Taken for an (Educational, Entertaining) Ride

I'll admit it: it was a dent to my ego when my biggest fan turned out not to exist. JT Leroy was by far my most flattering supporter. A true literary voice. A celeb magnet. And a man. It's very nice to be blurbed by a social activist like Eve Ensler or a bestseller like Marian Keyes. But when JT Leroy blurbed my second novel, then followed it with a flurry of e-mails, phone calls, fan mail to magazines I wrote for and party invites, I felt validated.

Four years later, Antidote Films, which optioned Leroy/Albert's Sarah for director Steven Shainberg, has won its case against Laura Albert. The author notes that this sets a terrible precedent for writers everywhere, and I have to agree. No doubt she was a great swindler. But it is wrong to recast her merely as a swindler just because the deceit has been exposed. She was—and still is—a great writer. In an anthology published about J.D. Salinger, I described JT's prose as being earthy but never earthbound. And I stand by my admiration. Antidote owns the same wonderful story it first paid for.

As a female novelist, I admire Laura Albert, crazy as she is, for getting her work read through a lens that saw it as literature. Generally, as a female novelist post-Bridget, if you're not Zadie Smith, you're chick lit. Slender character sketches featuring unlikable protagonists, not told on a grand global scale, just motel to truck stop, would have baffled publishers and bookstores if presented by a woman—and then been stuffed into the chick lit section anyway. Probably the most interesting voice of her age group, bestselling author Jennifer Belle saw her new novel, Little Stalker, go, like her previous two, without review in the New York Times and summarized as “chick lit” by journalists who hadn't read it. The other truly wonderful book I have read this year is Kaui Hart Hemmings's The Descendants, and as the Times noted, Hemmings seems to have deliberately written as a man. The book is both hilarious and profound, and had the protagonist been a grieving wife instead of a husband, would have been in chick lit with all the other books that don't belong there.

I'm also happy for Laura Albert's success because it gave us a star novelist who comes from the working class. Which is very, very rare. A J.K. Rowling rags-to-riches story is so beautiful because it hardly ever happens in publishing. Though it has no bearing on their talent, the fact remains that “JT” 's peers—Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer—are all middle- or upper-middle-class novelists who support their work through jobs in academia or with family money. Not by manning phone sex lines, as Laura Albert did.

In retrospect, I think of JT Leroy as a prototype Myspace. “He” functioned late at night, using the Internet as a superhero mask, connecting the dots between random people. The up-and-coming (Rosario Dawson). The used and abused (Tatum O'Neill). It was thanks to “JT” that several stars signed with his manager, Untitled Entertainment.

Wooed by Web, Gus Van Sant, Denis Cooper and Mary Karr thought they were helping a troubled, brilliant teenage boy. A troubled, brilliant 40-year-old woman is of considerably less interest, and they have all distanced themselves.

My own Thin Skin (the novel Albert-as-JT blurbed) was a nervous breakdown by typewriter, which benefited from a pleasing d.o.b. and author photo. Extreme neurosis and damage is only palatable, only sexy, with youth and beauty—it's “Betty Blue” syndrome. As delusional as she was, Albert saw that very clearly, and it's just one more thing I'm so thrilled she subverted.