Are the Alice Books based on your own experiences?

Comment:

I love you so much! Thank you for writing the wonderful Alice series, everything in them is true and my sister and I read them together. They books brought us closer together and we talk about the things that happen in them. My friends and I remind me very much of Liz, Pam, and Al. I wanted to say that reading The Grooming Of Alice helped my friend who was too hung up on losing weight, I showed it to her and it helped her. Also, a thing very similar to what happened to Elizabeth in the scene where she gets her period at Mark Stedminsters pool happened to me! And I wanted to ask- is Alice based on you or anything that happened in your life?

Phyllis replied:

A lot of girls write to me about liking “The Grooming of Alice” for discussing very personal things.  Many things that appear in these books either happened to me or friends of mine, though mostly they come from my imagination.  But there is an element of truth in almost everything in the Alice books–either I heard about it, read about it, or experienced something like it, and then turned it over to my imagination for the story.