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I was conned by JT Leroy
I talked to him on the phone for hours. I even listened to his therapy sessions on tape. And after one particularly weird conversation about his upcoming sex-change operation, I decided he was a fake. So why did I still get sucked in?
By Ayelet Waldman [2006-01-11]

  • another JT con, just as mystifying

    I wrote a review of Leroy's first book, Sarah, when it came out for The Montreal Mirror. I liked it, even though I found it a little fantastic. When Leroy's second book came out, The Heart is Deceitful, another editor at the Mirror pulled me aside. After reading Sarah, she was so moved by it, she wrote to him/her/them. Leroy not only wrote back, but they struck up an intense enough correspondence that he included her in the acknowledgments of his second book.

    This editor has since moved to Australia, but as far as I know they remain friends.

    So there you go, Ayelet. Leroy wasn't only "conning" celebrities, she was also "conning" ordinary people. Actual ordinary people, not relatively ordinary people such as yourself. Or maybe she was just making friends. Novelists create fictional characters. So this novelist took that task a little too seriously. Does that really make everything about the friendship false? Does it make the work less compelling or more.

    It all raises interesting questions, which I believe is supposed to be what writers do.

    -- julwat
    [Read julwat's other letters]
    Wednesday, January 11, 2006 03:33 PM
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