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| Hearsay: |
Literary-hoaxer Laura Albert is defending herself in court by claiming that her JT Leroy personality, which she sold to the world as a very real figure, was at least real to her. She should have just written her own life down. It would have been just as fucked up and only half as much a lie. After faking an AIDS narrative for personal gain, I can’t help but feel she’s abusing a whole other range of marginalized people with her claims of abuse and mental disorder. I have no doubt abuse and mental disorders are involved here, I just think they’re probably not the ones she’s trying to use as heartstrings designed for tugging.
The woman who penned a fictional “autobiography” about a male truck-stop prostitute defended her actions in court Wednesday, saying the story she presented was real to her.
San Francisco writer Laura Albert, who wrote under the pseudonym JT LeRoy, is being sued by a film producer who bought the rights to her book, Sarah.
Albert said she had assumed male identities since childhood and the boy she described in the book was real because he was inside her.
“It was my respirator,” she told a jury in U.S. District Court in New York. “If you take JT, you take my other and I die.”
Albert kept her identity secret while giving interviews about the book under the name JT LeRoy.
Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, president of Antidote International Films, is suing Albert for $110,000 US, saying he did not know the JT LeRoy character was imaginary until 2006, six years after the book was published.
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June 21st, 2007 at 8:27 am
It’s incredible George that you could call her work, written under heteronym, “a lie.” I’m actually quite surprised. Do you think poets like Erin Moure, when writing as Eirin Mouré cross some sacred boundary between literary license and criminal con-artistry? How then do we account for the work of Alberto Caeiro or George Elliot or Andreas Karavis? Text is text, prose is prose, verse is verse; they all do their work regardless of their author’s photo. The complaint one should level against the book is that it’s shitty, not that it’s immoral.
June 21st, 2007 at 8:36 am
The lie is that she turned it into a cottage industry in order to make money, not art. It was an exploitation for personal gain, not for anything else. The immorality was in sucking up the sympathy dollars in a mis-lit obsessed society, well-past the chance to come out and make a statement.
June 21st, 2007 at 8:40 am
I have no problem with pseudonyms and even hoaxes. In fact, I love hoaxes. But I hate greedy over-privileged people who profit off the suffering of others and then claim positions of marginality as defence. JT crossed the line from literary act to lie when people started investing money, hope and time in the myth beyond the book and she didn’t make the call to reveal it, but rather began pocketing the cash and making fools of everyone. If she was a shock DJ doing this, we’d be calling for her to be fired.
June 21st, 2007 at 12:16 pm
So wait… I don’t get it. It’s only criminal when it’s profitable, provocative, or pathetic (in the Greek sense of the word)? If it’s ignored, unprofitable, or apathetic then it’s ok? Hell, you don’t think George Elliot was bought, read, and heart-breaking in her day? I’m not saying I agree with what this woman has done but we have to be careful not to set a precedent that mitigates the authority of artists to piss off, deceive, and act up, even if it hurts feelings and makes a buck.
June 21st, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Interesting discussion. But surely you mean George Eliot? And her reasons for choosing a nom de plume had more to do with the publishing climate of the 19th c. than with a desire to profit off the fictive misery of her characters.
June 21st, 2007 at 1:06 pm
No, no. It’s about intent. Piss off as many people as you can, make as much money as you can from your art. But Albert’s intent isn’t art. It’s riches and fame. And she’s made it off the backs of others who aren’t in on her little charade. She’s siphoned attention and money from the very marginalized demographic she’s impersonating. She’s not just making money, she’s doing harm.
June 21st, 2007 at 2:05 pm
theresa,
The JT Leroy has a lot to do with the publishing climate of the 21st! You have to get noticed, or it’s the remainder bin for you.
And to get noticed, you need to be sensational (as in causing a sensation, not necessarily being any good).
June 21st, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Although I didn’t make it very clearly, I guess my point is really that George Eliot wasn’t operating as a fraud. She was a woman trying to be taken seriously as a writer in a time and place where such things were not to be taken for granted. One has only to read biographies of the Brontes and others who took the nom de plume route to understand something of that dilemma. As I understand it, Laura Albert was hoping to convince us that the JT Leroy autobiography was real. She is an opportunist of the worst sort, I think, though not without some talent as a writer! Maybe it comes down to how a book is presented and what we are expected to believe or know about the line between fiction and non-fiction.
