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

JT had a similar effect on people. Gus Van Sant, who at one point owned the option to Sarah and who gave JT an associate-producer credit on the 2003 film Elephant, last year told Butt magazine, "JT was a superclose friend. There was one year where I would talk to him three hours a day ... He became one of my anchors, and then all of a sudden, the anchor wasn't there ... And then, when I ended up meeting Laura, she was what I imagined Sarah to be like, kind of demonic and odd." Van Sant still finds the character "enchanting ... and I think I could still talk to JT, because I think he still exists."

Which speaks to a lot of things: imagination; faith; the frisson that comes with believing that something that sounds too bad to be true actually isn't. That we will save those whom others may not; that we will try — because we are creative and tolerant and sexually progressive — to make the hard ground a little softer for those who walk behind us.

"A lot of these hoaxes, I think it's very common where people have what they call the 'fat-girl personality,'" says Laura. "You develop this personality on the phone because you can't show yourself." After the birth of her son, Laura weighed "up to 320 pounds"; felt "isolated and disgusting"; and spent her time nursing her baby ("for four years," she says, pulling up her shirt to show the scars of her breast lift) and writing Sarah. And if she spoke in the voice of a character she sensed would receive support and love, it was not because she wanted to con anyone, but because she was suicidal. By these lights, she feels, it should not matter if the person you're helping is not the person you think he is. "Are you sorry you saved a life?" asks Laura.

Not long after I see Laura, I meet Dave Eggers at a dinner party. Eggers had edited JT's last book, Harold's End, a slender little volume that first appeared in McSweeney's. When I ask him if he's had contact with Laura since she was outed, Eggers says, "I haven't taken her calls in a long time." Still, he's at ease with having helped someone he thought was a struggling kid. "I teach writing to high school students," he says, "and every year, I have a kid whose writing is great, and I ask myself, is it really great, or do I think it's great because a 15-year-old wrote it?" He shrugs. "You can never separate it."

Ira Silverberg, the agent who sold both Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, agrees. "The 'who' and the circumstances of the author absolutely colored my impression of the work," he says. "I trusted that what I was reading was by a teenage boy who's come through prostitution and drug addiction and AIDS. As a gay man, I've lost many dear friends, many artists and writers, and I think I was vulnerable to this."

Speaking from his office in New York, as, he says, someone who came through "the culture wars with NEA funding and Jesse Helms," Silverberg points out that he was "committed to publishing people who'd been marginalized, to get these voices of authenticity out there."

Would he have represented the work had he known a 35-year-old woman wrote it? "I can't answer that yes or no, but it would have been no had it been Laura Albert," Silverberg says. "I find her unpleasant, and you know, there's a big difference between helping a young man and someone whose careerism becomes bigger than the work itself. Look, I understand, if you're a kid and you've been shat upon. Then, having the attention of celebrities is okay; this might be your biggest redemption, 'Ooh! I talked to Madonna!' But when it's a 40-year-old adult, no."

Silverberg admits he did not know there was no JT until the news broke. "I bought [the JT story] lock, stock and barrel," he says. "And quite honestly, I was transcended by all this stuff; the wig and the hiding and shyness and the ambiguity, it all made sense. I remember, we were in Cannes, and Savannah [Knoop, as JT] took off her glasses, and I saw these sparkling blue eyes, and I had tears in my eyes. It was so ... it was as if ..."

As if JT were showing himself, naked?

"Yes, revealing himself to me," Silverberg says. "It was very personal. I devoted so much time to JT on the phone, talking about whatever horrible problem it was that day. We flocked to someone we were proud of, for transcending this horrible life ... The work was wed to a persona, there was redemption in it. But as the writer is not the one we thought it was, there is no longer that person to be redeemed. It could be that hers is the last remnant of victim-culture literature, and that we're all armchair psychologists."

Laura, like some highly skilled Shaolin warrior, has learned to deflect whatever arrows are shot her way. "The more someone puts you on a pedestal and fetishizes you, the more they're going to have to hatchet it," she says. "I was prepared for it."