JT Leroy

Reece Pancake once said that all great writing *is* based on morality.

I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.

And with that, I spent in the face of grey cancers ruining great work.

Rumbling your shite Lowest Common Denominator workplace is not namedropping, it's KNOWLEDGE. Which I wanted to share with everyone who may not have realised. And you need the attentions of a good sub-editor more than I would have done at the age of 12, so it's hardly surprising you've found a home with Little Red Wapping Wench.

Alas no, collaborative novels don't really work. But that doesn't excuse your Doomie Mk One ¡Kill The Trendies! rant. It just sounds like once someone wearing black clothes said No Job For Mikey and now the rest of the world has to pay for your stupid prejudice for ever after because of it.

And originality in isolation is just a bad, over-Romantic idealisation of the creative. People who are not terribly creative or original do that one all the time.

Can you explain Harper Lee then?

If you do not like celebrity culture, go off and live on a farm in Texas. Yes, lig culture is irritating, but screeching about it, complaining and banging on like you are the first person that has ever noticed it is even more irritating than those you decry. Those who complain the loudest are almost invariably failed liggers who are jealous because they themselves have failed to attach themselves to a star. Congratulations on being lower than a bottom feeder.

You observe it, you are horrified, and then you either LEAVE or else you learn to cope and live and work around it, recognising your true friends and like minds wherever you find them.

Complaining is not the solution to the problem, it is PART of the problem.

Not many people do know. I have an astounding amount of people who do call me and discuss personal issues of distracting taste. People whom I have known for a fortnight. You see, I'm that good. Or else I would not have gotten as far as I have.

But you still have not offered an explanation of Harper Lee?

It would be interesting how you fit her beautiful writings into your world view.

I have no need to grovel nor complain as I do make very good money and I do enjoy my job. Very few people can claim that. I am where I want to be in my life.

However if you think NoTW = going far you have made a category error.

Cooper's writing struck me as being only a dustjacket and shelfspace at Borders' away from child pornography. I'm aware this is a slippery slope and I could end up sounding like a Chrisitan ranting against Harry Potter. Everyone has different standards for what makes something obscene. Personally, I find Cooper obscene and do not think he has any amount of talent with which to redeem his work.

His statement that he writes what he writes to avoid *doing* it and being it doesn't cut it with me. There are alt.sex groups where he could post his crap. Perhaps its the publishers and literary community that have welcomed him with whom I should hold a beef.

'Do not overestimate great man lest you underestimate yourself'

I'd rather read News of the World than I-D though, heh, no offence Suzy but the tits are too "arty" for me and I miss out on top new Jordan news.

Works both ways.

See you kids later.

I think Courtney would be great as the mom in Sarah. Despite being, in all honesty, a little too old for the part, as Suzy pointed out. I'm surprised she's campaigning for it so heavily, though. It's not that big a part, really. Pivotal, but not much screen time probably.

(why sicker than if they retired to boudoirs dressed as french maids, ned?)

Because such a big deal was made in all the reviews I read about the autobiographical side and the unusual circumstances in which the books were written, I'm sure pretty much everyone who read the books had this in mind, and I wonder whether they really stand alone.

I wonder if he'll ever write another book -- that article doesn't mention one.

From houstonpress.com
Originally published by Houston Press 2005-08-25
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.

Coal Miner Mother of a Mess
In which we call bullshit on J.T. LeRoy's "essay" in the Oxford American's music issue
By John Nova Lomax

A couple of Fridays ago, my wife and son were out playing softball, and I found myself baby-sitting our infant daughter. Having gotten her off to bed, it seemed as good a time as any to tear into the Oxford American's annual music issue, so I uncorked a big bottle of cheap Chardonnay, stoked my jambox with a mother lode of CDs and dug in.
A few words about the magazine: Each summer the quarterly, now-Arkansas-based journal gives itself over entirely to music, and this year's model is on stands now. As usual, it comes with a CD sampler of the artists profiled in the magazine, and as usual, the editors have rounded up an all-star lineup of writers, photographers and painters. Also as usual, the CD that comes with it is great. Producer Rick Clark has done his usual bang-up job of harvesting rare treasures from canonical artists.

The stories are far more of a mixed bag. The pieces on Jack Clement, Blind Willie McTell, Sammi Smith and Buddy Holly were all top-notch. But when it's bad, it's awful, and Racket is not the only one in his circle to have literally hurled his copy across the room. For me, it was J.T. LeRoy's "Coal Miner Mother," a whale of a tale about LeRoy's mother's reputed desire to transmogrify herself into Loretta Lynn, and LeRoy's unrequited wish that she would absorb the message of Lynn's songs.