June 21st, 2007 at 2:22 pm
theresa,
Yeah, I knew what the conditions were. Though it’s interesting that Albert also had to write as a male to be taken “seriously.” That’s pretty much why she’s getting sued. Her work isn’t what’s important, it’s the male persona she invented beside it. Haven’t really thought a lot about this, but I will be. Hmmmm.
June 21st, 2007 at 3:45 pm
I still think it’s an incredibly uneclectic and bureaucratic view of fiction that one needs to disclaim “THIS ONLY HAPPENED IN MY HEAD” for our puritan sensibilities to be unharmed while reading it. Can’t fiction be fiction even if it doesn’t call itself that? If not, why? Maybe this is the future of fiction — the only way for us to suspend disbelief in a literary culture that requires us to slot our writing into genres… or else.
June 21st, 2007 at 3:50 pm
There’s no issue of artistic merit at play here. If Albert had published these books under her own name, and with truthful biographical details about her as the author, there’d be no issue. The issue isn’t that she lied in print, it’s that she lied in person. If she’s going to claim that JT Leroy is a real person, and the author of this work, then that has to be true or else she will have to bear the consequences. “But that’s what you have to do to get ahead in publishing” is no defence. Realistically, to get ahead in life we all have good cause to go out and rob a bank. Try that one in front of a judge and see where you get.
This is part of a larger issue, though, which seems complex but is really quite simple. If you’re writing poetry or fiction, you can tell whatever lies you like in the text of the work. The deal you have made with the reader is that you’re asking for (and they’re granting you) suspension of disbelief. If you’re writing non-fiction, you can’t, because the reader hasn’t agreed to invoke suspension of disbelief. They’ve agreed to read as though the things in the work actually happened. It’s a fundamental difference in approach, for a reader. If you’re representing yourself as an author of either, though, you can’t make up an alternate life for yourself. You have to be you, or you’ll get caught and discredited. The examples of Erin Moure and others like her are not relevant, because to my knowledge these people aren’t representing themselves in a false way in terms of their biographical material. We don’t live in the same world as George Eliot, so that example’s not really applicable either.
Authors, publishers, agents and the media can try to negotiate and rationalize their way around this all they want, and certainly they do, but readers do not care about these subtle nuances, and punish the perpetrators. Albert lied to her readers, and in this case her business partners, in a way they didn’t agree to. Period.
June 21st, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Plus, if this suit is successful, it more or less sets a legal (though civic) precedent which prohibits authors writing under a heteronym from writing about anything outside of their experience. That’s shocking. So much for historical fiction. While in residence in Banff, I listened to a panel discussion more or less about this very question: what are the moral consequences of writing fiction from the perspective of a socio-economic, racial, ethnic, medical, religious, or legal demographic that isn’t your own? Hell, the stakes are high on this one.
June 21st, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Michael,
“I still think it’s an incredibly uneclectic and bureaucratic view of fiction that one needs to disclaim “THIS ONLY HAPPENED IN MY HEAD” for our puritan sensibilities to be unharmed while reading it.”
But this isn’t the issue at all with JT Leroy. Laura Albert, in what has to be one of the more complex hoaxes around (there’s a good article about it in, I think, Salon) went to great lengths to convince us that her fiction wasn’t fiction at all.
What you’re talking about is a situation where people assume that something is true when it isn’t. I can’t think of a single example of this happening. It only happens when the author claims, or allows it to be claimed, that the work in fact did not happen in their head, but happened in the real world, and to them. It’s a significant distinction.
Remember, she’s not being sued for the content of her work, she’s being sued for misrepresenting herself in relation to the work. No one, with this suit, is suggesting that an author can’t write from a position outside their own. What you can’t do, and shouldn’t be able to do, is lie and say it is your own when it isn’t. You’re right, the stakes are extremely high, but I think you’re on the wrong side here. It’s people like Albert, who lie about who they are personally and misrepresent themselves as writers, that give fodder to those who would tell writers to stick to their own personal experience. It makes writing from outside your own experience seem dishonest. Which it isn’t.