The story of JT LeRoy is the stuff of literary legend.
The author, who identified as gender-fluid, burst on to the scene in the late 1990s with confrontational tales that hinted at a troubled past, becoming a wunderkind seemingly overnight. Celebrities such as Shirley Manson and Winona Ryder were quick to count the talented writer among their closest friends.
LeRoy’s second novel was swiftly adapted into a film that premiered at Cannes. But in 2005, all the goodwill came crashing down following the bombshell that the author wasn’t real – but was in fact the creation of Laura Albert, a Brooklyn mother who had been posing as LeRoy’s manager under a fake name and British accent. Fans and friends of the person once believed to be LeRoy turned, upset at having been duped.
In Jeff Feuerzeig’s riveting re-telling of the events that led to the shocking discovery, Albert gets offered the opportunity to redeem her actions, and make light of why and how she conned the world. Unsurprisingly, she’s a hell of a storyteller.
Over a series of interviews, Albert relays how LeRoy came to be. Under the pseudonym Terminator, she piqued the interest of the publishing world with her dark folky tales. Terminator soon morphed into LeRoy, and the rest is history.
Interspersed throughout are confessional flashbacks to Albert’s childhood, in which she recounts a painful upbringing spent battling obesity that she argues yielded the bruised poetry of LeRoy. Albert is of course an unreliable narrator. But the tale she weaves is so vivid and engaging, it’s impossible not to be swept up.
Feurzeig, probably realizing the goldmine he has in Albert, rarely cuts to other voices. The few instances where other people creep into the narrative are primarily via phone recordings of conversations between Albert and a medley of key figures in LeRoy’s evolution, including Billy Corgan and most memorably, Courtney Love.
In Author’s funniest moment, Love abruptly interrupts an intense discussion: “There’s a really small line of coke here and I don’t want to put you on hold.”
A fleeting appearance from Albert’s sister-in-law Savannah Knoop, who assumed the public personae of LeRoy during the whole circus, is effectively held until the end.
Albert never addresses why she has gone to the pains of recording countless phone calls with a persons of interest. She doesn’t have to – the calculated effort speaks for itself. Author is less a run-through of one of the biggest controversies to plague the literary world in the past century, than an illuminating study of the enigmatic and driven woman behind the phenomenon.
