(no subject)
"Soul-baring fiction author J.T. LeRoy plays with gender -- and identity. Does it really matter who he is?"
Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, December 17, 2005
(and thrown in here for fun, I present to you, Toothpaste For Dinner)
When author J.T. LeRoy burst out of nowhere in 2000 with "Sarah," the San Francisco Chronicle called the novel "larger than life" and "comically Dickensian."
The comparison was apt.
Dickens enraptured readers with the travails of Little Nell. Likewise, LeRoy's up-from-adversity saga -- of a 12-year-old truck-stop prostitute -- was catnip for a certain edgy audience. The permeable membrane between author and subject was tantalizing, since "Sarah" was described by the publisher as semi-autobiographical fiction.
Praise poured in from well-known authors. Mary Gaitskill called it "a wildly comic tour de force and a brilliant debut." Dennis Cooper called it "a revelation." Among those thanked in the book's acknowledgments are Art Spiegelman, Sharon Olds and Tobias Wolff. (Full disclosure: Chronicle Acting Deputy Managing Editor David Wiegand has edited some of LeRoy's fiction.)
LeRoy's next effort, "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things," was promptly made into an independent film. The publisher of both books, Bloomsbury, also has J.K. Rowling and Edmund White in its stable.
Though too shy to appear in public or conduct in-person interviews, LeRoy, who lives in San Francisco, soon counted Winona Ryder, Courtney Love and Madonna among his confidantes and fans.
LeRoy's literary reputation grew, juiced by doubts about his identity.
In 2003, he served as associate producer on -- and wrote an early draft of -- Gus Van Zant's film "Elephant," which won the 2003 Palme d'Or at Cannes. That year, Ryder emceed a LeRoy tribute party in New York at which celebrities read from "Sarah" and the rock band Thistle (LeRoy is the lyricist) performed. In April, LeRoy made a rare public appearance to read at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, a gig that was a particularly good fit since the author seemed to have popped from an Andy Warhol how-to book on cultivating celebrity; he even adopted Warhol's signature prop, a shaggy blond wig.
Links between the art world and the celebrity business are not new: The 18th century British poet Lord Byron was famously "mad, bad and dangerous to know." In 1978, American readers swooned over "The Basketball Diaries," Jim Carroll's memoir of teenage heroin addiction and gay hustling in New York. His band's 1980 song, "People Who Died," became emblematic, particularly after the murder of John Lennon.
But the allure of such grittiness necessitates that it be real.
In October, New York magazine ran an article by San Francisco novelist Stephen Beachy, arguing that LeRoy is not a former hustler from West Virginia but a woman in her 30s from Brooklyn named Laura Albert. (Albert, a.k.a. Speedie, is a member of Thistle and LeRoy's housemate.) After much sleuthing, Beachy concluded that the weight of the evidence -- including LeRoy's refusal to prove his identity by offering up a Social Security card or a passport -- showed he was a fraud.
The expose, originally written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian (whose editors didn't think the story was ready for publication, so Beachy's agent placed it with New York), inspired a flurry of follow-up stories and created chatter equal to that sparked by LeRoy's celebrity relationships. The Washington Post answered with an Oct. 13 story that said: "The whole long affair appears to be one of the great literary hoaxes of our day, and it fooled a whole lot of people as well as media." On Friday, LeRoy talked to The Chronicle by cell phone. Asked how the New York magazine article has affected him, he said, "I'm busier than I ever f -- was before. I'm on my way to the set of "Deadwood" in L.A. right now. For a ghost, I've got a pretty good f -- life." (He is writing an episode of the HBO show, he said.)
"A hoax? A hoax is what you do to get people to "buy a happy meal," he said.
During the course of the interview, LeRoy mentioned dealings with Bono, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Corgan, Dave Eggers and Carrie Fisher.
The New York Times seems to have been affected by the publicity. Soon after the stories ran, they killed a story LeRoy had written for its November travel section. They had asked him to show identification, and he refused.
"They asked me for my passport, my Social Security card," LeRoy told Women's Wear Daily. "They knew exactly what they were getting when they dealt with me. I've always played with identity and gender."
The negative publicity could cost LeRoy other writing jobs, friends fear, though his monthly gig with the slick San Francisco fashion magazine 7x7 is safe for now, according to its executive editor.
