Girl gone wild

Savannah Knoop revisits her time as JT
LeRoy and the literary scandal that followed
in Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy

by JULIET WATERS

I remember the day I picked up my review copy of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. “Check this out,” my then editor at the Mirror, Genevieve Paiement, said before she opened the book to the acknowledgment page. Somewhere in between Courtney Love and Gus Van Sant was Paiement’s name.

She had written some fan mail to JT LeRoy after she read Sarah and they had struck up a correspondence. This was five years before it was revealed that the girlish boy that had been photographed for Vanity Fair was not actually a former truck stop prostitute, or a boy, or JT LeRoy. A mannish-looking woman named Laura Albert had written the “autobiographical” stories. Savannah Knoop, Albert’s younger sister-in-law, had agreed to impersonate “JT” for public events.

Once the story of the “literary hoax” broke in The New York Times, celebrities started heaping scorn on Albert. According to Girl Boy Girl, Knoop’s recently released memoir, however, Albert had already soaked up a fair amount of scorn by then. Celebrities who Albert seduced easily over the phone often became nasty and dismissive to JT’s middle-aged woman “handler.”

I never totally bought the hoax spin on this story. For that, the book has to be lame (see James Frey). Lucky enough to pick Sarah up in the Mirror slush pile, I read it cover to cover before finding out there was any autobiographical dimension. It was like a queer white trash version of The Wizard of Oz. Dark but fearlessly campy, at a time when books like this were all striving for bleak “authenticity.” It’s tragic that Albert has been generally dismissed as nothing but a glitterati starfucker.

This isn’t to say that Albert and Knoop didn’t enjoy the starfucking while it lasted, but Knoop’s generally clear-eyed memoir hints at a reality that’s far more complex. This seems more the story of a talented writer with psychiatric issues at the centre of a celebrity culture that is about 95 per cent hoax on a good day.

Albert had been impersonating LeRoy for some time before she penned Sarah. She’d been having extended phone conversations with a psychiatrist she met on a suicide hotline who convinced her to start writing. She impersonated LeRoy to writers who probably should have known better—Dennis Cooper, Dorothy Allison and Mary Gaitskill—who all helped her out. After Sarah took off, it became harder for Albert to protect her true identity.

What did Savannah Knoop get out of the deal? Awkward sex with Asia Argento (who directed the film version of The Heart Is Deceitful), some start-up money for the clothing design company she’d begun, and just enough interesting celebrity stories to write a book. There were strained moments, but it was surprisingly easy to impersonate a brilliant author, because so few people ever wanted to actually talk about the writing.

And that was just fine with Knoop, who shows little interest in the books herself, and even less in what lay deeper beneath the surface of Albert’s intentions.

This is a serviceable, readable rendering of events. Knoop shows admirable self-awareness in presenting herself as not much more than the cipher she seems to be. If she’s aware of the Shakespearean irony of so many of the scenes where Albert is clashing with all the other narcissistic mother figures in Savannah’s life (Argento and Carrie Fisher) she doesn’t show it. Fans of Sarah, and its brutal representation of motherhood, will enjoy the potential for metafiction. Hopefully someone out there will see the potential in this story for a film.

Maybe David Milch? The last The New York Times wrote about Albert, the Deadwood creator was her last and only defender. In the company of one of their reporters, he gave Albert some good advice: “Shut your mouth. Quit this sick behaviour. Disengage. Forget the press. Go home. Be still. Get healthy…And pray that you can write.” Then, apparently, he slipped her $500.

GIRL BOY GIRL: HOW I BECAME JT
LEROY BY SAVANNAH KNOOP,
SEVEN STORIES PRESS,
PB, 223 PP, $17.95