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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Fake Someone

  
 
tituba
06:36 / 22.03.06
The woman who exploited AIDS and child prostitution to sell more tickets to performances of her lover's band Thistle as well as ironic JT Leroy T-shirts has stated that she did it because the publishing world is mean and because of her status as a woman, and not her apparent lack of talent, she was denied a publishing deal. This trickery has infuriated millions of ageing agnostic hipsters and amiable publishing old-darling. But beyond all of this a small minority still exists who fervently clings to their belief in this imaginary lot lizard. They say they now believe only in the idea of him and has thus granted this creature transcendental status as a conceptual being, which is sooo progressive of them. Among this throng, the ginger bird off of Garbage.

Thus the question exists: In the literary world of make-believe and fanciful tales of fairy princesses does it matter if you're a lying shack of shit or is it and has it always been just part of the biz and in the age of Paris is it better to be a fake someone rather than a real no one? (I knicked that from The Talented Mr. Ripley, sorry)

And also should these people really be treated so harshly after being exposed…I mean that one guy made Oprah look like a blithering dolt and single-handedly brought her all-powerful Oprah’s Book Club to its knees. That should be worth having our emotions molested, shouldn’t it?
 
 
sleazenation
07:32 / 22.03.06
Lying and fakery isn't so much 'part of the buisiness' as much as it's part of business. Sadly, it is easier to sell a story about a story than it is just to sell a straight story on its own merits, and it is all about shifting units.

Consider if you will the celeb autobiography - these things are seldom, if ever actually written (or even actually read) by the author purportedly behind them. They are written by a talented author who can actually write and structure a sentence... does anyone actually care tha Jordan did not actually write he autobiography? Do they fuck.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
09:18 / 22.03.06
There's a thread dealing with James Frey here.

Couldn't you have said 'Shirley Manson' instead of 'that ginger bird off of Garbage', btw? It sounds as though you almost despise her more for being a red-haired woman than for believing in the idea of JT Leroy (not sure what's 'progressive' about that either - all sounds a bit woolly to me).

Anyway - I am sure this is not a new development. Early modern claims of 'a true and exact narrative' generally indicate a biased version of events aligned with one political party or other. There's an interesting thread of satirical fictionalised authors (e.g. Lemuel Gulliver, the narrator in Sterne's Sentimental Journey) which might provide some parallels.

I suppose in the current climate of interest in memoirs like A Child Called It, fabrication of an interesting background is a good marketing move - as sleaze says, it's business.

Dunno what Dan Brown has to do with all this - his is surely just a case of rather unimaginative 'homage' to existing ideas?
 
 
Cat Chant
09:27 / 22.03.06
The woman who exploited AIDS and child prostitution to sell more tickets to performances of her lover's band Thistle as well as ironic JT Leroy T-shirts has stated that she did it because the publishing world is mean and because of her status as a woman, and not her apparent lack of talent, she was denied a publishing deal. This trickery has infuriated millions of ageing agnostic hipsters and amiable publishing old-darling. But beyond all of this a small minority still exists who fervently clings to their belief in this imaginary lot lizard

I have no idea who you are talking about (beyond the fact that 'this imaginary lot lizard' is J T Leroy). Can you provide links, names, and/or a more straightforward version of this paragraph? I think it's potentially an interesting thread - I read a lot of memoirs and have been thinking lately about what makes them convincing and/or useful, and how much their 'truthfulness' or otherwise is part of that - but, being a bit lost, all I can say is that J T Leroy is a fiction writer, isn't ze? One who deliberately staged the unknowability of his extratextual identity? That seems to be a different matter from James Frey publishing a fabricated memoir as non-fiction.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
09:35 / 22.03.06
I suppose with Leroy and Frey it's the level of fabrication that's troubling/irritating. Personally, I'd have had no problem with 'Leroy' if her alter ego's back story hadn't got so out of hand, in terms of the AIDS claims and so on. Otherwise, a forty year old woman passing herself off as a classically troubled (and very marketable) teenage author would have seemed like quite a pertinent stunt, in terms of what it said about modern publishing.

And I think Frey would have got off a lot more lightly if it hadn't been for his almost psychotic insistence that EVERY SINGLE WORD WAS TRUTH!!11!23! And if he'd written a half-readable book, obviously.
 
 
tituba
05:38 / 23.03.06
Couldn't you have said 'Shirley Manson' instead of 'that ginger bird off of Garbage', btw?