"It should make writers really angry and upset," said owner and founder Ron Turner, of Last Gasp, which published LeRoy's latest book, the novella "Harold's End." Last Gasp will also release LeRoy's next book, "Labour," in the spring.
LeRoy was picked up by Last Gasp -- a self-described "purveyor of underground comic books and distributor of subversive literature" based in the Mission District -- after he split with Bloomsbury for reasons the publisher will not discuss.
Eventually, someone may prove that LeRoy is -- or is not -- who he says he is. Reportedly hot on the trail is Warren St. John of the New York Times, who wrote a flattering profile of LeRoy in 2004. Meanwhile it's an occasion to ask: What if LeRoy did make up parts of his background to woo important friends and sell books? Are the implications dire for American literature or simply par for the course today?
Armistead Maupin, author of "Tales of the City," has had experience with literary pretenders. In the early '90s a small publisher sent him an advance copy of "A Rock and a Hard Place," a memoir by Anthony Godby Johnson, a teenage AIDS patient near death, which inspired Maupin to contact the author. A six-year telephone relationship ensued during which Maupin came to question the veracity of Johnson's story.
"The work of both Anthony Godby Johnson and J.T. LeRoy seems quite harrowing and moving when you don't know they're a fraud," Maupin said by phone last week. "When you go back and read it again, it reads like the most awful kitsch."
Out of the experience came Maupin's 2000 novel, "The Night Listener," a meditation on literary pretending. In the phone interview, Maupin called Johnson's ability to rally support -- and writing tips -- from authors and editors as "one big literary circle jerk." (The subject will soon hit the big screen, in a film starring Robin Williams based on Maupin's novel.)
"The minute I read the New York magazine piece, I knew that the situation was almost identical," Maupin said. "Writers are vulnerable because we have imagination. Throw us a little raw meat and we'll gobble it up."
LeRoy has done little to publicly defend himself, before or after the New York magazine article. In it, he is quoted as saying, "I don't have any burning desire to be proven to be real. I reserve the right to grow and change my identity."
Publishers of writers who can perform their personality or make it a mystery -- Tom Wolfe and Thomas Pynchon come to mind -- are aware of its publicity value.
"There are two kinds of publicity," said Jeff Seroy, executive vice president and publicity director of publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux. "There's critical writing about the work on the page and then there's everything else." That is, stories about the writer, how the work came into being and how the work speaks to the moment.
"Those are extrinsic to the creation of a literary work, but they have become increasingly important in terms of driving sales," Seroy continued. "Proust famously said that the work and the writer -- his personality and how he lives his life -- are two separate and distinct things. That's a close-to-impossible situation to imagine now."
The post-9/11 times also seem to call for the verity of nonfiction.
"There's a tremendous thirst for authenticity," said fiction writer Paul Greenberg, who was pushed to promote his last novel, "Leaving Katya," as a personal story to boost sales.
"Authors are prodded more and more to expose themselves as people in their books," Greenberg said. "My novel was written in the first person, which, as a writer, is just a device. But the press release called it: 'a heartfelt and deeply personal story.' "
Greenberg called the LeRoy debate a symptom of celebrity culture. "Celebrity has become a way of moving up to a higher class. Lesser writers, lesser artists are going to their real experience and to their memories just to promote their social ambitions."
Although the voices of those who doubt LeRoy are loudest at the moment, there are plenty of people who will testify that LeRoy is not a thirty-something woman.
"I've had dinner in three different cities with J.T. and talked to him on the phone nearly every day," Last Gasp's Turner said, "and this person doesn't exist?"
Comic Margaret Cho -- a longtime LeRoy fan -- also weighed in. On her blog last month, she wrote: "I love J.T. LeRoy whether he is she, whether he/she rolled johns or publishers, whether the stories are true or make believe."
Either way, Berkeley critic and author Greil Marcus sees something insidious behind the debate.
"What it all signifies to me is a deepening mistrust of the imagination, or the driving out of fiction by nonfiction," Marcus wrote in an e-mail this week.
"People will read fiction about a gender-confused teenage or preteen parking-lot hustler -- but only if they can believe that what they are reading is true. Then they can celebrate the person as an artist while avoiding having to actually engage with art."