A few words about LeRoy for the uninitiated: Almost no facts are known about this reclusive author. Indeed, it is not even certain that LeRoy is male, as he purports. At any rate, LeRoy arrived at a San Francisco equivalent of Covenant House in 1993 and told people he was then 13. He was deemed a hopeless case, but one of his therapists hooked him on the writing bug, and out came a torrent of purportedly autobiographical tales of the seamiest sort -- tales of being a gay street hustler in San Francisco; being a seven-year-old heroin addict; being turned out as a cross-dressing "lot lizard" (truck-stop prostitute) by his drug-addicted, too-young mother, who taught him how to give head using carrots; seducing his mother's boyfriends from the age of ten. And then there were his psychotic, Bible-bashing grandparents…

LeRoy was put in touch with Los Angeles author Dennis Cooper, from whose bleak novels of life in the gay street-trade underworld LeRoy seemed to have escaped. Cooper helped mold LeRoy, touted his writing, and gave him entrée into the world of underground literature. In 1997, when he was 17 and using the pseudonym "Terminator" (which he retains in part as the "T" in J.T. and which he says was his ironic hustling nickname), he published the short story "Baby Doll" in the awful-sounding collection Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage and Desire. Three years and one book deal later came the first novel, Sarah, a magic-realist memoir of his lot lizard days, followed by the short-story collection The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, another litany of abuse and a testament to LeRoy's indomitable will and purity of heart.

By this time, he was the darling of a certain demimonde of the damned; Gus Van Sant, Courtney Love, Madonna, Winona Ryder, Marianne Faithfull, Tatum O'Neal and Garbage's Shirley Manson were all whooping high hosannas about this damaged, cross-dressing naïf. (In public, the petite, pear-shaped LeRoy usually wears a hat, huge Jackie O. shades and mangy, ill-fitting blond wigs, not to mention the raccoon-penis-bone necklace that he has made his trademark talisman.) Tom Waits even interviewed him in Vanity Fair. Most recently, LeRoy and Italian actress Asia Argento collaborated on a film adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful… (And oh, yeah, he was also selected as the guest editor of this year's model of Da Capo's Best Music Writing, one of the only shots we lowly music scribes have at getting our prose immortalized in even tiny measure.)

But that Waits interview was the sum of my knowledge of LeRoy lore when I picked up the Oxford American. "Coal Miner Mother" is identified as "an essay" and it begins thusly: "I remember my momma, Sarah, stripping in the pole clubs to the song 'There He Goes' by Loretta Lynn." I groaned. I knew immediately that this story was not going to have much to do with Lynn, and from there, the Southern Gothic clichés mounted, each more preposterous than the last.

Sarah made young LeRoy record "There He Goes" by forcing him to hold a pawn-shop jambox up to a motel TV that was airing Coal Miner's Daughter…Sarah and LeRoy would make such scenes in Nashville record shops about Lynn's ownership of "There He Goes" (Patsy Cline has another version) that record store clerks would escort them out at the wrong end of a shotgun. (How very Quentin Tarantino. But I can assure you -- having lived there both before and after the time the story was set -- that Nashville record store clerks were far more like Jack Black in High Fidelity than the Gimpkeepers in Pulp Fiction.)…Sarah would get wasted and tell people that she and LeRoy were not just the daughter and grandson of coal miners -- hell, they were coal miners themselves! When people would doubt that J.T. was a miner, she would wonder "Ain't they read they Dickens?!"…That Sarah called all her boyfriends "Doo" during this era….That Sarah, J.T. in tow, would perform Lynn songs at Nashville open-mike nights, her face daubed in charcoal to simulate coal dust. And then, when the crowd would hiss, she would flash them her bush. (How very Sharon Stone!)…Later, she fashioned a Coal Miner's Daughter outfit from materials purloined from the Salvation Army, and she and LeRoy would shoplift food and liquor from Publix stores…

Wait a minute, I suddenly thought. What the hell is a Publix store? Like I said, I lived in Nashville before, during and after that period, and I had never heard of such an animal. I guessed that it was a supermarket, and I knew that to this day, liquor was unobtainable at Tennessee grocery stores. Turns out Publix is a grocery store chain -- but until 1990 it was confined to Florida. (According to a Publix spokesperson, the chain opened its first Tennessee store in late 2002.) It was a telling misstep -- while he never specified the names of any of the bars Sarah sang in, the stripper dives she pole-danced in, the motels they stayed at, or where the shotgun-toting record store clerks were, LeRoy did manage to screw up one of the only specific places he mentioned.

