Laura Albert resurfaces, talks on phone, and infuses fiction
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When I tried to describe JT Leroy/Laura Albert to graduate students last night, one said she’d just seen that story -- with a different ending -- on ‘Law & Order.’ The connection was noticed by our colleague Ron Hogan at GalleyCat, who got Albert on the phone and asked her some questions about it. Hogan writes:
...she found the tameness of the Law & Order episode at times comical -- like the way all the hustlers, who were supposed to be victims of lifelong abuse, were the most beautiful people in the cast. ‘It’s like watching somebody else describe a war as a jousting match when you’re with actual survivors of that war....’ [Albert said.] ‘I have no desire to reach out to the people who don’t understand,’ Albert said. ‘I don’t need to supply anyone with any kind of explanation or answer....’
In case you’re not caught up what explaining might be expected of Albert, she was the author behind one of the big literary hoaxes of recent years. Albert, with her then-significant other Geoffrey Knoop, penned several works as JT Leroy, a transgendered, abused young truck-stop hustler. When Leroy became so hip and popular that the demand for his appearances had to be met, Knoop’s sister stood in as the ‘real’ Leroy, wearing a wig and oversized sunglasses. (Earlier this year, Savannah Knoop published a memoir of playing Leroy, ‘Girl Boy Girl.’) The scheme was brought to light by a 2005 article in New York Magazine.
As reporter Stephen Beachy noted, Leroy fostered his literary career by befriending authors, including Dennis Cooper and Mary Gaitskill, over the phone. He -- actually Albert -- was alternately charming, vulnerable and compelling. She may have been in New York for a reading by Janice Erlbaum (turns out the two of them were in a group home together), but she chose to talk to GalleyCat over the phone anyway.
Making phone calls to key people isn’t the only thing Albert is back at -- she’s also returned to writing. A columnist for a pop-culture website called psychoPEDIA, she writes Outpost. The column is ‘a San Francisco-based West Coast guide offering off-the-cuff (and, on occasion, fictionally infused) blog reviews.’
‘On occasion, fictionally infused’ seems like an apt disclaimer. But if you’re waiting to see if it appears on a memoir of Albert’s own, you’ll have a long wait. ‘I would rather be misunderstood than accommodate them by writing a ‘tell-all memoir,’ ‘ she told GalleyCat, ‘and then they say I’m holding out for the big bucks before I tell my story? I’ve turned down $2 million of their money already.’
-- Carolyn Kellogg