E-mail Heidi Benson at hbenson@sfchronicle.com.
Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, December 17, 2005
(and thrown in here for fun, I present to you, Toothpaste For Dinner)
When author J.T. LeRoy burst out of nowhere in 2000 with "Sarah," the San Francisco Chronicle called the novel "larger than life" and "comically Dickensian."
The comparison was apt.
Dickens enraptured readers with the travails of Little Nell. Likewise, LeRoy's up-from-adversity saga -- of a 12-year-old truck-stop prostitute -- was catnip for a certain edgy audience. The permeable membrane between author and subject was tantalizing, since "Sarah" was described by the publisher as semi-autobiographical fiction.
Praise poured in from well-known authors. Mary Gaitskill called it "a wildly comic tour de force and a brilliant debut." Dennis Cooper called it "a revelation." Among those thanked in the book's acknowledgments are Art Spiegelman, Sharon Olds and Tobias Wolff. (Full disclosure: Chronicle Acting Deputy Managing Editor David Wiegand has edited some of LeRoy's fiction.)
LeRoy's next effort, "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things," was promptly made into an independent film. The publisher of both books, Bloomsbury, also has J.K. Rowling and Edmund White in its stable.
Though too shy to appear in public or conduct in-person interviews, LeRoy, who lives in San Francisco, soon counted Winona Ryder, Courtney Love and Madonna among his confidantes and fans.
LeRoy's literary reputation grew, juiced by doubts about his identity.
In 2003, he served as associate producer on -- and wrote an early draft of -- Gus Van Zant's film "Elephant," which won the 2003 Palme d'Or at Cannes. That year, Ryder emceed a LeRoy tribute party in New York at which celebrities read from "Sarah" and the rock band Thistle (LeRoy is the lyricist) performed. In April, LeRoy made a rare public appearance to read at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, a gig that was a particularly good fit since the author seemed to have popped from an Andy Warhol how-to book on cultivating celebrity; he even adopted Warhol's signature prop, a shaggy blond wig.
Links between the art world and the celebrity business are not new: The 18th century British poet Lord Byron was famously "mad, bad and dangerous to know." In 1978, American readers swooned over "The Basketball Diaries," Jim Carroll's memoir of teenage heroin addiction and gay hustling in New York. His band's 1980 song, "People Who Died," became emblematic, particularly after the murder of John Lennon.
But the allure of such grittiness necessitates that it be real.
In October, New York magazine ran an article by San Francisco novelist Stephen Beachy, arguing that LeRoy is not a former hustler from West Virginia but a woman in her 30s from Brooklyn named Laura Albert. (Albert, a.k.a. Speedie, is a member of Thistle and LeRoy's housemate.) After much sleuthing, Beachy concluded that the weight of the evidence -- including LeRoy's refusal to prove his identity by offering up a Social Security card or a passport -- showed he was a fraud.
The expose, originally written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian (whose editors didn't think the story was ready for publication, so Beachy's agent placed it with New York), inspired a flurry of follow-up stories and created chatter equal to that sparked by LeRoy's celebrity relationships. The Washington Post answered with an Oct. 13 story that said: "The whole long affair appears to be one of the great literary hoaxes of our day, and it fooled a whole lot of people as well as media." On Friday, LeRoy talked to The Chronicle by cell phone. Asked how the New York magazine article has affected him, he said, "I'm busier than I ever f -- was before. I'm on my way to the set of "Deadwood" in L.A. right now. For a ghost, I've got a pretty good f -- life." (He is writing an episode of the HBO show, he said.)
"A hoax? A hoax is what you do to get people to "buy a happy meal," he said.
During the course of the interview, LeRoy mentioned dealings with Bono, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Corgan, Dave Eggers and Carrie Fisher.
The New York Times seems to have been affected by the publicity. Soon after the stories ran, they killed a story LeRoy had written for its November travel section. They had asked him to show identification, and he refused.
"They asked me for my passport, my Social Security card," LeRoy told Women's Wear Daily. "They knew exactly what they were getting when they dealt with me. I've always played with identity and gender."
The negative publicity could cost LeRoy other writing jobs, friends fear, though his monthly gig with the slick San Francisco fashion magazine 7x7 is safe for now, according to its executive editor.