A few days later, via e-mail, I confronted LeRoy and Oxford American editor Marc Smirnoff with my doubts. How could such a preposterous, uncorroboratable tale, wherein one of the only two businesses mentioned by name did not check out, be passed off as "an essay" and not fiction? Within hours, I was ladled the following e-mailed dollop of mushy condescension from LeRoy's camp.

Hi John,

J.T.'s in LA right now and away from his computer. This is his assistant, Nancy. Having worked with J.T. for 4 years, I am confident that I can speak for him regarding your questions.

If you were to look at J.T.'s works, you would find that all of them are published as fiction, even those pieces that are very close to his actual experiences. This is because J.T. doesn't really believe in the concept of true fact and true fiction. The way he sees it, any event that occurs is subject to interpretation from the person involved with it. Two people may be in the exact same situation but take entirely different memories away from it, depending on what they bring to the table and their own personality. Likewise, a writer always weaves parts of his/her life experiences, opinions, thoughts, small noted details, in short, everything that they are and have been, into their writing. It would be unnatural not to do that.

So, you see? No true fact or fiction.

J.T. has, surprisingly, been asked this kind of question about his book, Sarah, which, like all his work, has a foot in reality. He has replied to these folks that yes, much of the folklore is true and he was a lot lizard in West Virginia and that ramps are a celebrated food there but he never really walked on water. It's the genre called "magical realism."

J.T. is a story teller. In my opinion, his works do everything that good writing should: they captivate, move me to tears and laughter, uplift me and fill me with wonder. I am always the better for having read and digested his words. I, of course, am not alone here. In fact, J.T. is guest editor of this year's Da Capo's Best Music Writing of 2005. Paul Bresnick, the editor of many books in this series, upon receiving his copy of the Oxford American, replied:

"BTW, I really liked your piece in the music issue of the Oxford American. It'll definitely make the first cut for next year's BEST MUSIC WRITING."

I've always felt that the main measure of a piece of writing is how much a reader enjoys it, is made to think and to feel. However, if your reliance on the facts precludes your appreciation of J.T.'s Loretta Lynn piece, I guess there's not too much we can do about that.

Please send us a copy of your story. I know J.T. would find it interesting reading.

Warm regards,
Nancy Murdock
J.T.'s assistant

Wow, a total cave-in. I replied to it thusly:

Seen Rashomon, have we?

I'm familiar with the whole concept of subjective reality and all that. And when LeRoy engages in magic realism and flights of fancy in his memoiristic fiction, that's fine, so long as it's labeled as fiction. I don't care if J.T. lived every line of his novels and short stories or not.

But when it's labeled as "an essay" in a magazine that is entirely given over to nonfiction articles (with the exception of a comic strip or two and some poetry)…That's another matter. It just seems like lying to me. But then again I am a facts-bound music writer and thus, evidently, unlikely ever to be included in any Da Capo anthologies.

And yet to a certain degree, I could see Murdock's (or LeRoy's, or whoever it was who sent that e-mail) point. By a broad definition of "essay" -- say, this one: "a short literary composition on a single subject, usually presenting the personal view of the author," which I got off dictionary.com -- "Coal Miner Mother" would pass muster. It certainly would in LeRoy's worldview, where words have no meanings save for those we apply to them individually. But still, most of us lowly, uncreative types -- those of us who are yet bound to the surly bonds of facts and can't quite touch the face of God -- would agree that this story surely should have been labeled "fiction." (Or better yet, to my eye, anyway, "a parody of Southern Gothic fiction.")

At which point we turn to Smirnoff, the Oxford American's editor. At the end of a testy interview, after he questioned my credentials, cut me off several times and told me he had only glanced at the e-mails I had sent to him along with LeRoy's camp, here's what he had to say about running the piece as an essay: "Maybe a newspaper wouldn't be comfortable running a piece like J.T. LeRoy's as an essay -- I wouldn't be comfortable with the lack of fact-checking that goes on at a newspaper," he said. (Thus ignoring that it was a messed-up fact that made me call bullshit on "Coal Miner Mother.") "We have different practices. And this was a literary experiment at a literary magazine, and maybe that's not something you're comfortable with. More power to you. A literary experiment in a literary magazine…That would be my final position on it. But I'm also comfortable with you saying that it should have been a story, or an essay. I think it could have gone either way in a literary magazine. We are not a newspaper."

But we are. And the meaning of words still matters to me, and to pass this off as an essay in an issue of a magazine, literary or not, that was otherwise (save for a couple of poems and a comic strip) given over to nonfiction profiles and true-to-life, plausible essays, smacks of a bad decision at best. At worst, it could be interpreted as a fabrication, a hoax.

