JT Leroy

A year or two ago, there was a sort of mid-level scandal in the publishing world when, at around the same time, it was revealed that James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces, had palmed off as a factual memoir what was, in reality, an almost total fabrication, and that J.T. LeRoy, the author of Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things, was not, in fact, the bizarre, very young, camera-shy homosexual man that was presented to the public, but instead a woman in her thirties named Laura Albert.

I’d read A Million Little Pieces a year or so before it was exposed as fiction – no; “fiction” does it an undeserved credit – before it was exposed as a load of horsefeathers, and for my own part, recognized it before I was halfway through as the tissue of feeble, self-glorifying lies it could not have been other than. I’d also read Sarah several years earlier, and although I certainly considered Mr. LeRoy a very odd character, I never saw any meaningful reason to doubt his existence, or even give it any thought. It wasn’t an issue. Sarah remains one of the four or five greatest American novels of the past ten years, and whether it was written by J.T. LeRoy, Laura Albert, or a monkey hitting random keys on a typewriter, it’s a flat-out masterpiece.

George Eliot wasn’t really a man. The Ramones weren’t really brothers. Dr. Seuss did not, in reality, hold a valid medical license. You may even be shocked to learn that my name isn’t actually zarpex. But for some reason, J.T. LeRoy is called a hoax. Authorial identity is one of the crutches available to the aesthetically crippled. Few people, it pains me to say, possess the faculties even to understand what they like or dislike. The majority would wince at a glass of wine poured from a bottle labeled “Gallo” and rhapsodize over the same wine poured from a bottle labeled “Chateau Lafite.” If Toni Morrison were to be revealed in tomorrow’s newspapers as a wealthy Caucasian, her writing would suddenly be recognized as the facile twaddle it has always been, and its newly identified creator would be hanged from the nearest tree by the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature.

If anything, the invention of J.T. LeRoy should be regarded as a creative accomplishment unto itself, stranger and more complex than Ziggy Stardust (which, for all its endurance, was really little more than a pseudonym), possessing both an absurdity and a plausibility that stands toe-to-toe with Borat. And is it not possible that Laura Albert could not have written her books without creating an alternate character to speak through? Wagner had to dress in period costume to compose; Brian Wilson, whose feet, as far as I know, have yet to touch a surfboard, compensated by resting them in a box of sand when he sat at the piano to write.

A misfortune of timing lumped an important work of art together with a piece of crude literary onanism, and our culture is the weaker for it. Do yourself a favor if you haven’t already, and read Sarah.

The IAU stripped Pluto of its status as a planet, but you know what? It’s still out there.

http://mog.com/zarpex/blog_post/143832

by Levi Asher January 21, 2008

“Something about ‘Mark Twain’ has also attracted pyschobiographical analysis the way deep water attracts a dowsing rod. Justin Kaplan has pointed out that twinship was one of Twain’s favorite subjects, and proposed that Sam took refuge in the ‘Mark Twain’ persona as a conduit to literary independence — it helped free him from his temptations toward bourgeois respectability and blandness — and, as bereavements piled up in his life, as a means of protecting his sanity.”
– Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

I can’t figure out how this works. Lee Siegel, an Ivy League-educated critic who has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times and the New Republic, was caught impersonating an enthusiastic Lee Siegel fan on the New Republic website. His punishment? He was temporarily suspended from the New Republic and mocked on a few blogs, but has otherwise returned to respectability. His latest book got a generous review from Janet Maslin last week in the New York Times.

James Frey wrote a “memoir” about his addiction recovery, A Million Little Pieces, which earned several million little dollars, and then it turned out that he had sold a fictionalized story as truth. Two years later, he has returned to respectability, and his new book was signed by Harper Collins, in a very, very good deal, for publication this summer.

Both of these writers lied to their readers, and so did Laura Albert when she created a persona called J. T. LeRoy to publish a novel called Sarah and a book of stories called The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. But when the truth came out in 2005 that J. T. LeRoy was not a 25 year old man but a 40 year old woman, the author faced a barrage of anger and criticism that seemed to me disproportionate to the crime. Siegel and Frey also faced similar barrages, of course, but J. T. LeRoy had always been a fiction writer while Siegel and Frey billed themselves as non-fiction writers. The idea that a fiction writer cannot employ a pseudonymous identity without facing legal nightmares should concern anybody who cares about literature.

I’ve also noticed that criticism of Laura Albert tends to take on a strangely emotional and personal pitch. I read many articles at the time of the exposure and had several conversations with literary-minded friends about it and was constantly surprised to find that so many people hoped or believed that J. T. LeRoy/Laura Albert was now forever destroyed. Destroyed? A fiction writer? What’s that about?

And yet there is an overriding belief within the publishing community that Laura Albert should be treated as a pariah, despite the fact that she wrote books many of them once cared about. As the review quotes on the paperback copies of Sarah and The Heart is Decietful Above All Things reveal, many publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Bookforum, the New York Times Book Review and the Village Voice gave these books positive reviews when they were published.

But here’s the strange thing about the J. T. LeRoy scandal: the character was never believable from the beginning. I knew J. T. LeRoy was a fake persona from day one, and so did many others. How many people do you know with names like “Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy”? How many young writers do you know who don’t want to be photographed? (Answer: zero.)

