The Lies and Follies of Laura Albert, a.k.a. JT LeRoy

It would make sense that Laura understood the brilliance of her construct; that she'd been priming for it since Katrin. She tells me how, growing up in New York, she was a giant fan of Andy Warhol and, at 17, saw him on 79th Street. "I wanted to go up and say hello, but I didn't, because I knew instinctively that what I'd see reflected was, I was nothing," she says. "But I had this feeling of 'Perhaps one day,' when maybe these things that were stirring and bubbling inside me articulated in some art form. When I had my book and I could say, 'I'm coming to you as an artist, not as a fan,' not as someone who's, you know, in awe."

Laura wanted her work to be her emissary, and in this, she eventually succeeded. In addition to writing her books, she created a Warhol-like happening, and if its truth was mercurial, wasn't that part of the enchantment? Like a trick rider jumping from horse to horse, Laura's feat might be seen as a tour de force, as well as focusing a corrective lens on why we read what we read. Going over Sarah on the plane to San Francisco, I find it plagued with a first novel's problems: clumsy metaphors, dangling plotlines, and the sort of humor I found touching when I thought it was written by a 15-year-old boy, but which now seems lame. The author Mary Gaitskill, who helped JT early in his career, mused on what might be Laura's real contribution when she told The Independent (London) in 2001, "It's occurred to me that the whole thing with Jeremy is a hoax, but I felt that even if it turned out to be a hoax, it's a very enjoyable one ... a hoax that exposes things about other people, the confusion between love and art and publicity. A hoax that would be delightful and, if people are made fools of, it would be okay — in fact, it would be useful."

This turns out not to be the contribution Laura wants to make, or not yet at least. Months after her trial, three years since she/JT has published any new work, Laura's in a hard spot. She'd like credit for creating JT, but also immunity from any trouble his creation has caused. Alone onstage this time, no more trotting out sick, beautiful kids for love and veneration, Laura is banking on people appreciating that she "contains all of JT's pain, plus my own," and that she is equally victimized (if not by an unloving hooker mother named Sarah, as JT purportedly was). Thus, she deserves more of the sympathy and sunshine once allotted to JT, not less. In fact, it's been quite chilly in Laura's apartment for some time.

"Some people seem to be hoping Laura/Speedie was abused, so that some trace of the old JT LeRoy story will cling to the books," blogged Dennis Cooper, JT's former mentor and champion, soon after JT was exposed as a hoax. "But whatever the real story is behind whoever wrote JT LeRoy's texts, the fact is, they're almost on their own now."

Soon after letting me into her Nob Hill flat, Laura proves how limber she is by doing a full split in her narrow hallway, along which rest several pairs of her size-11 shoes. Then we sit down in the kitchen with some herbal tea and the lights out, and get down to business. "The ultimate hope is that I can reveal myself and you won't go away," says Laura. She had lost the Antidote lawsuit the week before, and spends a good deal of time on the phone, no longer with celebrity supporters but with her father, her sister; someone who might hook her up with Inside Edition. She pauses to listen to a song seeping from someone else's apartment. "Oh my god, is that John Mayer? I don't need to pay off any lawsuit — this is my penance."

To explain how she's wound up where she has, Laura first whips out the platitudes, about taking problems of the soul and turning them into art; about following in a distinguished line of writers using pseudonyms; about being not "a poster child for the First Amendment [but a] poster 40-year-old woman!" That she delivers these with brio and the occasional accent does not prevent them from sounding as though they came out of a can. Truer is her contention that our misunderstanding of her motivations has led to her eroding circumstances, a hard thing to deny when you see how she lives: in a cluttered apartment, with her 10-year-old son, a German roommate, Uwe, and a hundred bottles of vitamins and prescription medicines lined up on a cheap wooden bookcase. Laura, to look at, is not a healthy person. She wears a wig, her fingers are gray, and she's had what some might call excessive elective surgery — on her breasts, her nose, and her lips, which this afternoon show the pricks and puffiness of recent injections.

"I think people thought they had to have a reaction. I mean, in a way they were encouraged to by the media," she says, her hand resting beside 2-foot-high piles of magazines and news clips about her. "They say, this doesn't make sense, and I say, well, when you're done beating me with your stick, maybe you'd like me to explain it, because I can, because it wasn't a hoax. Someone who's doing a hoax can't explain it."