No. I couldn't have.

Dunno what Dan Brown has to do with all this - his is surely just a case of rather unimaginative 'homage' to existing ideas?

Dan Brown too is a naughty liar. He's currently in court on charges of plagiarism.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
05:52 / 23.03.06
Deva: I have no idea who you are talking about (beyond the fact that 'this imaginary lot lizard' is J T Leroy). Can you provide links, names, and/or a more straightforward version of this paragraph? I think it's potentially an interesting thread - I read a lot of memoirs and have been thinking lately about what makes them convincing and/or useful, and how much their 'truthfulness' or otherwise is part of that - but, being a bit lost, all I can say is that J T Leroy is a fiction writer, isn't ze? One who deliberately staged the unknowability of his extratextual identity? That seems to be a different matter from James Frey publishing a fabricated memoir as non-fiction.

Leroy wrote fiction which was purported to be "semi-autobiographical," with regard to "his" time as a young boy growing up in a truck stop parking lot, where his mother took up with various truckers and eventually he started to prostitute himself. I believe he ran away, as well. Leroy claimed to be gay and also ended up in a relationship with Asia Antiago, but I'm not sure if that was completely fabricated or if the two are friends or were in fact lovers in real life, her and Leroy's female true identity. The whole identity was fabricated, but I wasn't that heartbroken to learn that a woman had actually done all the writing and had cultivated a mystique around Leroy; it's in many ways an ultimate fantasy for a writer, creating such a complete construct that extends beyond the story. I suppose people felt cheated out of their own pity, but how much of that comes from middle class guilt surrounding the idea of a young boy prostituting himself? Ze's not the first writer to employ a person or pseudonym, but I suppose the complexity of the back story is "too much."

"The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things," interconnected short stories, isn't bad and has some fairly well-written dirty bits later on. It's not amazing, but it's certainly provocative fiction no matter what the background is.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
08:22 / 23.03.06
gravity - since the plagiarism case hasn't been settled, let's avoid making statements like that, eh? Only because Tom, the owner of barbelith, has recently been asked to remove some posts because of their libellous content. I mean, I don't think very much of Dan Brown's work, but best to be safe.

Besides, Dan Brown's works are explicitly fictional, and I don't think conflating them with a memoir which turns out to be exaggerated and in some places fictional, and with a fiction writer whose persona turns out to be fabricated, is necessarily very helpful.

w/r/t Shirley Manson - fine, I'm sure you didn't mean anything derogatory by it, but Barbelith is edgy about language used to describe and talk to women at the moment, so again, be wary.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
11:15 / 23.03.06
He's currently in court on charges of plagiarism.

What I find interesting with this case is that Michael Baigent and the other author of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" are claiming that "Da Vinci Code" is a plagiarism of their work. But the former book is presented as non-fiction. It is supposed to be a true life investigation that the authors carried out. So by taking Dan Brown to court over his fiction, are they not essentially admitting that their book is also fiction, and that they made the whole thing up? Because surely you can't hold the copyright to "history"?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:13 / 23.03.06
GL- I'm glad I'm not the only one whose brain's tying itself in knots trying to get round that one.
 
 
matthew.
12:47 / 23.03.06
What's especially interesting about this whole Dan Brown plagiarism is that this conspiracy theory (Jesus had children) is not unique or original to either camp of authors. The Merovingian line of kings in France had rumours swirling around them for hundreds of years (rumours probably pushed by themselves) that they were descended straight from Jesus. I haven't read Holy Blood... but I hear it does rely heavily on this link to create the overall thesis.

Besides, Dan Brown's works are explicitly fictional, and I don't think conflating them with a memoir which turns out to be exaggerated and in some places fictional, and with a fiction writer whose persona turns out to be fabricated, is necessarily very helpful.

I think the big problem in the case is that Brown's novel has a page stating that every historical "fact" is completely true.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:23 / 23.03.06
by taking Dan Brown to court over his fiction, are they not essentially admitting that their book is also fiction, and that they made the whole thing up?

The thing that's really interesting about the Dan Brown plagiarism case is that they're not suing him for appropriating the 'factual' results of their historical research; they're suing him for appropriating the narrative structure of their book. So their case, as I understand it, is not that he used their research and wrote a fictional narrative based on the results of that research - this wouldn't make any sense, as writers of historical fiction have to rely on writers of historical non-fiction for background and setting. Rather, they're suing him because his novel appropriates the suspenseful structure that they used to narrate the process of research. It's interesting, because I think it's pretty clear that Brown has made a lot of money off the back of the HBHG authors' research, but (as you say) they can't sue him for that per se, even though all he's done is narrativize (in what I hear is a pretty clunky way) the version of history as presented in HBHG: I think this is a rather elegant solution.

