Archive for July, 2007

Author Laura Albert, The Real J.T. Leroy, Charged

Monday, July 2nd, 2007
clipped from www.indiewire.com

“Sarah” Author Laura Albert, The Real J.T. Leroy, Charged With Fraud

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Is the J.T. Leroy scandal what you think it is?

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

clipped from www.slate.com

Laura Albert. Click image to expand.

But step back for a moment: Sarah is a novel, not a memoir. It contains the same events, in the same order, no less “true” or “false” than they were before the hoax was exposed. What, with Albert unmasked, did Antidote lose? The answer, it seems, is that Antidote wanted, and paid for, and lost, the right to call Sarah a product of LeRoy’s life. “We bought the identity of the book’s author,” one Antidote employee said. The value of the novel, in Antidote’s view, depended not on what was between its covers, but on who the producers thought the author was (and on their belief that the novel derived directly from events in his life). Almost all the press around Albert’s deception—including stories about the trial—has treated “LeRoy’s” fiction the same way, as something akin to falsified autobiography.

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I STILL AM THE REAL LEROY: LAURA

Monday, July 2nd, 2007
www.nypost.com

 

SCANDAL SCRIBE STICKS TO STORY

But she sailed into the newsroom yesterday – a bone from a raccoon’s penis hanging jauntily from her neck – dropping A-list names like Bono, Madonna and even Paris Hilton. And the middle-aged mom originally from Brooklyn Heights insisted she was, deep down, that teenage, transgendered hooker.
“I’m fighting for my life, Andrea!” she insisted. “I’m up against a conglomerate.

 
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First of all, they’re great fuckin’ books.

Monday, July 2nd, 2007
www.10zenmonkeys.com
Laura Albert, aka, JT LeRoy
First of all, they’re great fuckin’ books. Some books are a cool read. They grab you. But then they let you go. The JT LeRoy books, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, Sarah, and Harold’s End gnaw on your bones. They stay with you, if you let them. (I just caught the last fifteen minutes of the film version of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things on IFC and it brought it all back.) But then again, maybe you just kicked them out of your head because the writer turned out to be a woman in her thirties and not a boy in his teens. Your loss.

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But What If “JT Leroy” Wasn’t a Fraud?

Monday, July 2nd, 2007
clipped from www.mediabistro.comlaura-albert-courthouse.jpg
You may have seen this morning’s item about the judgment against “JT Leroy, as Laura Albert was ordered by a jury to pay $116,500 to the production company that bought the rights to her novel, Sarah. But here’s the thing: Even if one maintains reservations on the appropriateness of the lengths Albert went to in order to ensure “JT” was the public face of her work—and acknowledging the point that signing a contract under a, let’s say, extra-legal name probably isn’t the most kosher of actions—if we’re going to start finding fraud in authors choosing literary personae at odds with their material realities… well, let’s just say it’s not exactly a healthy precedent.

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Mary Ann Evans Sued For Impersonating George Eliot

Monday, July 2nd, 2007
clipped from www.litkicks.com
I’m with Ron Hogan on this one. I find a federal court’s decision to award a film production company a fraud settlement against writer Laura Albert inexplicable and bizarre. So Laura Albert impersonated a man named J. T. Leroy. It was a work of fiction. There is a long, long history of pseudonymous literature. Was nobody on Albert’s defense team aware that some of the greatest novelists of all time were women who impersonated men to increase their chances of commercial success, including Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte (Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell) and George Sand (Aurore Dupin)?

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Laura, Savannah and Sarah put gender-bending muse in the dock

Monday, July 2nd, 2007
clipped from scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com

ALAN FEUER IN NEW YORK

ONE is Jeremy ‘JT’ Leroy, an androgynous drug addict who lifted the lid on the seedy world of truck-stop prostitution on a West Virginia highway. The other is Laura Albert, an unassuming 40-something who has been living in obscurity in Brooklyn.

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Being JT LeRoy

Monday, July 2nd, 2007
clipped from www.parisreview.com

It really felt like he was another human being. I’m talking about him in the past tense because I feel that his energy is not the primary force inside me, as it was then.

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