No need to be mean about it, ML, but I was -- like you -- beginning to wonder why no one seemed to have heard of JT Leroy, until the last couple of letters came in. (Is James Frey actually better known? I guess Oprah can bring a writer the kind of fame that even celebrity patrons can't.) But Jesse's comment said it best -- Waldman's probably too close to the furor to realize that, contrary to her opening line, "everyone" does not know who Leroy is, was, or wasn't. And I agree that the piece would have been stronger -- certainly more accessible -- had it included a couple of sentences providing the basic necessary background.

That said, ML really does seize on the key point -- the interesting thing about this whole issue is how and why so many people were duped, or let themselves be. I mean, look at the photos of this person. Does he look like a guy to you? I never saw a picture before this week (much less met "him"), so I guess I at least have that excuse. But whatever the faults in the writing or editing of this column (and let's remember this is a first-person column, not a piece of reportage, so a bit of solipcism is forgivable), let's give Waldman and Salon credit for being pretty quick to get to the hard nut at the center of this lit-world peach -- why the hell did so many people play along? If you look past the details about penis stumps, this is one person's answer to that question -- the first such account I've read. So yes, this IS, among many other things, what I pay to read on Salon.

By the way, am I the only one puzzled by the last section where she condemns Frey's "fraud" as being the much greater and more venal one? From what I gathered, he took liberties with some factual details in an account of his own life. Isn't there an implicit disclaimer at the front of every memoir that says, "Some names may have been changed to protect the innocent, sex scenes may or may not be invented, and some dialogue has been significantly altered to heighten dramatic effect"? I mean, if we could fact check his (or any memoirist's) account of what they felt, thought, or said in the tale they tell, would that make for a better -- or truer, or more meaningful -- account? If the answer to that is no, why should it matter if a memoir plays somewhat with surrounding factual events? It's a memoir, not a documentary. To call his case a "fraud" seems somewhat overstated -- at least until we learn that he never, in fact, was an addict at all, went through recovery, etc. Now THAT would be a fraud. Frey's crime appears to be more of a misdemeanor.

Usually, yes, but not in the case of Frey's book. There is no disclaimer there, and he regularly announces that his book is completely "true." [etc.]

Thanks for answering my question. Not having read either Frey's books or the Smoking Gun takedown -- just secondhand accounts of both -- I apparently didn't grasp the depth of his deceptions.

But more than than, I think the judgment may boil down more to matters of tone and literary personality than actual truthfulness. Though I'm inclined to be drawn to narratives of addiction and recovery, there was something about the bits of Frey that I did read that made me inclined to dislike him personally, and avoid his book, if not necessarily mistrust his story. Some stench of self-aggrandizement and machismo, I guess. Whereas the LeRoy-Albert saga, however real or fictional, however assiduously promoted, does two things differently: creates a more sympathetic character, and -- more important -- plays artfully, and (we now know) self-consciously, with our notions of truth in various genres of writing, especially memoir and memoir-fiction and the thin line between them. So I tip my hat to adesoto, who unpacked rather well the point about there being "something disturbing about our seemingly collective desire for verisimilitude in the genre of memoir." Thanks too to Jesse for posting the link to the original Beachy New York article that unraveled it all. It does make fascinating reading.

A last point I can't help making: The vitriol that Ayelet Waldman manages to evoke in some Salon readers never ceases to astonish me. Don't know what it is, exactly. Myself, if I find something to be drivel, I just stop reading it and move on. Life's too short, and there's too much good reading to be done as it is.