I recognized much of the persona of “J. T. LeRoy” as loosely inspired by Warhol Factory denizen drag queen Candy Darling (real name: James Francis Slattery), a fabulously trashy and tragic 60’s transvestite who has been immortalized in not one but two great Lou Reed songs, “Candy Says” and “Walk on the Wild Side”. Because I know my Andy Warhol and I know my Velvet Underground, I always sensed that “J. T. LeRoy” was some kind of updated homage to Warhol/Factory subculture, and I also figured the name “Jeremiah” was inspired by Candy Darling’s best friend Jeremiah Newton (I also figured that whoever was creating this J. T. LeRoy character must be a big fan of the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol, in which Jeremiah Newton and Candy Darling are two of the main characters, and that this person might have seen the film one too many times.)

But you don’t have to be into Andy Warhol to appreciate the wider literary tradition of fake identities. How easily we forget that Bob Dylan tried very hard to make people believe he was a drifting hobo from the prairies until journalists exposed a well-educated Jewish kid from Minnesota named Robert Zimmerman. George Eliot, George Sand, the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen all used pseudonyms, and in all cases their careers would not have been possible without the use of pseudonyms. Certainly these facts are Literature 101.

So why the utter outrage? Why can Lee Siegel and James Frey be published again if Laura Albert cannot? Lee Siegel never intended for his deception to be exposed; his IP address betrayed him (and it’s no wonder that he’s now writing books about the evils of internet culture). James Frey also intended to keep his deceptions secret, and I think this points to a more insidious kind of dishonesty. So why are they allowed back in, and Laura Albert not?

I have some theories. I think that a large percentage of the publishing community always hated this trashy and over-hyped underground upstart, and many of those who never liked J. T. LeRoy are now engaging in a bit of triumphalism in declaring Laura Albert an utter outcast.

There may be some ageism involved in the outrage directed at the woman who shaved 15 years off her lifespan without a care in the world. Also, comically, there’s a mistaken impression that Laura Albert “got rich” by being J. T. LeRoy (anybody who believes this must think that underground fiction sells a whole lot better than it does), and this adds to the backlash.

In fact, speaking of money, Laura Albert lost a very harsh legal judgement last year to a film production company, and is now facing the very common American problem known as financial ruin. And this probably adds to her current unpopularity; everybody hates a loser.

I’ve argued elsewhere that her legal team badly bungled the defense at this trial, and I hope Laura will earn an appeal (she and her representatives are trying). I spoke to Laura on the phone last week, and found myself interacting with a warm and vulnerable person, a down-to-earth mother of a ten year old boy, an intellectual whose favorite recent book is Foreskin’s Lament by Shalom Auslander and who cites Mary Gaitskill, James Joyce and Flannery O’Connor as influences.

Here’s what I told her: Laura, please find a way to get back in the game. You are a writer, and a writer must write. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Can Laura Albert ever be forgiven? I daresay she’s not the only fiction writer who ever told a lie. That’s why they call them fiction writers.

http://www.litkicks.com/LauraAlbertForgiven/

It really shouldn’t be that hard. For any writers who remain confused, here are a few basic rules.

February 5, 2008

By Levi Asher
It’s depressing to learn that the young author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is facing accusations of factual inaccuracy. If true, it follows the dreary precedent set by James Frey, and A Million Little Pieces.

What’s next? Are we going to find out that Elizabeth Gilbert loved first, and ate and prayed later? Readers are getting sick of it, but it’s hard to tell whether our shared outrage is channelling into useful new standards for writers and publishers, or rather if the world of publishing isn’t simply working itself up into such a dizzy froth of contradictory principles that nobody knows who or what to believe anymore.

The situation reached a height of unreality last winter when the utterly trustworthy Ian McEwan was forced to explain that his hospital scenes in Atonement, which recalled the work of nurse/novelist Lucilla Andrews, were a case of homage rather than theft.

And the situation reached a height of banality in March 2007 when John Banville published a “pseudonymous” mystery novel but the book ended up referred to as Christine Falls by Benjamin Black by John Banville (or as Christine Falls by Benjamin Black and John Banville, or any of several other variations). Publishing a mystery novel under a pen name alongside your real name is about as exciting as going to the prom with your mother.

A gullible and attention-scattered book-journalism community must take some of the blame for the lack of clarity regarding truth in authorship. Earlier in this decade, a fresh-faced young woman named Samantha Knoop began appearing at parties or interviews in a big hat, blonde wig and dark glasses playing the writer JT LeRoy. This was obviously a person “in character”, especially since JT LeRoy was supposed to be a male drug addict and drag queen bearing scars of lifelong abuse, and this was a healthy young woman in a hat and wig and glasses. And yet top publications like the New York Times ran credulous interviews with this “JT LeRoy”, and when the ruse fell apart journalists claimed to have been expertly conned.

Journalists and publishers must adopt higher standards, but most of all it’s the writers who suffer when these scandals break, and it’s the writers who must learn from past mistakes. I’d like to propose a simple set of realistic standards that all writers should adopt to avoid authorship scandals in the future. Here are the eight things every writer should remember:

1. Do not use the word “memoir” unless you mean it.

2. If you’re not sure whether what you’re writing is a memoir or not, guess what? It’s a novel.

3. No more than half a page of plagiarism per book.

4. Don’t make up exact dates that you can’t remember. Instead, be general: “The most important day of my life was the day of my son’s birth, in the summer of 2005 …”

5. Just say no to sending a friend out in public with a wig as you.

6. If you’re in a flame war and you’re about to go sock puppet, take a 10-minute break and go to a coffee shop without a wi-fi facility. Maybe the walk will cool you down.

7. Go ahead and make up dialogue. Everybody except Tom Wolfe does.

8. Pick a name. “Benjamin Black is John Banville” is just not a good look.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/02/how_to_avoid_author_scandals.html