James Frey refused to take no for an answer on his first title, A Million Little Pieces. When in 1998 he began the “fictional memoir,” as it is now called, he was a struggling L.A. screenwriter with a single credit to his name: the romantic comedy Kissing a Fool, which Roger Ebert called “pea-brained.” So he decided to write literature like his idols, Hemingway, Mailer, Henry Miller, Kerouac, and Bukowski—something new that would “break a lot of rules … people place on writing and art, which I wholly reject,” he later told Vanity Fair.1 But an MFA friend who read the first draft of the detox nightmare told him, “This is unpublishable. This would get destroyed in my workshop.”
Soldiering on, Frey signed with Kassie Evashevski of Brillstein-Grey. All eighteen publishers to whom the agent sent the novel rejected it. Then, as now, victim titles—horrific but redemptive memoirs—were cash cows (Angela’s Ashes, Running with Scissors, A Child Called ‘It’, etc.) So Evashevski resubmitted Pieces as autobiographical nonfiction. The manuscript was immediately accepted by Random House, one of its original rejecters, and turned over to legendary editor Nan Talese.
Released in 2003, Frey’s “colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood” was showered with accolades. Talese’s best-selling novelist Pat Conroy called the title “the War and Peace of addiction.” Even nonlogrollers found the 420-page root canal “unflinchingly honest,” “mesmerizing,” “electrifying,” “turbo-charged, “incredible.” Frey had indeed upped the memoir ante: He portrayed himself as a loose cannon junkie outlaw who decked cops and priests, underwent Marathon Man dentistry without Novocain, and invited chicks to snort coke lines off his penis.
A few quibblers were put off by Frey’s masturbatory stream of consciousness, contempt for punctuation, and affection for random caps. In his “Million Little Pieces of Shit” review, critic John Dolan called the book a bad Hemingway knockoff. “This self-aggrandizing, simple-minded, poorly observed, repetitious, maudlin drivel passes for avant-garde literature in America?” he wondered.2
Yes, replied Oprah Winfrey. The matron of American letters picked the title for her book club and turned it into a bestseller. But soon The Smoking Gun published “A Million Little Lies,” exposing Frey’s tabloid nonfiction as fiction.
“The truth is what matters,” Frey stubbornly insisted in the book. “It is what I should be remembered by, if I’m remembered at all.” Then, after being busted, he told Esquire magazine with equal moral indignation, “What’s truth and what’s not doesn’t even matter.”3
In any case, Oprah had Frey’s back, at least in the beginning. When he appeared on Larry King Live to answer The Smoking Gun charges, Oprah phoned in to announce, “The underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me, and I know it resonates with millions of people. … To me, it seems to be much ado about nothing.”
When other critics picked up the pitchforks and torches, the Queen of Empathy, allowing that objections might be much ado about something, invited the author and his editor to her “Truth in America” special broadcast.
“Then anybody can just walk in off the street with whatever story they have and say this is my story,” challenged America’s bestseller maker.
“Absolutely true,” replied Talese.
“That needs to change,” snapped Oprah.
“No, you cannot stop people from making up stories,” objected Talese. Later, according to Time magazine, the editor demanded an apology for her host’s “fiercely bad manners” and “ambush.”
Random House offered a refund to readers who felt duped. One thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine filed, costing the publisher $27,348, a fraction of their millions in profits for A Million Little Pieces. The publisher froze Frey’s royalties anyway but soon unfroze them when he threatened to sue based on his prepub “Author’s Questionnaire.” In it, he had described his title as more “a work of literature” than “a memoir or autobiography.”
Avoiding collateral damage, Kassie Evashevski dropped him and Riverhead cancelled the contract for his next two books.4 “Literally, pretty much everybody I knew in publishing, with the exception of, I think, two people, cut contact off,” Frey told Vanity Fair.
He was now in nonfiction retreat, reversing his initial bullish advance. During prepublication interviews he had flashed reporters his “ftbsitttd” wrist tattoo—a “Fuck the Bullshit, It’s Time to Throw Down” acronym. He was following the advice of the allegedly real-life hero of his Pieces sequel, My Friend Leonard, a Mafia hit man father figure.
“Every time you meet someone, make a fucking impression,” the mob Confucius had supposedly told the novelist in detox. “Make them think you’re the hottest shit in the world.”5
And so he had, after the fashion of his role models, Hemingway and Mailer. He trashed his competitors, including David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. Then he went on to predict that he would be recognized as the best writer of his generation.
