Author: The JT LeRoy Story review: when fiction is preferred to the truth

This extraordinary documentary allows its subject virtually unfettered freedom to tell her own mad story. Around the turn of the century, Laura Albert, an articulate, animated New Yorker, wrote a series of grim tales under the pseudonym J T LeRoy.

Reviews were universally ecstatic. Her most celebrated book, The Heart is Deceitful Above all Things, was made into a film by Asia Argento that screened at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. Shortly before the movie’s US release, news emerged that author was somebody else altogether.

Rather than being an abused young man, raised the son of a prostitute, she was an abused mother from Brooklyn. Should this really have been a big deal? Those people who believe Shakespeare was actually seven aristocrats and a drunk tanner argue that this “fact” makes the plays no less worthwhile.

The problem, it seems, was that J T LeRoy’s public persona - given androgynous flesh by the author’s sister-in-law Savannah Knoop - was just a little too appealing to fickle rock stars who want all writers to be post-beat oddballs. The reaction in this part of the world would surely have been less vociferous, but, in the US, the notion of literature as self-help has set in with stubborn resilience. The author’s suffering was part of the appeal. Just recall Oprah’s melodramatic swoon upon hearing that James Frey’s misery memoir A Million Little Pieces was really a misery novel.

If ever there were a documentary that could get away with an unreliable narrator then this is it. Addressing the camera directly, Albert talks us through the gradual smaller deceits that led to the near-accidental creation of the irresistible JT LeRoy. Domestic viewers (while balking at her staggeringly dreadful Irish accent) will enjoy her very plausible tale of being given the “The Bono Talk” at a U2 gig.

She is right to object to the suggestion that she is the perpetrator of a literary hoax (The Heart is Deceitful was labelled “fiction”). Rock stars, of all people, should be familiar with the notion of a persona. Alice Cooper is really a mid-western Christian called Vincent Furnier, you know.

Fascinating stuff.