What you think of it depends on where you stand on the issue of "true fact" vs. "true fiction."

I do think JT Leroy has got something different to offer by comparison to a lot of writers... his profound innocence, essentially.

This is relevant, at least to me -- I read The Heart Is Deceitful on a trip to Barcelona that should have been the time of my life. Instead, my memories of the trip are a tangled mess of nightmares related to the book. I couldn't sleep, I was afraid to sleep because of the dreams I had on account of reading that book. I'm not saying I regret reading it, because it affected me deeply enough to make me lose sleep, but if I could read it again, I would NOT read it on vacation.

Dude please, 2001? The book *had* just come out, I liked the writing, and yeah I have an old Cooper connection. BFD.

It could be a lot worse. One could be my former editor, who thought she was participating in phone conversations with JTL!

this type of hoax is enabled and perpetuated by the type of person who is "in the know"--the type of person who pretends to know something when they just know someone (or know someone who knows someone, etc.) who has told them that they know something

it's really not all that hard to fool people. people want to be fooled.

nasdijj > leroy in all ways, he doesn't apologize or try to justify, he just spits incoherent venom at his enemies

-- J0hn D., Saturday, June 23, 2007 11:31 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

dunno who he's talking about or why spitting incoherent venom is what i'm looking for in a writer.

being fooled isn't embarrassing but lording it all over those who aren't "in the know" pretty much is.

lol people still read books?

it's funny how this writer's fiction turned out to be fiction

lol people still pretend to be "in the know" on the internets?

so is there like a reverse-backlash "wow! she's just like Andy Kaufman!" cult yet

is JT Leroy the small cat?

I would love it if they introduced 'What is an Author' into evidence.

english public schools had a standard question in their exams about the authorship of shakespeare's plays along those lines before yer foucaults and barthes were even born.

everyone knows francis bacon wrote the plays

or was it marlowe

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1382/551965414_7897451a24_o.gif

this is my favorite thread

omg can't believe jt leroy is guilty of fraud. what is this world coming to.

― Wrinklepaws

it's funny how this writer's fiction turned out to be fiction

― Binjominia, Sunday, June 24, 2007 2:19 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a good thread

https://www.versobooks.com/events/1417-author-the-jt-leroy-story-with-an-introduction-by-juliet-jacques

she's just like Andy Kaufman!" cult yet

― marmotwolof, Sunday, 24 June 2007 18:30 (nine years ago)

I gather the woman behind the whole thing has made a new documentary claiming just that about herself, at least by implication. Also that she recorded everyone's calls without their permission. Figure she's about to be in for a new world of legal hurt.

My girlfriend Kate and I just watched the other documentary that came out a year ago, The Cult of JT Leroy -- choppy at points but definitely a good portrait of a pretty fucked up situation. As much a portrayal of wanting to be part of the in crowd as anything else. As I said to Kate at one point, "Who was starfucking who here?" (Meantime the couple of telling clips from people who live and struggle through Leroy's supposed stomping grounds are telling in turn.)

The various posts at the start of the thread are definitely bemusing.

I only vaguely knew of this saga when it was happening/was revealed, but I really enjoyed her interview on WTF a week or so ago.

i LOVED this latest documentary. i don't really care how much laura albert says is true or not, i found the whole thing fascinating.

it was weird to me how identical her and savannah's voices/fake accents were. i wanted to know more about the relationship between them - how was laura conducting all these relationships over the phone, while savannah was maintaining them in person?? i had a general idea of the story before watching the doc, but no clue that the whole thing went on for like a decade - i was under the impression it had lasted maybe a year or so.

and all the recordings of conversations... THAT WAS FUCKING WEIRD. she recorded everything?? did the doc get permission from the people on the other end of the line to use those clips? i really wanted to here from more celebrities who were convinced j.t. was a real live person. i wanted to know what holes in the story people picked up on throughout those 10 years.

and laura's son! i wanted to know how he felt about all this.

i only watched like 30 mins of this and bailed, maybe will revisit sometime, but my impression was maybe some of the recorded converstions were genuine but some struck me that they seemed reconstructed for the doc idk i could be wrong

There was one taped convo where she was breaking up with her husband that I was a bit dubious about

i liked the doc but yeah i would have loved to hear more from savannah and the husband about their perspectives

maybe the recordings are part of the ongoing jt leroy mystique project
(that's what i was thinking when i wondered the same thing about them)

Yeah I started to wonder if they were just reenactments bit but they sounded real. So many questions.

did the doc get permission from the people on the other end of the line to use those clips?

Nope.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/movies/asia-argento-and-others-are-angry-about-being-in-jt-leroy-documentary.html