Frey was bummed about being a “pariah” of publishing until he had the good fortune of meeting Norman Mailer. “If you would have called me, I would have explained to you how to get through all this mess!” the eighty-three-year-old legend told him. Like a boxer, every rebel artist takes a beating, he explained. Just as the Philistines had for forty Biblical years “stomped on me,” the author of The White Negro went on, “now you have the privilege of being stomped on for the next forty years.”
Redeemed by the master, Frey self-exiled to France and there began his resurrection gospel, Bright Shiny Morning. Eric Simonoff of Janklow & Nesbit agreed to represent the title and soon secured a $1.5 million advance from HarperCollins. Still gun shy from the Million Little Piece IED, Frey said that before publication this time, “I was expecting to get killed everywhere.” So he hired Hell’s Angel bodyguards for the Shiny Morning book tour, inspired perhaps by how well they’d worked out for the Stones at Altamont.
Blessedly, the bikers’ services were not needed with readers or critics, and there was no “Sympathy for the Devil” curtain call with pool cues. Though the L.A. Times called the novel “a train wreck” and the New York Daily News “schlock,” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin described Frey as a “furiously good storyteller… [who] hit one out of the park.” The Guardian went further, calling Shiny Morning “the literary comeback of the decade. … If his story tells us anything,” it concluded, “it’s that being a deluded fantasist and pathological liar may be a disadvantage for a biographer, but it’s a decided asset for a novelist.”6
Publisher’s Weekly called this groundbreaking memoir “a startling achievement in his accelerating mastery of the literary form.” In the book’s afterword, Mister Rogers himself called it, “A virtuous, unflinching, and unsentimental account of one boy’s courage amid some of the world’s worst cruelties.”
Six years after its publication, the San Francisco Chronicle called the novel “the greatest literary hoax in a generation.”
Sarah, by JT LeRoy, was published by Bloomsbury in 1999. JT was Jeremiah Terminator who was Cherry Vanilla who was Sam who was Sarah. JT-Cherry Vanilla-Sam-Sarah was a twelve-year-old boy-girl transvestite runaway and HIV-infected “lot lizard” who pulled tricks at a West Virginia truck stop. JT was a kind of postmodern, Less Than Zero, LGBT Holden Caulfield/Victor Victoria.
In 2005, novelist Stephen Beachy outted the lot lizard.7 His suspicions were originally aroused when noting an uncanny resemblance between Sarah and Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener, which itself turned out to be a retread of Anthony Godby Johnson’s 1993 Crown title, A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy’s Triumphant Story—the “autobiography” of an HIV-infected fourteen-year-old beaten and raped by his parents. Anthony had turned out to be a Union City, New Jersey woman by the name of Vicki Fraginals.
As for JT, after much digging, Beachy discovered that his/her real name was Laura Victoria Albert. Laura had started off as a social worker named Emily Frasier. She then morphed into a Renaissance wo/man by the name of Speedie. She wrote, acted, and sang for a San Francisco punk band called Daddy Don’t Go and moonlighted as a phone sex operator.
Like Frey, in spite of her extracurricular activities, Albert was committed above all to literature. “S/he spoke about metaphorical truth, about purity of intent, and of a commitment to writing,” reported Beachy. Instead of Frey’s “Fuck the Bullshit” lit tattoo, she often wore a typewriter pendant inscribed, “Write Hard, Die Free.”
Though he may have written hard, he didn’t dwell on mechanics. “He couldn’t punctuate to save his life…” wrote one of his many volunteer editors, David Wiegand.8 “The only reason his spelling isn’t worse than it is is because some of the errors are flagged by Microsoft Word.” But Weigand does credit the author for both his self-promotion and editorial manipulation skills: “LeRoy works editors much as Louis B. Mayer worked writers back in MGM’s heyday.”
Indeed, LeRoy-Laura-Emily-Speedie proved herself the Luck, Suck, & Pluck Queen. In six years she worked herself from the bottom to the top of the publishing food chain. In 1994, her analyst, Dr. Terrence Owen, passed her first JT story to his neighbor, editor Eric Wilinski. Then she contacted gay novelist Dennis Cooper through his agent, Ira Silverberg, which in turn put her in touch with sympathetic authors Sharon Olds, Mary Karr, and Mary Gaitskill. Meanwhile she placed short stories with Coppola’s Zoetrope and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. She wrote screenplays for Gus Van Sant, hung with Madonna and Courtney Love, and, finally, scored a Crown contract for Sarah through agent Henry Dunow.
