In the ongoing saga that is JT Leroy, now more a title than a name anyhow, I came across this interesting article in the New York Times about the woman behind the writing. In case you missed the hullabaloo last year I wrote a pretty lengthy post about the loss I felt when one of my favorite writers was unmasked as a fraud. Still I have a place in my heart for this fraud and by extension, Laura Albert. She’s been through a lot, as evidenced early on in the story:
“In the last two years Laura Albert has lost, in no particular order, her livelihood, her boyfriend, a piece of her identity, quite possibly her apartment…”
And she sounds like a character herself, probably pretty difficult to deal with, perhaps annoying, and possibly even mentally ill on some level (aren’t we all…). In a way she is as flawed as her author/character JT Leroy. That makes her writing all the more genuine, even as misleading as it was. If her flaws stem from similar reasons as her alter ego or not we can’t really know…until she writes her own autobiography.
