Q.—and use it to expose the dangers of witchcraft. Accepting this solemn task, Sparks sorted through the boy’s possessions, interviewed his friends and teachers, and organized his journal into more than two hundred entries. A small disclaimer on the copyright page indicated that “times, places, names, and some details have been changed to protect the privacy and identity of Jay’s family and friends.”

In fact, such changes—the boy’s home town, Pleasant Grove, became Apple Hill; a local restaurant, the Purple Turtle, became the Blue Moo—functioned like bread crumbs for those who wished to track down the book’s real setting and characters. Jay, they learned, was actually Alden Barrett, and nearly two decades after “Jay’s Journal” was released his younger brother Scott self-published an account of Alden’s life and the events surrounding his suicide. His book, “A Place in the Sun,” portrays his brother as an aspiring poet who excelled at debate but suffered from depression. It also reproduces images and transcripts of all the entries in Alden’s actual diary; according to Scott, Sparks drew on only about a third of them, fabricating nearly ninety per cent of what she published, including entries about how, after being sent to reform school, Jay learned to levitate objects, developed E.S.P., attended midnight orgies, and was possessed by a demon named Raul.

Alden’s diary does not mention the occult, and, according to Scott, although his brother smoked pot, studied Hinduism, and played with a Ouija board, his real transgressions were rebelling against the family’s Mormon faith and opposing the Vietnam War. And yet Sparks portrayed him as part of a network of cattle mutilators who drained some three thousand cows of their blood in twenty-two states. There were other preposterous revisions, including a wedding that she renders as a demonic Mass featuring black candles, bloodletting, and a kitten sacrifice but in reality was a quiet, unofficial ceremony between Alden and his high-school girlfriend.

In the final pages of “Jay’s Journal,” Sparks reproduces Barrett’s suicide note. “I don’t want to be sad or lonely or depressed anymore, and I don’t want to eat, drink, eliminate, breathe, talk, sleep, move, feel, or love anymore,” he wrote. “Mom and Dad, it’s not your fault. I’m not free, I feel ill, and I’m sad, and I’m lonely.” Sparks prefaces those heartfelt words with a few invented entries about Raul’s increasing power over the boy, suggesting that the suicide was the result not of depression but of witchcraft and demons.

Barrett’s mother was shocked by Sparks’s book, and said as much when Scott published his rebuttal. By then, the family had fallen apart. The parents divorced, the mother left Pleasant Grove, and the whole family struggled with recurring vandalism of Alden’s grave and reports of teen-agers re-creating events from the diary.

The Barretts’ experience suggests that Sparks’s other works may have been based on real source material, but also that her use of such material was fast and loose. If anything, it got faster and looser. Sparks, who died in 2012, at the age of ninety-five, published books well into her eighties, teen-age tragedy after teen-age tragedy, from “It Happened to Nancy,” about a fourteen-year-old who dies from aids after being seduced by a man she met at a Garth Brooks concert, to “Finding Katie,” about an abused teen in the foster-care system.

It’s possible that Nancy and Katie and the rest were all based on real teen-agers, or that Sparks compiled their stories from multiple case studies she encountered, as she claimed in “Voices.” Verisimilitude is a difficult thing to gauge, especially when it concerns the inherent histrionics of adolescence and the genuine extremes of addiction or trauma. Some critics of “Jay’s Journal” base their skepticism on emotionally wrought passages that they deem improbable coming from a teen-age boy, but some of the book’s most improbable passages are taken verbatim from Barrett’s diary, such as this one about falling in love: “Well, things are looking up! Yes, things may be getting better. I might be finding someone ‘to see.’ . . . Someone real. An individual, an understanding ear, a seeing eye, an open mind.”

But even if Sparks’s books were indeed based, in part, on real teen-agers, how she arrived at the rest remains a mystery. Emerson alleges that she fabricated not only source material but also blurbs from fictional experts; he doesn’t address the long-standing claim that a co-author helped Sparks with her work. When a reporter confronted her with the Barretts’ objections to “Jay’s Journal,” Sparks said that every occult detail came from interviews with Alden’s friends, which left her so scared that she could not write at night. She even used the chronicle’s authenticity as a defense of her work, with its graphic scenes and obscene language. She wrote about troubled teens “so other kids won’t have to go there where they have been,” she said. “They can see the price that one has to pay, and they make their own decision.”

Publishers made their own decisions, too. Prentice-Hall wagered that readers would be more gripped by a tale that seemed to come directly from the ghost of a teen-age addict, and publishers are still, apparently, making the same bet: years after Sparks died, Simon & Schuster issued a boxed set of “Jay’s Journal” and “Go Ask Alice,” listing their author as “Anonymous” and doing nothing new to clarify Sparks’s role.