Dunow flew to San Francisco to meet his elusive AC/DC golden goose but, as usual, she was a no-show. Surrendering to increased pressure for public readings at last, she showed up in a wig and sunglasses but often hid under tables. She alternated between an English accent, a Brooklyn accent, and—for NPR’s Terry Gross Show—a West Virginia drawl.
At last this public JT was revealed to be not Laura-Emily-Speedie at all, but Savannah Knoop. In 2008, Ms. Knoop, not to miss the bandwagon, published Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy, a memoir about the six years she spent as an HIV-positive teen lot lizard stand-in.
The year before, Antidote International Films sued Laura Albert for putting her JT Hancock on a Sarah movie deal. According to The New York Times, the author was ordered to pay the production company $116,500 in damages and $350,000 in attorney’s fees. Presumably the sum would come out of her royalties for Sarah as well as its film-optioned prequel, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, plus her “I Am the Real JT LeRoy” T-shirt sales.
As for her publisher, Bloomsbury, unlike Random House in the Frey case, it offered no refunds to readers, nor were any demanded even by bona fide AIDS victims.
Before the LeRoy fraud was exposed, but while it was suspected, Stephen Beachy asked Laura Albert’s last agent, Ira Silverberg,9 how he funneled royalties to his client. “None of your business,” Silverberg told him. Beachy later discovered that checks went to Underdog, Inc., a Nevada enterprise run by Albert’s mother, Carolyn, a theater critic. When Beachy went on to ask the agent about the fraud rumors, Silverberg told him, “If it is all a big hustle, it’s a great hustle, and I applaud it. … If it’s true, it’s as Warholian as it gets.”
Later the Sterling Lord rep, a judge for the Gregory Kolovako Award for AIDS writing, reconsidered. “To present yourself as a person who is dying of AIDS in a culture which has lost so many writers and voices of great meaning, to take advantage of that sympathy and empathy, is the most unfortunate part of all of this,” he told The New York Times.10
In her first major interview after being outted, the author of Sarah told The Paris Review, “It’s amazing to me for the first time in my life to be out in the world as Laura Albert, the successful writer.” As for her charade, she explained, “I never saw it as a hoax. I always felt like JT was a mutation, a shared lung. JT was protection. He was a veil upon a veil—a filter.”11
As for the professional character of her young alter ego hero, Stephen Beachy concluded, “LeRoy has written about the way prostitutes fulfill other people’s fantasies and about the way the literary world can seem like simply a different form of prostitution.”
1 Evgenia Peretz, “James Frey’s Morning After,” Vanity Fair, June, 2008.
2 The eXile, Issue #167. May 2005.
3 John H. Richardson, “’There Is No Truth,’ He Said,” Esquire, October 13, 2011.
4 Riverhead was burned again in 2008 when Margaret B. Jones’ Love and Consequences, a memoir of her life as a poor Native American foster child in L.A., was revealed to be the creation of Margaret Seltzer, a wealthy white woman. “I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Seltzer said. Riverhead pulled the memoir shortly after publication.
5 James Frey, My Friend Leonard (New York: Riverhead, 2005).
6 Irvine Welsh, “Saved by the City of Angels,” The Guardian, August 1, 2008.
7 Stephen Beachy, “Who is the Real JT LeRoy?” New York Magazine, October 10, 2005. Beachy’s most recent novels include Distortion (Queer Mojo Publishers, 2010) and Boneyard (Verse Chorus Press, 2011).
8 David Wiegand, “First Person, LeRoy and the Art of Getting Editors to Work for Free,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 10, 2006. Weigand has edited Ann Beattie, among others.
9 Silverberg left Sterling Lord Literistic Agency in late 2011 to become Literature Director for the National Endowment for the Arts. Prior to becoming an agent, he was the Grove/Atlantic editor-in-chief.
10 Warren St. John, “The Unmasking of JT Leroy: In Public, He’s a She.” (The New York Times, January 9, 2006)
11 Nathaniel Rich, “Being JT Leroy,” The Paris Review, Fall 2006.