Book-It 'o9! Book #42
More of the Fifty Books Challenge! This was a library request.
Title: Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy by Savannah Knoop
Details: Copyright 2008, Seven Stories Press
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "The JT LeRoy scandal is a story of our times. When The New York Times unmasked Savannah Knoop as the face of the mysterious author JT LeRoy, JT’s fans, mentors, and readers came to terms with the fact that the gay-male-ex-truck-stop-prostitute-turned-literary-wunderkind was really a girl from San Francisco, whose sister-in-law had written the books.
Girl Boy Girl is the story of how Savannah led this bizarre double life for six years, trading a precarious existence as a college dropout for a life in which she was embraced by celebrities and artists-Carrie Fisher, Courtney Love, Mary Ellen Mark, Winona Ryder, Asia Argento, Sharon Olds, Gus Van Sant, Mike Pitt, Calvin Klein, Shirley Manson, to name a few-and traveled the world.
Telling her side of the story for the first time, Savannah reveals how being perceived as a boy gave her a sense of confidence and entitlement she never had before. Her love affair with Asia Argento is particularly wrenching, as they embark on an intimate relationship that causes more alienation than closeness. But as Savannah struggled to embody the JT character, she encountered the limits of the game, and ultimately felt relief when the truth came out. Inadvertently, she found herself through the adventure of being someone else."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I was unfamiliar with the story of JT LeRoy and when I stumbled across this in Atomic Books's catalog, I was intrigued.
How I Liked It: Scandal, hoax, cover-up, celebrities, a confession from one of the two people at the center... how could this story not be fascinating? It is, but this book isn't. An accusation leveled at her by her former sister-in-law (the voice of JT LeRoy) over this book rings true: simply because Knoop played an author doesn't mean she is one.
The tense switches jump around as does the time line. Trying to keep up with Knoop's skewed chronology is an exercise in the utmost patience. She prefaces the book with
"The following story is told as best I understood it. Any factual errors are unintentional. When details, names, events, or dates are blurry, I have tried to indicate my sense of confusion. But this is my experience, told to the best of my recollection."
Unfortunately, that confusion translates as an almost incomprehensible story for the reader. At times, the book reads like a police report; at others, like celebrity RPF (although by all accounts the encounters were not actually fictional). There is a touch of memoir somewhere in the hazy almost snapshot semi-recollections of pockets of time, but it's largely lost due to the lack of a consistent thread throughout the story. Knoop further clouds the fairly jumbled book by admitting (via asterisk) when she forgets a person's name and is therefore making one up. This happens a good three times in the book and could've been solved by a single sentence technique I learned in middle school: "A [man] who I'm going to call _______ due to my lack of memory of his real name...". As it is, it's just one more bit of clumsiness that further disjoints an already uneven production.
The book manages to leave out whole stretches of storyline that are only hinted at (Savannah's boyfriend Jonathan whom she maintains a relationship with even during her affair with Asia Argento, the fall-out from the reveal which the book abruptly closes with), much to the detriment of the plot and the confusion of the reader. Perhaps it might have diluted Knoop's "authenticity" (already in question by the very topic of the book), but an experienced co-writer would've helped smooth out the lines and guide the book back to the story that is worthy of telling, a story we can hope is someday picked up and told by a competent author.
Notable: Knoop dons a wig and sunglasses (and ace bandages) as part of her disguise as JT. Given her uneven telling, it's hard to know when she's dressed as JT and when she's dressed as Savannah, but a memorable instance occurs when she (as Savannah) attempts to purchase fabric for her own clothing line (which is subtly plugged in the book) and encounters a rather brusque salesman:
"[The shopkeeper]disapprovingly took one of my swatches and pointed to a sign that read, 'Do not swatch the silk.'
'I didn't know it was silk.'
'What are you doing here, then?'
'I am here to buy fabric.'
'Only by the bolt, not by the yard. This is for real clothing-makers. Not hobbyists.'
Why is it that no one takes young women seriously? JT didn't go around encountering this bullshit. JT didn't even have to say anything. But I had to state my mission to every person I met, reassuring them that I was indeed serious, that I was not wasting their time." (pgs 163 and 164)
Another area that would've benefited to be explored was the fact Knoop was performing, however unwittingly, gender drag. Although JT was a character she had virtually nothing in common with and so any interaction would be compared to her own life for its difference, the role gender played (experiencing life as a boy rather than a girl, as her title suggests) would've been a ripe topic. This was hinted at briefly when Knoop mentioned her affair with an effeminate (he confides to her that his "hormones are off") Japanese boy, Hilo, she met at college, one who was consistently being told he entered the wrong restroom, this was the men's restroom. As JT, Knoop borrows her ex's indignant expression and exclamation ("I'm a boy!") when told the same thing (she vows to thank Hilo if she ever sees him again). Like much of the book, any real poignancy to be made from extraordinary events appears to be lost in the ineptitude of the writer.