"It should make writers really angry and upset," said owner and founder Ron Turner, of Last Gasp, which published LeRoy's latest book, the novella "Harold's End." Last Gasp will also release LeRoy's next book, "Labour," in the spring.
LeRoy was picked up by Last Gasp -- a self-described "purveyor of underground comic books and distributor of subversive literature" based in the Mission District -- after he split with Bloomsbury for reasons the publisher will not discuss.
Eventually, someone may prove that LeRoy is -- or is not -- who he says he is. Reportedly hot on the trail is Warren St. John of the New York Times, who wrote a flattering profile of LeRoy in 2004. Meanwhile it's an occasion to ask: What if LeRoy did make up parts of his background to woo important friends and sell books? Are the implications dire for American literature or simply par for the course today?
Armistead Maupin, author of "Tales of the City," has had experience with literary pretenders. In the early '90s a small publisher sent him an advance copy of "A Rock and a Hard Place," a memoir by Anthony Godby Johnson, a teenage AIDS patient near death, which inspired Maupin to contact the author. A six-year telephone relationship ensued during which Maupin came to question the veracity of Johnson's story.
"The work of both Anthony Godby Johnson and J.T. LeRoy seems quite harrowing and moving when you don't know they're a fraud," Maupin said by phone last week. "When you go back and read it again, it reads like the most awful kitsch."
Out of the experience came Maupin's 2000 novel, "The Night Listener," a meditation on literary pretending. In the phone interview, Maupin called Johnson's ability to rally support -- and writing tips -- from authors and editors as "one big literary circle jerk." (The subject will soon hit the big screen, in a film starring Robin Williams based on Maupin's novel.)
"The minute I read the New York magazine piece, I knew that the situation was almost identical," Maupin said. "Writers are vulnerable because we have imagination. Throw us a little raw meat and we'll gobble it up."
LeRoy has done little to publicly defend himself, before or after the New York magazine article. In it, he is quoted as saying, "I don't have any burning desire to be proven to be real. I reserve the right to grow and change my identity."
Publishers of writers who can perform their personality or make it a mystery -- Tom Wolfe and Thomas Pynchon come to mind -- are aware of its publicity value.
"There are two kinds of publicity," said Jeff Seroy, executive vice president and publicity director of publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux. "There's critical writing about the work on the page and then there's everything else." That is, stories about the writer, how the work came into being and how the work speaks to the moment.
"Those are extrinsic to the creation of a literary work, but they have become increasingly important in terms of driving sales," Seroy continued. "Proust famously said that the work and the writer -- his personality and how he lives his life -- are two separate and distinct things. That's a close-to-impossible situation to imagine now."
The post-9/11 times also seem to call for the verity of nonfiction.
"There's a tremendous thirst for authenticity," said fiction writer Paul Greenberg, who was pushed to promote his last novel, "Leaving Katya," as a personal story to boost sales.
"Authors are prodded more and more to expose themselves as people in their books," Greenberg said. "My novel was written in the first person, which, as a writer, is just a device. But the press release called it: 'a heartfelt and deeply personal story.' "
Greenberg called the LeRoy debate a symptom of celebrity culture. "Celebrity has become a way of moving up to a higher class. Lesser writers, lesser artists are going to their real experience and to their memories just to promote their social ambitions."
Although the voices of those who doubt LeRoy are loudest at the moment, there are plenty of people who will testify that LeRoy is not a thirty-something woman.
"I've had dinner in three different cities with J.T. and talked to him on the phone nearly every day," Last Gasp's Turner said, "and this person doesn't exist?"
Comic Margaret Cho -- a longtime LeRoy fan -- also weighed in. On her blog last month, she wrote: "I love J.T. LeRoy whether he is she, whether he/she rolled johns or publishers, whether the stories are true or make believe."
Either way, Berkeley critic and author Greil Marcus sees something insidious behind the debate.
"What it all signifies to me is a deepening mistrust of the imagination, or the driving out of fiction by nonfiction," Marcus wrote in an e-mail this week.
"People will read fiction about a gender-confused teenage or preteen parking-lot hustler -- but only if they can believe that what they are reading is true. Then they can celebrate the person as an artist while avoiding having to actually engage with art."
E-mail Heidi Benson at hbenson@sfchronicle.com.