Is he really she? Hoax riddle of cult US novels

[emad]

Sunday Times
Tony Allen-Mills, New York



HE has been profiled by the Observer magazine, interviewed by The Independent and recently wrote a colourful account of his visit to Disneyland Paris for the travel pages of The New York Times. There is only one question about JT LeRoy — the cult American novelist whose torrid account of his drug-addled upbringing became a publishing legend — does he really exist?

After years of gossip and rumour about the shy 24-year-old author of three successful works of autobiographical fiction — the best known of which is The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things — a literary sleuth from California has declared LeRoy a hoax. The books, which claimed that his mother introduced him to heroin and put him to work as a child prostitute, may be someone else’s work.

After an investigation into the mysteries of LeRoy’s supposedly tortured past, a professor of creative writing at the University of San Francisco has concluded that the author is the creation of a 39-year-old former rock singer named Laura Albert from Brooklyn.

Professor Stephen Beachy says the man whom many journalists, publishers, fellow authors and celebrities claim to have met or befriended may have been one of Albert’s relatives or Albert herself — LeRoy invariably appears in public in dark glasses and a blond wig, and speaks in a girlish voice.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1827558,00.html

[mockmonkey]

1. Odd story

but then so are JT's books.

[jobycom]

2. Wow, a literary Victor/Victoria. The most amazing part to me

Is that, if this is true, the author created sales by creating a fictional persona, and will shoot sales through the sky by having that persona exposed.

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

3. Wow!

I'd have to dig them out, but from memory his/her books contain recommendations from tonnes of contemporary figures. Kudos to Mrs Albert's immagination - she's certainly visited some dark places in the pursuit of an authentic voice.