I decided to revisit this topic for two reasons. One, on my last post on memoirs I received this comment.

To clarify about Laura Albert, she herself was an abused child and she never used AIDS to sell her books. Please try to find a reliable source for that misconception, it does not exist.

What she did was an articulation of her very real experience with trauma and childhood abuse.

Then, I found yet another false memoir story, “Love and Consequences,” in which

“Margaret B. Jones writes about growing up as a half-white, half-Native American girl in South-Central Los Angeles in the foster home of Big Mom. One of her foster brothers, she writes, was gunned down by Crips gang members outside their home.

Jones also writes of carrying illegal guns and selling drugs for the Bloods gang” (cnn.com)

Interesting…except for the fact that she’s white, upper class, private schooled, and never been in foster care. Yeah. This is not a memoir, this is fiction. This was such a gross deception that there is no way that she can even pretend it is real.

Now, about Albert. After I received that comment, I went back and did some research on Laura Albert, also known as J.T. LeRoy. While her books were at first marketed as fiction, they were soon “revealed” to be confessional fiction based on his tempestuous life , which told the reader that they had some grounding in fiction.

An elaborate back story quickly unfolded in reviews and articles. This was the life the author had lived as a young boy. He eventually ended up wandering the streets of San Francisco, and was rescued by a doctor and sympathetic writers and editors, who encouraged him to put down his hellish life on the page. (Salon)

Not only did Albert pretend that she was LeRoy when she was writing, but to her editors, readers, and colleagues as well. And she took it beyond just playing the character - she went so far as to talk about suicide and going back to drugs with an editor friend as well and noted sex writer Susie Bright who said,

“This really breathy, tearful, high-pitched voice would say, ‘I just don’t believe in myself.’ Being desperate, being like, ‘I hate myself.’ It wasn’t comical. You felt like you really had to get into therapist mode and give him reason to hope.” (Salon)

In addition to duping writers and publishers, she also wrote non-fiction articles, such as when she wrote an article about going to Paris Disneyland for the New York Times. In it she says,

When I was a child, my mother worked the strip clubs outside Orlando, Fla., and weeding out the Disney dollars from legitimate tender stuffed into her G-string was my job. The Disney money annoyed her because no matter how hard she tried, for any exchange rate, her dealers would not accept it. I was thrilled, and hid it, my stash for secret trips to Disney World with some of her customers. As a teenager, I hustled on the streets of Los Angeles. (NYTimes)

This was more than just a nom de plume. Albert deliberately deceived everyone in order to market her book. As far as the AIDS claim goes, Albert said,

Originally I felt that he might die of AIDS, but that’s not in any of the books. I didn’t deny the rumors, but I never made any statement intended to further JT’s popularity by claiming he had AIDS. (The Paris Review)

She let the rumors build without correcting them, again for the publicity and furthering the mystique.

“People were generous because they thought they were helping an H.I.V.-positive former drug addict, ex-prostitute, who used the hardships of his life to make art,” said Ira Silverberg, JT Leroy’s former literary agent and an early champion. (NYTimes).

So yes, I think that Laura Albert’s deception was fraud. It doesn’t matter in terms of this hoax that her childhood was abusive - she could have written fiction inspired by her life, but by claiming to be the character in the books she turned the focus from her writing, to her persona, and started lying to her readers.