(The above is phrased as if I thought Holy Blood, Holy Grail was a work of legitimate historical research containing historical facts as currently defined by the scholarly community. That's not because I think it is, but because the value/truthfulness of it as a piece of historical non-fiction isn't the point at issue here.)
 
 
Keith, like a scientist
17:41 / 23.03.06
if someone tricked Winona, I should like to beat them up, please. Address if you have it would do nicely, thank you.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
01:22 / 24.03.06
Alex's Grandma, could you tell me more about the JT Leroy AIDS claims?
 
 
Cat Chant
09:19 / 24.03.06
Driven to Google by gravity-rides-everything's preference to very long kennings (cf 'that ginger bird off of Garbage') over names, I have found out that 'The woman who exploited AIDS and child prostitution to sell more tickets to performances of her lover's band Thistle as well as ironic JT Leroy T-shirts' is Laura Albert. I haven't read the article yet, but I thought the link would be helpful for people (like me) who want to know what this thread is actually about.
 
 
Totem Polish
23:03 / 28.03.06
Hey Deva, thanks for the heads up on that great article. Like the spate of recent writing on Leroy/Laura Albert it has a slight tinge of bitter hacks cheesed off at having their precious manipulative media out-manoeuvered by someone desperate enough to almost outplay them at their own game. This quote especially struck me:

"I see JT as an elaborate nom de plume," says former New York Press editor Strausbaugh. "Sort of a 21st century George Sand. Here's this middle-aged woman who's not getting anywhere as a writer. She reinvents herself as a girly boy and becomes a huge success. On whom does that reflect more poorly, her or all the rest of us?"

Is all the vitriol justifiable because Albert has played the oldest game in the book to such a massive extent? After all Thomas Pynchon sent a comedian to pick up literary awards in the 60s and no-one found his fiction devalued when they found they had been hoodwinked by the publicity shy post-modernist.

Would the situation have been different if Laura Albert had been a man? The article suggests that the life presented in Leroy's books was very similar to the one lead by a young Albert, possibly including the sexual exploitation and abuse. Is it the fact that a woman felt that in today's apparently liberal literary climate she had to pose as an abused male much younger than herself to be taken seriously that has riled so many people?

I'm not very familiar with Leroy's output, so perhaps another 'lither can examine how it has been devalued or otherwise by the discovery of the hoax?

If, as the blurb suggests Leroy's writing "actually turns the tawdriness of hustling into a world of lyrical and grotesque beauty, without losing any of its authenticity." then why can the same not be said of Albert's?

After all, if Swift were alive today does anyone think he wouldn't have used every aspect of the media to present Gulliver's fictitious journey as fact? Would it have been such an outrage to see a Lemuel Gulliver (or god forbid, a woman posing as a man!)appearing in public attesting to speaking to great horse-like creatures, and even if he were revealed as a fraud would the actual work created be worthless as the hacks poring over the current controversy appear to be suggesting.

It's true Albert lied, but do we really live in an age where B.S.Johnson's derisive view of fiction as 'telling lies' has taken root? I don't think we do, which makes this whole media coverage of this scenario appear decidedly more sinister in my book.
 
 
Totem Polish
23:11 / 28.03.06
Also from the salon.com article, regarding the apparent exploitation of Leroy's having Aids:

Although Albert didn't initially publicize LeRoy as being HIV-positive, at some point in the media swirl, the young prostitute was mentioned as having the virus, and Albert never discouraged the rumor, which continued to disseminate through articles and blogs.

This implies more than a bit of media collusion in and enhancement of the J.T Leroy persona. Alright, Albert is guilty of not quelling the rumours, letting the poor journo's souls rest easy, yet there is still no proof of her exploiting the situation directly. In fact I have yet to see any proof of her direct collusion in it throughout this thread or anywhere else, so to accuse her of her profiting unwarrentedly from it seems a bit much, at least from my perspective.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
01:55 / 29.03.06
If Swift were alive today does anyone think he wouldn't have used every aspect of the media to present Gulliver's fictitious journey as fact?