Satanism might have been a bogeyman of the eighties, but Sparks’s other subjects cannot be similarly dismissed. When she published “It Happened to Nancy,” in 1994, sexual violence was twice as prevalent as it is today, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, and almost forty-two thousand people died of H.I.V. infections that year in the U.S. alone, according to the C.D.C. If Sparks’s teen-agers were fake, or mostly fake, their crises—homelessness, addiction, depression, unwanted pregnancies, abuse—were mostly real. The sad truth about sensational topics is that someone’s moral panic is often someone else’s moral emergency.

Those who found “Go Ask Alice” or any of Sparks’s other works exploitative or manipulative may feel vindicated upon learning of their suspect origins. But, to those who found them gripping, realistic, or effective deterrents to self-destructive behavior, their provenance likely doesn’t matter. As a few ex-Mormons have pointed out, Sparks was not the first Mormon to publish a text ostensibly based on an original source that the rest of the world did not get to see. There is no accounting for what people will believe, whether they are impressionable teen-agers or anxious parents. And there is also no calculating the ramifications of those beliefs.

Whether scare tactics like those used by Sparks work, though, isn’t clear. Decades of studies scrutinizing the effectiveness of anti-drug programs like D.A.R.E. suggest that they might not, but if you believe that fear is effective there is a temptation to make everything as frightening as possible. That’s the Manichaean world that Sparks envisioned: absent respect for our elders and regular churchgoing, all of us are one drink away from an overdose and one party away from pregnancy.

Emerson sees Sparks chiefly as an impostor, but she comes across as a true believer, both in evil and in her capacity to combat it by scaring teen-agers straight. She almost certainly saw herself as part of the storied tradition of taking vice for one’s subject in an effort to extoll virtue, a modern-day Dante or a latter-day John Bunyan. Plenty of teen-agers, though, read her work not as a P.S.A. but as P.R. What Sparks’s family said in her obituary is unquestionably true but wonderfully ambiguous: “She wrote these books to make a difference in people’s lives and she did.” ♦

Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of Poisons

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In many ways the poison was the personality in Agatha Christies stories—the element of surprise amid an otherwise...
In many ways, the poison was the personality in Agatha Christie’s stories—the element of surprise amid an otherwise reassuring collection of country-house clichés.PHOTOGRAPH BY POPPERFOTO/GETTY

In the course of her career, Agatha Christie killed hundreds of characters: some by drowning, some by stabbing, and one with a crowbar. But her preferred murder weapon was chemical, rather than physical. “Give me a decent bottle of poison,” she is supposed to have said, “and I’ll construct the perfect crime.”

Or, perhaps, the perfect murder mystery: as Kathryn Harkup demonstrates, inadvertently, in a new book, “A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie,” Christie’s fictions are profoundly shaped by the poisons that their characters skillfully employ. What’s more, those characters enjoy relatively unfettered access to a range of exotic toxins, in a way that a would-be murderer could only dream of today. One begins to suspect that, among the many factors that gave us Christie’s enormously popular novels, we must count the particular period for poisoning in which she lived.

Harkup is a chemist, as well as a Christie fan. Christie, she writes, “freely admitted to knowing nothing about ballistics,” but used poisons “with a high degree of accuracy.” Christie also used them far more frequently than any of her contemporaries. Her meticulous use of strychnine was even remarked upon in a review in the Pharmaceutical Journal, much to Christie’s delight.

Her expertise can be traced back to volunteer service in the local hospital dispensary during the First World War, during which time Christie trained as an apothecary’s assistant. She successfully passed her exams in 1917, after receiving private tuition from a local commercial pharmacist. Mr. P., as she referred to him, was a rather alarming character, whom Christie caught making a potentially fatal mistake while formulating suppositories, and who carried a lump of curare in his pocket at all times, because, he said, “it makes me feel powerful.”

Mr. P. went on to play a starring role in one of Christie’s later mysteries, “The Pale Horse,” and Christie’s firsthand experience in the delicate art of handling potentially deadly drugs became central to her books. In Christie’s fictional universe, as Joan Acocella has written for this magazine, emotional depth is forgone in favor of elaborate and entertaining puzzles. After all, as Acocella points out, “if she had given her characters any psychological definition, we could have solved the mystery,” and the addictive quality of Christie’s whodunit formula would have suffered as a result. The cold, calculating nature of murder by poisoning, as opposed to the violent passion implicit in a stabbing or strangulation, is precisely suited to propelling plots in which any one of the characters could be the culprit, all the way until the very end. In many ways, the poison was the personality in Christie’s stories—the element of surprise amid an otherwise reassuring collection of country-house clichés.

