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

"I have written in my diary, 'If I lose JT, I will die,'" says Laura. "That was my feeling. He didn't want to go; I didn't want him to go. I would do anything, and he would do anything, to stay."

It's the next day, and having gleaned that I do not have a Vanity Fair expense account, Laura has set two mini quiches on the table. She eats only the filling, with her fingers.

"I would hear from people, 'JT would call me up, suicidal,'" she says. "It's funny, because JT could articulate it; I couldn't say it — that I was suicidal. I couldn't ask for help, because my greatest fear was, if I had said I wanted to kill myself, people would have said, 'Well, I can understand that.' He could say, 'I'm suicidal,' and someone would say, 'No, don't do that.'" She pauses. "But if there was an added adjunct that they were also getting off on the perversity of a little boy, that is unforgivable."

Unforgivable, I suggest, is a little strong, considering JT's predilection for initiating sex talk, and the fact that in most of JT's stories, boys are sex objects. But I realize, as Laura makes us more tea, the subject is calculated.

"I read this book Try, by Dennis Cooper, and I was not the healthiest puppy in the world," she says. The book, about an adolescent boy sexually abused by his two adoptive fathers, appealed, Laura says, "to that sick part of me that understood the loneliness and abuse and the perversity."

And so she started to write. And then, passing herself off as the homeless, drug-addicted Terminator, had the wherewithal to get her work to Silverberg, who showed it to his client Cooper, who became both a staunch supporter ("Dennis" is one of the people to whom Sarah is dedicated) and a daily phone confidant.

"Having Dennis say to me, 'Keep going, Terminator; keep writing,'" says Laura, her voice thickening with tears. "I was suicidal. I was fucking nuts. I was, like, bouncing off the wall. I don't know how to articulate it. It was like, I was going to that state of just how do I take a knife and slit myself open. Writing was the one time where I was free of that, where there was order, and there was peace. And I needed permission to do it, and I would give anything to have that permission."

So she sought it from people like Cooper. If he could have so much interest and compassion in JT, even with all of JT's problems, she thought, "then maybe he can have compassion for me, Laura, who felt the most disgusting, or whatever."

This hopeful assumption proved incorrect. When Cooper found out JT was Laura, he was not understanding, as he wrote on his blog, because Terminator "was constantly threatening to either commit suicide or find some S&M master who would kill him and expected me to spend hours on the phone talking him out of it." Mostly, he was angry on behalf of the work.

"The fact that his books had serious weaknesses — rampant sentimentality, cliched characters and storylines, uneven writing, etc. — was forgiven due to 'his' youth ... 'his' emotional problems, 'his' precarious health," wrote Cooper. "The books were always in some inspirational way souvenirs of this boy's awful life."

Laura dismisses Cooper's critique as sour grapes. "[Dennis] told JT that the final straw was that Edmund White, the gay writer, had said to him, 'You know, I like your Dennis Cooper stuff okay, but your JT LeRoy work is brilliant,'" she says. "Everywhere he went, people were asking him more about JT LeRoy than him, and he was getting sick and tired of it ... 'cause JT LeRoy had surpassed him."

Rather than coming clean ("Don't use that expression," she says) and apologizing to the people she's pissed off, Laura digs in.

"I am not sorry that beautiful work got brought into the world," she says. "If you are disappointed that I am 15 years older and a female, I'm sorry. If it devalues the work for you, I'm sorry for that." Later she'll tell me, "For me to say I'll never apologize, it's not — there's different kinds of apologies. I mean, I am sorry for people who really fell in love with the little boy. I fell in love with him too, and I'm sorry he's gone."

Looking at the remains of JT around the apartment, "Harold's End" T-shirts and celebrity photos and what Laura says will be "a new JT LeRoy perfume," it's clear that the writing — fewer than 500 pages in the JT oeuvre — was not the point. The point was the vehicle, and Laura was extraordinarily good at driving it. She used everything at her disposal — flattery, hyperbole, gifts, sexual innuendo, fatal diseases (though Laura insists she never went on record saying JT had AIDS) — to push forward her career. And while it did not bring her wealth (the final book sold to Last Gasp for $4,000), it did bring fame. As she told The Paris Review in 2006, when she learned Madonna was reading Sarah, "I was in Florida, swimming in the pool at my grandma's house, thinking, 'My God, Madonna's in my world ... she's in my world, she's in my world.'"