I suppose he might have done, yes. But then again, and I think more feasibly, he probably wouldn't have bothered.

You aren't seriously comparing 'great horse-like creatures' (not part of documented reality as is known at present,) to the experience of child abuse/prostitution in the US mid-west, or in fact anywhere else (which, y'know, sadly...) are you?

I mean I'm sure you're not, but the thing is about this type of literary scam (which I'd say is valid, insofar as it addresses a certain dubious appetite in the book-reading classes for authentically damaged, fucked-up lives, and none of this fancy *made-up* stuff) is that after a while, IMVHO, you do have to have to admit to what you've been doing, or otherwise end up colluding in the process you were originially attempting, presumably, to satirise.

Ok, she did call one of the books 'The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,' or whatever it was, but the minute the AIDS claims surfaced, however inadvertently, she should have said something - the fact that she didn't suggests that a)she was far more wedded to the idea of borrowed literary fame than anything to to do with empathy for the characters she was supposedly giving voice to, in the various novels, the 'Elephant' screenplay etc, b)that anyone with direct experience in these areas, who might have been inclined to have taken her stuff (in the interviews, mainly,) at face value is entitled to feel at least vaguely annoyed, and that c)while all this mendacity doesn't necessarily invalidate the work as such, it should at least put her in the literary doghouse for the forseeable future.
 
 
doozy floop
11:31 / 29.03.06
As an aside, grant helpfully linked to some bits and bobs about the JT Leroy thing here, in the Sarah thread, and there's more gossip, revelation and angst about it here from Susie Bright and here from the Guardian.
 
 
astrojax69
23:14 / 29.03.06
i love a good literary hoax. and if it is fooling people, it isn't non-fiction, is it?

but a real question: what can we expect from sources of information? once we listened to the theory that god made everything and the sun moved about the sun. we don't listen to that idea any more. it is fiction. where is the line?

as for fooling oprah's book club, o yea and verily shall we adulate thee...!

i mean, if the story of the life of depravity depicted is so strong, and so telling, and gosh we all ought to learn a lesson from this unfortunate story, o my; then why is it a lesser story for not being actually to the letter factual? it was hardly far from a reality. which is more important - the vehicle or the contents? fiction is a powerful powerful medium. did someone kill a mockingbird...?
 
 
Daemon est Deus Inversus
02:54 / 30.03.06
This is a true story. In the early 19th-century, a very mediocre, though rich, would-be poet privately published his own work while purporting it on the title page to be by "George Gordon, 10th Baron Byron." The man's plan was that, once everone praised the book as a work of genius, he'd exclaim, "No, that's actually me!" The book bombed, of course. The real Byron- once he found out the identity of the culprit- brought suit for libel. Byron lost when the trial court found that the impersonation was not actually defamatory. The Lord Justices of Appeal reversed, and the opinion created a new tort at Common Law called "False Light": the widespread disemination of a non-defamatory untruth. I like to refer to it as "Lord Byron's tort."
 
 
Daemon est Deus Inversus
13:40 / 30.03.06
One thing that bothers me about Dan Brown is his historical/factual liberties. In his Vatican conclave novel, he refers to Ste. Terea de Avila as "a nun" who had dreams (she was the co-founder with St. John of the Cross of a Catholic reform movement, in the sense of curtailing the feudal rights of high clergy, which was Spain's answer to Luther); as a literary device, he ignores that the Camerlengo is invariably the Papal Secretary of State. These are just two examples. (Not to mention that the timing of events in his usual 24-hour formula are quite impossible). Still, it's light reading....
 
 
Totem Polish
12:53 / 31.03.06
You aren't seriously comparing 'great horse-like creatures' (not part of documented reality as is known at present,) to the experience of child abuse/prostitution in the US mid-west, or in fact anywhere else (which, y'know, sadly...) are you?

Ofcourse not, but perhaps the original intent behind J.T. Leroy may have been similar. I agree that due to the huge publicity/ego-trip that resulted from Albert has given her a somewhat deserved pariah status, but to me the fine line between satire and exploitation was only crossed to a certain extent.

The resultant bashing by the cognoscenti whomever they may be stems only partly from that IMHO and it's vigour appears to be mainly bitterness at not being in on the whole charade. That doesn't excuse Albert although it does reflect arts journalism's gruesome appetite for hype and being in on the latest whatever without critical distance just to presume themselves cool. As if that's anything worthwhile.
 
  
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