Maybe I don’t pay enough attention to the literary world but until a couple of weeks ago I had never heard of JT Leroy or his/her books. After that brief reference and discussion of this person , I see in today’s New York Times this article, The Unmasking of JT Leroy. Interesting article. Does this mean this is all some very weird publicity stunt or what?
Any Dopers out there familiar with this persons work?
Is it worth reading or is the mystery about the individual more interesting than the books?
Haven’t read his stuff. “New York” magazine devoted a huge amount of space to this a month or two ago, so the Times is actually following in their wake. I can only say that this writer’s received no attention from either the usual review sources, nor on the lit blogs I read, so it sounds like his work is popular only in the hipper places of NYC and absolutely nowhere else.
Of course, absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, so make of it what you will.
I had the feeling it could be a writer known only in those ultra hip NY literary circles too, but the NYT article implies she/he is known in France and mentions a film made from one of the stories. That made me think there might be a broader audience and I had somehow missed hearing about it.
Just earlier today I was thinking that the reason I’ve never subscribed to The New Yorker was that too much of it was about New York.
This teapot tempest is more proof that New York is the most provincial city in the world.
Where’s global warming when you need it?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn Leroy is a fake. Several things I’ve read have made me suspect that it was more than just a publicity shy author but a literary Milli Vanilli going on. My guess, though, was that he was a creation of Tom Spanbauer, a gay writer best known for The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon- their subject matter and their writing style is extremely similar, and Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (also a movie) is in many ways the same book with the setting switched from 19th century Idaho to late 20th century truckstops. (Spanbauer is thanked in one of Leroy’s novels.)
I know there are teenagers with literary talent, but generally speaking uneducated teenagers who have done major drugs and had horribly dysfunctional childhoods just don’t write as polished as Leroy does. If he’s not a hoax I’d wager a testicle he has a heavy handed ghost writer.
Nitpick.
New York magazine had the expose that pesch made reference to, not The New Yorker.
That appears to be the conclusion the article in the NYT draws as well.
I just finished reading LeRoys first novel, " Sarah". Well worth reading, a page turner. Smooth, horribly funny.
The lightness of the reading both accentuates and makes bearable the horrible things happening to a 12 year old boy, whose biggest ambition in life is to be a better prostitute then his mother.
Here’ s a typical scene. It is a fond memory the boy has of his mom, Sarah.
She and he lie on motel beds, engaged in a friendly contest: who can best deep-throat a big carrot? “Sarah always won”. 
Ok, I will bump this and if it goes nowhere I’ll let it die.
I did go to Wikipedia and look up Leroy. It seems to have been quite the hot topic over there from looking at the discussion page. I’m still not sure what to think of this though. It appears to be a fraud but there are still quite a few people who seem to be working to keep it going.
Pretty clearly a fake. The Times (in a rare but belated piece of good investigative reporting) did a pretty damning job of tracking down the details of the Disneyland Paris trip. Case closed, as far as I can see.
The truth is this never much mattered. It was always about sensationalism. “Teen hustler writes brilliant prose!” Well, yes, except the author turns out not to be a teen nor a hustler, and the prose in retrospect was not so brilliant. When you learn that the prime actor behind this stunt is a frustrated wannabe-famous middle-aged woman, all the claims to “authenticity” and “raw realism” lose a lot of their punch. Another reason you may not have heard about this is that the woman wasn’t so much interested in being a writer as in being a celebrity – very early on there was a big emphasis on hanging with (stupid credulous) actors and musicians as opposed to moving in real literary circles.
The flames were fanned I think by a relatively small number of San Francisco and New York-based dupes. I remember New York Press bought into, and enthusiastically promoted without a shred of questioning, the whole Terminator/J.T. Leroy charade from an early date.
http://www.nypress.com/11/3/news&columns/feature.cfm
It’s my personal view and YMMV, but I also think the woman was very shrewd to position this character as an HIV positive homosexual hustler. First, the sympathy factor from the HIV. Second, there’s a bit of vicarious porno in her buddying up to leading homosexual authors by regaling them with tales of teen hustling that may well give them a bit of a frisson. Finally, those of a liberal bent of mind can’t have found unwelcome the “success story” or “norming” presented by the otherwise-highly-unconventional persona created for “Leroy” – I remember part of the shtick was that he and some boyfriend had adopted a kid – Heather Has Two Daddies writ large, I suppose.
I, uh, have a bottle of this. Never read his stuff, but the perfume’s one of my favorites.
Sigh. Yes, I know. My thoughts about New York provincialism preceded this whole thread, but this appeared to be yet another example of it. The New Yorker, New York magazine and The New York Times all pretend to be national media but are obsessed with the wonderfulness and specialness of New York City and New Yorkers way out of proportion to reality.
So is anybody else picturing the wig and glasses being pulled off of Ms. Knoop and her hissing “And I’d have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling literary magazine investigative reporters!”
I first heard about JT Leroy in rural Virginia five or six years ago, for what it’s worth. This isn’t some “new york thing” - he created a huge buzz in literary circles in '99 or '00 or so and has been steadily coasting on it ever since.
JT Leroy perfume?!?!? GACK!
So now it seems like one long extended publicity stunt for sure.
Alot of their punch? I’d say **all **of it. And honestly the HIV positive angle just makes it downright offensive in my mind. How long I wonder til the backlash from all the celebs starts.
As far as the obscurity of all this goes, I just got back from my neighborhood Borders and they had all of Leroy’s books in stock. I suppose I’ve just been oblivious to all the hype.
Under other circumstances I could imagine the Times taking an amused and detached or neutral stance on this, treating it as a literary tempest in a teapot or as a Andy Kaufman-esque prank. But in the post-Blair era they were obligated to take it seriously, especially as they’d published stuff by “him.” Decent (if belated) solid investigative reporting (as was true of the New York article).
You only need to see this happen a few times (or, have the experience of being misquoted or misrepresented in the news yourself, as happens a shocking proportion of the time) to lose any presumptive belief you may have had even in the most “respected” MSM sources.
This article seems to pretty much believe the jig is up. It describes a visit to the Knoop house in San Francisco, Dave Eggers stating he was duped, etc…
So I wonder… has she committed any crimes if she made Leroy up, or is it just a pseudonym? I also wonder what it will do to the sales of the books (which are currently in the 3,000s on Amazon.com).