Title: Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy by Savannah Knoop
Details: Copyright 2008, Seven Stories Press
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "The JT LeRoy scandal is a story of our times. When The New York Times unmasked Savannah Knoop as the face of the mysterious author JT LeRoy, JT’s fans, mentors, and readers came to terms with the fact that the gay-male-ex-truck-stop-prostitute-turned-literary-wunderkind was really a girl from San Francisco, whose sister-in-law had written the books.
Girl Boy Girl is the story of how Savannah led this bizarre double life for six years, trading a precarious existence as a college dropout for a life in which she was embraced by celebrities and artists-Carrie Fisher, Courtney Love, Mary Ellen Mark, Winona Ryder, Asia Argento, Sharon Olds, Gus Van Sant, Mike Pitt, Calvin Klein, Shirley Manson, to name a few-and traveled the world.
Telling her side of the story for the first time, Savannah reveals how being perceived as a boy gave her a sense of confidence and entitlement she never had before. Her love affair with Asia Argento is particularly wrenching, as they embark on an intimate relationship that causes more alienation than closeness. But as Savannah struggled to embody the JT character, she encountered the limits of the game, and ultimately felt relief when the truth came out. Inadvertently, she found herself through the adventure of being someone else."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I was unfamiliar with the story of JT LeRoy and when I stumbled across this in Atomic Books's catalog, I was intrigued.
How I Liked It: Scandal, hoax, cover-up, celebrities, a confession from one of the two people at the center... how could this story not be fascinating? It is, but this book isn't. An accusation leveled at her by her former sister-in-law (the voice of JT LeRoy) over this book rings true: simply because Knoop played an author doesn't mean she is one.
The tense switches jump around as does the time line. Trying to keep up with Knoop's skewed chronology is an exercise in the utmost patience. She prefaces the book with
"The following story is told as best I understood it. Any factual errors are unintentional. When details, names, events, or dates are blurry, I have tried to indicate my sense of confusion. But this is my experience, told to the best of my recollection."
Unfortunately, that confusion translates as an almost incomprehensible story for the reader. At times, the book reads like a police report; at others, like celebrity RPF (although by all accounts the encounters were not actually fictional). There is a touch of memoir somewhere in the hazy almost snapshot semi-recollections of pockets of time, but it's largely lost due to the lack of a consistent thread throughout the story. Knoop further clouds the fairly jumbled book by admitting (via asterisk) when she forgets a person's name and is therefore making one up. This happens a good three times in the book and could've been solved by a single sentence technique I learned in middle school: "A [man] who I'm going to call _______ due to my lack of memory of his real name...". As it is, it's just one more bit of clumsiness that further disjoints an already uneven production.
The book manages to leave out whole stretches of storyline that are only hinted at (Savannah's boyfriend Jonathan whom she maintains a relationship with even during her affair with Asia Argento, the fall-out from the reveal which the book abruptly closes with), much to the detriment of the plot and the confusion of the reader. Perhaps it might have diluted Knoop's "authenticity" (already in question by the very topic of the book), but an experienced co-writer would've helped smooth out the lines and guide the book back to the story that is worthy of telling, a story we can hope is someday picked up and told by a competent author.
Notable: Knoop dons a wig and sunglasses (and ace bandages) as part of her disguise as JT. Given her uneven telling, it's hard to know when she's dressed as JT and when she's dressed as Savannah, but a memorable instance occurs when she (as Savannah) attempts to purchase fabric for her own clothing line (which is subtly plugged in the book) and encounters a rather brusque salesman:
"[The shopkeeper]disapprovingly took one of my swatches and pointed to a sign that read, 'Do not swatch the silk.'
'I didn't know it was silk.'
'What are you doing here, then?'
'I am here to buy fabric.'
'Only by the bolt, not by the yard. This is for real clothing-makers. Not hobbyists.'
Why is it that no one takes young women seriously? JT didn't go around encountering this bullshit. JT didn't even have to say anything. But I had to state my mission to every person I met, reassuring them that I was indeed serious, that I was not wasting their time." (pgs 163 and 164)
Another area that would've benefited to be explored was the fact Knoop was performing, however unwittingly, gender drag. Although JT was a character she had virtually nothing in common with and so any interaction would be compared to her own life for its difference, the role gender played (experiencing life as a boy rather than a girl, as her title suggests) would've been a ripe topic. This was hinted at briefly when Knoop mentioned her affair with an effeminate (he confides to her that his "hormones are off") Japanese boy, Hilo, she met at college, one who was consistently being told he entered the wrong restroom, this was the men's restroom. As JT, Knoop borrows her ex's indignant expression and exclamation ("I'm a boy!") when told the same thing (she vows to thank Hilo if she ever sees him again). Like much of the book, any real poignancy to be made from extraordinary events appears to be lost in the ineptitude of the writer.