After months of speculation, the New York Times revealed last week that hipster author JT LeRoy was in actuality the creation of San Franciscans Laura Albert and her husband Geoffrey Knoop, who were said to have rescued LeRoy from a life of truck-stop prostitution, gotten him psychological treatment and helped him publish his books. The allegedly reclusive LeRoy was played at his rare public appearances by Knoop's half-sister Savannah, and his books (Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things) and articles were most likely written by Albert.
At the same time, wildly popular memoirist James Frey, whose book A Million Little Pieces is a runaway bestseller, a selection of the Oprah Book Club and in development as a feature film, was unveiled as a different sort of fraud: Frey apparently exaggerated or fabricated certain instances in his account of drug addiction, criminal activity and recovery. While both scandals have received extensive coverage, Frey's offenses have been under a brighter spotlight because of his financial success and endorsement by Oprah. Readers of both, however, have expressed outrage and betrayal.
The difference between the two cases is subtle but important. Although none of the people behind the LeRoy hoax have yet confessed, it's fairly clear that their intention from the start was to craft a fictional persona and play a trick on an unsuspecting literary public. LeRoy's alleged biography is filled with lurid details, including his days as a prostitute and struggles with drug addiction and homelessness. It's the stuff of fiction, certainly, and the stuff of LeRoy's fiction in particular, which traffics in many of the same themes. LeRoy's persona was carefully cultivated via his reclusiveness, friendships with rock stars and other counterculture figures and mysterious, infrequent interviews. In a way, LeRoy's entire existence is a novel itself, or a performance art piece put on by Albert and Knoop.
Frey, however, is an actual person, many of whose actual experiences made their way into A Million Little Pieces. To the extent that Frey is being deceitful, he is not perpetuating a hoax or engaging in performance art; he is merely lying. While LeRoy's background was played up in promoting his work, his books are clearly labeled as fiction, and he's never been on Oprah making the host cry with his tales of addiction and recovery. Part of his story did include an alleged fight with HIV, which is the detail people have pointed out as the most damagingly deceptive. While it's certainly morally questionable to solicit sympathy by faking a terrible illness, being HIV-positive is not as shocking as it once was; it's now acceptable fodder for a well-told story, which is what the LeRoy incident amounts to.
Writers have been using pseudonyms for centuries, sometimes to provide anonymity, other times to create alternate personae that generate publicity or allow for the chance to break free of expectations. Stephen King wrote five novels in the late 1970s and early '80s under the name Richard Bachman, and crafted a backstory for Bachman that included a dead 6-year-old son and a battle with a brain tumor—less tragic than LeRoy's tale, but still able to elicit sympathy. After he was exposed, King wrote a novel, The Dark Half, in which an author's pseudonym takes on a murderous life of its own.
To listen to some people whine, you'd think that LeRoy, like The Dark Half's George Stark, was going to track them down and murder their families. What Albert and Knoop have done is perpetuate an entertaining and sometimes revealing hoax, and in the process produce fiction that some have found powerful and moving. Unlike Frey, who continues to flaunt his supposed authenticity, they aren't hypocrites—just cheekily infuriating charlatans.
Josh Bell is exactly what he appears to be, sadly. Read more of his takes on pop culture at
http://signalbleed.blogspot.com.