According to Harkup, when it came to poisons, “Christie invariably played with a straight bat”: no untraceable poisons, no implausible sourcing, and just three invented drugs, only one of which was used to kill. Harkup plays it equally straight, sticking to her own formula so closely as to risk tedium. After a promising introduction, readers are left to plod through the next fourteen chapters, each of which details, in the same order, the toxicology, availability, famous real-life cases, and Christie’s fictional use of arsenic, strychnine, cyanide, and eleven other poisons. Fortunately, interesting tidbits emerge: digitalis intoxication may have been responsible for van Gogh’s “yellow period”; eating phosphorus-laden match heads was a surprisingly common method of suicide in the nineteen-twenties; and arsenic was popular enough among murderers that its French nickname was poudre de succession, or “inheritance powder.”

More intriguingly, out of the somewhat mind-numbing accumulation of detail, it becomes possible to discern the ways in which chemistry, rather than character, drives Christie’s plots. It is the poison that provides the pacing, for example, in the Hercule Poirot mystery “Five Little Pigs,” in which the time it takes for a lethal dose of hemlock to take effect allows five potential murderers, all of whom have good cause to wish the unlucky Amyas Crale dead, the opportunity to strike. Again and again, the varying availability, symptoms, antidotes, and post-mortem detection methods of particular poisons shape both the actual crimes and Christie’s careful orchestration of red herrings and clues. Arsenic’s solubility in hot water, atropine’s bitter taste, even phosphorus’s propensity to endow its victims’ intestines with an eerie glow, not to mention “smoking-stool syndrome”—in each case, it is the poison’s strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies that structure the narrative and eventually allow Miss Marple, Poirot, or one of Christie’s other amateur detectives to solve the mystery.

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Indeed, as the examples (and dead bodies) mount up, Christie’s rigorous rejection of character and motivation in favor of chemical agency comes to seem almost avant-garde. Meanwhile, as Harkup points out, while she favored cyanide, Christie was frequently esoteric in her choice of poisons. Hemlock, for example, had not been used in an intentional poisoning since Socrates’ day, according to Harkup. Ricin, which is deployed against four members of the same household in “The House of Lurking Death,” had no track record as a murder weapon at the time Agatha Christie was writing, Harkup says, despite being potent, untreatable, and easily consumed accidentally in the form of castor-oil seeds. “In many respects,” Harkup writes, Christie’s use of ricin “was years ahead of her time.” (Ricin had a brief moment of notoriety when the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated in London using a ricin-tipped umbrella, in 1978, but its current fame is owed mostly to Walter White, of “Breaking Bad,” who favored ricin as a means of disposing of anyone who got in his way.)

What’s most striking about Harkup’s exhaustive descriptions, however, is the portrait they draw of a culture awash in poisons. In early-twentieth-century Britain, patent tonics contained strychnine, opium could be bought over the counter without question, and no gardener’s shed was without a stock of potassium cyanide (for use as an insecticide). Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution had democratized arsenic: as a byproduct of smelting iron ore, arsenic trioxide was scraped out of chimneys in vast quantities. “Soon,” according to Harkup, “anyone and everyone could afford enough arsenic to dispatch an unwanted relative or inconvenient enemy.” The nineteen-twenties and thirties, when Agatha Christie began her career, are known as the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” in which a cohort of mostly British authors defined the standards of the genre. Seen through the lens of Harkup’s research, it seems equally to have been the golden age of poisons, after the first flowering of organic chemistry and before the stricter regulations that arrived after the Second World War. Never before or since, it seems, has the would-be murderer—or murder-mystery writer—been furnished with such a range of easily available toxins.

Indeed, Christie’s attention to detail left her open to the accusation that she offered a handbook for would-be murderers. Harkup recounts a 1977 case in France, in which Roland Roussel, a fifty-eight-year-old office worker, murdered his aunt using atropine eye drops. The gendarme who found a copy of the Miss Marple mystery “The Tuesday Club Murders” in Roussel’s apartment reportedly declared, “I’m not saying Roussel was inspired by the book, but we found it in his apartment with the relevant passages on poison underlined.”

At the same time, Christie’s precision when it came to poisons can apparently be credited with saving at least two lives. Harkup quotes a 1975 letter from a woman in South America who had raised justified suspicion that an acquaintance was being poisoned by his young wife: she wrote to Christie in thanks, concluding, “but of this I am quite, quite sure—had I not read ‘The Pale Horse’ and thus learned of the effects of thallium poisoning, X would not have survived.” Two years later, soon after Christie’s own death, a nurse with a taste for mysteries spotted the symptoms of thallium poisoning in a nineteen-month-old in Qatar. In their report, the child’s physicians acknowledged their indebtedness “to the late Agatha Christie for excellent and perceptive clinical descriptions, and to Nurse Maitland for keeping us up to date with the literature.”

In the Land of the Very Old

Jan 23, 2024 — by Sam Toperoff in  Original  for THE SUNDAY LONG READ 1. Passports, or Prescriptions I am writing this in a blue notebook I ...