The Heart is Deceitful? JT Leroy's Literary Hoax

On Sunday, The Observer chose to reheat the story of the decade’s most interesting literary phenomena, the rise and fall of JT Leroy. As a quick summary, Leroy exploded onto the literary scene in 2000 with the novel Sarah, the story of a young boy, living a transient and deprived life, subsisting by turning truck-stop ‘tricks’ with his young mother.

The book, with its mixture of naivety, experience, hard-edged reality and fantasy, was accompanied by outlandish and arresting PR statements - the author was a ‘working boy’, who was advised to write by his psychiatrist; the manuscript was typed up by his clients, who came to him for domination. Leroy’s media persona was reclusive and shy, although not shy enough to prevent him hob-nobbing with pop-culture icons like Winona Ryder and Carrie Fisher. The book itself garnered applause from the oh-so-hip likes of Dave Eggars and David Cooper, whose style he was clearly influenced by.

Sarah was swiftly followed by ‘The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things’, which was identified even more closely with Leroy’s own upbringing, like a cross-gender ‘Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’. The book was made into a film, and enjoyed good sales, boosted by further association with just the right cultural arbiters. Again, the author was a distant figure, glimpsed fleetingly at awards ceremonies and rarely speaking in public.

Rumours began to spread about Leroy’s true identity, before finally and definitively surfacing in the New York Times – the books were written by a woman, Laura Albert, and the public ‘Leroy’ was performed by Savannah Koop. The myth was imploded; the film company and her publisher both severed connections, and threatened legal action. The press, which had lionised ‘him’, immediately turned.

Musician and flaneur Dickon Edwards has written excellently on the importance of Leroy’s identity in The Mind’s Construction Quarterly. To wit, in all literature, the storyteller-listener relationship is crucial, particularly in the ‘abuse-lit’ genre; readers are desperate to identify with the author, to have a figure they can trust and who has shared their experience. Leroy’s books featured an email address, encouraging still further personal identification. To invite vulnerable readers to form this sort of attachment to an author, and then kick the crutch away, seems the height of cynicism.

The writer of the Observer’s piece, James Stafford, claims a personal friendship with Laura Albert, the real author, formed whilst the Leroy charade was ongoing. At the time, Albert was posing as an assistant to ‘Leroy’. Stafford presents her as being trapped, forced into a false identity by the weight of the deceit. Despite the court cases, she seems quite liberated by the unmasking, and defiant. The article is also keen to highlight her own problems (molestation, psychiatric hospitals).

It is interesting, in fact, that this attempted vindication concentrates on Albert’s merits as an icon of suffering rather than as the writer of two fine novels (and one extremely indulgent novella). For me, the attempt backfires. If Albert has experienced such a lifestyle, then she should have been aware of the likely consequences of her fraud being discovered. Furthermore, the whiff of cynicism remains. Publisher’s lists are currently overwhelmed with this ‘abuse-lit’ – it’s not like her tale was unsellable in real terms. If she wanted scandal, or intrigue, she could have, say, operated anonymously, rather than inventing this pop-culture icon.

It seems unlikely that she will write again, which is a great shame, as a career full of promise has ended. It also seems that she may be bankrupted, as her backers fight to claw back their investments. The film of ‘The Heart is Deceitful’ sunk without trace, and is available to buy for £1 in my local Blockbuster. All of this may seem too harsh a punishment. It does, however, show the danger of stamping the dread phrase ‘based on a true story’ to works of artistic license.

Individuals will always look to put trust in storytellers and artists, whether it be in literature, music or film – there’s always a character, a song, an artist who understands them. Maybe this link is a psychological result of our being read to as children, and identifying the storyteller with the parent figure.

The most extreme example of the danger of abusing this link concerns the Coen Brothers film ‘Fargo’. The directors light-heartily appended a ‘based on a true story’ tag to what was plainly a knockabout work of fiction. However, one viewer took them at face value, and froze to death whilst searching for the buried money left by a character, near the Canadian border. No-one can seriously blame the Coen Brothers for this – they simply hadn’t realised that someone, somewhere, wouldn’t get the joke.

I think, though, that the deliberate misleading of an audience, on serious subjects such as prostitution, abuse and street-living, is a different matter, especially when the deceit is practiced in such a stage-managed, ‘pr’s wet-dream’ manner. The people responsible for the charade cannot possibly have thought that the readers they had sucked in would react well to their unmasking. What was their long term plan? Retire with the cash? A Kiss-style ‘masks off’ revelation? Further false identities?

By all means, read Leroy’s books again. As novels, they do stand up to the likes of Dennis Cooper, and have far more literary merit than the likes of Dave Pelzer. But there’s always going to be that nagging doubt…

Read Dickon’s superb article at: http://tmcq.co.uk/articles/how-very-dare-you-the-cathexis-of-jt-leroy/

His diary (possibly England’s longest-running blog) is linked from the top of this page.