3:AM Magazine

By Bob Thurber.

Now that the civil trial against author Laura Albert (who employed the alter ego JT LeRoy for over a decade) is over, I can confess something.

I’m the real JT LeRoy.

Surprised? Shocked? 

No one could be more astonished by this revelation than I was. 

In the first place, I am not a former cross-dressing hustler/street urchin from West Virginia, and my mother, as far as I know, was never a crack-smoking truck-stop prostitute. She was, however, a naive teenager who gave birth to two children out of wedlock. Breeding bastards was a moral crime in the 1950s, so producing two made her an immediate outcast. Shunned and shamed, she lied about her past until the day she died. Continuously resentful of her children, she brutalized my sister and me throughout our childhood.

Though it’s true that Madonna never sent me a book on Kabbalah, the hardscrabble life that spurred a series of autobiographical tales thick with verisimilitude belongs to me. I’m the traumatized kid raised by the teenage mother who didn’t know nurturing from novocaine. (That’s not a plea for sympathy; just a point of fact.) I’m the boy who despite a childhood teeming with poverty and abuse grew up to find the transcendent healing power of art. 

Okay. In comparison, my own success has been moderate. A list of publication credits, a few awards. I don’t have anything close to “his” congregation of devoted readers, or “his” earnings from book and movie deals. But I do have my peace of mind and a sense of harmony — two rather unexpected gifts, I must admit.

So here I am.

Without the big sunglasses, floppy brimmed black hat, and blond wig.

Without the hype, the fluff, or the gender-crossing pseudonym. 

Without the celebrity pals — among them Bono, Melissa Etheridge, Courtney Love, Carrie Fisher, Sharon Osborn, Tatum O’Neal, Debbie Harry, Tom Waits, Winona Ryder, Liv Tyler, Dennis Cooper, Dorothy Allison, Dave Eggers, and Mary Gaitskill. (That’s the short list of the bamboozled.)

Here I am. The real deal. A nobody from nowhere who survived unimaginable (unless you’re Steven King) childhood horror and lived to tell about it, lived to write about it.
 
I’ve followed the JT Leroy saga as it has played out over the last year. I had read “his” short stories and been affected by the gritty subject matter. I didn’t adore the writing but I sympathized with the author’s background. Another lost child.

When I later learned that the author was not who “he” claimed to be — a street smart former drug abusing hustler — but rather a fragile, middle-aged woman from Brooklyn Heights with childhood issues of her own. I wasn’t angry or shocked. I understand that fiction is a trick done with mirrors. 

Now that the jig (or gig) is up Laura Albert admits to using “camouflage” over the past eleven years, though she claims her elaborate masquerade wasn’t a hoax, but a psychological survival mechanism for coping with her own childhood abuse.

The San Francisco Chronicle quotes author/activist, Michelle Tea as saying: “Laura Albert is a traitor to writing itself, specifically to memoir . . .  It’s such a slap to the artists who really are toiling away to create meaning from the hardships of their live. It turns the redemptive quality of a lot of writing into a total farce.” 

Perhaps Ms. Albert’s masquerade hurts the credibility of genuine survivors, but it’s minor damage. A piece of costume jewelry in the back of the drawer doesn’t decrease the value of the authentic gems. Now that the deception is over, I sympathize with Laura Albert as much as I did with her alter ego.  Living a lie for eleven years must have been excruciatingly painful.

It’s a tragedy the woman was unable to distinguish her true self among the ruins and needed to create an entity more traumatized by life than she herself had been. She followed a line of words and got her feet tangled in the process. But it’s no calamity that the autobiographical tales behind the published stories were concoctions, or that behind the memoir-style fiction was a fictional personality with a fake childhood. Fabrications, layer upon layer. When you think about it, that’s quite a literary achievement; pretty much a post-modern triumph.

In her preciously thin book “The Writing Life” Annie Dillard admits “The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good.” But she doesn’t mention that sometimes the air is bad and life stinks. 

Childhood trauma is so often the source of one’s art. Pain focuses the mind, and early wounds cut terribly deep. Without a time machine the injury can not be undone. There is no going back, only forward. This is the artist’s path. It’s in the forward movement that hope and healing may be found. It can be a long process, requiring years or decades for the ugly damage to be repaired. 

In a recent interview Ms. Albert referred to the JT persona as her “respirator.” She claims the mechanism allowed her to breathe.

I know about mechanisms (writing autobiographical fiction is certainly one) and I’m all for breathing. Perhaps, by acting out her complicated charade, Ms. Albert did herself more good than harm. Maybe now the woman can finally catch her breath.
 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Over the last few years Bob Thurber has published more than 200 short stories, appeared in 15 anthologies, and received  awards or citations in thirty writing competitions. Most recently he is the recipient of: The Marjory Bartlett Sanger Award, The 2006 Meridian Editors’ Prize, and The 2007 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, August 15th, 2007.