Letters to the Editor
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a woman scorned
What's with the naysaying? I can't understand how anyone wouldn't be fascinated by the long, strange road Laura Albert traveled before ultimately creating JT LeRoy. Party poopers. The real interest now--for me, anyway--rests not in unmasking LeRoy, but in unmasking Albert.
I am especially fascinated by women who "join" subcultures, only to feel sidelined and thwarted by matters of gender, and then counter that friction by dressing androgynously. Flora Jan Belle, a flapper and writer in the 20s, might be one example, and semi-fictional "Mardou Fox" (from The Subterraneans) is most certainly another.
It's fitting, then, that Albert, empowered by a sexual transience and fluidity, would assemble an alter-ego--not a masculine one, but rather, an androgynous one--to gain literary acceptance. It's even more interesting that she would take on that alter-ego with such permanence and conviction. Historically, plenty of female writers have published under a masculine or nebulous pseudonym, so that the work itself might be accepted on its own terms. And, historically, plenty of writers have fabricated their own memoirs. Fine. But Albert/LeRoy is so different, and therefore so fascinating, because the work of fiction didn't stop when she pulled the pen from the paper. With every phone call, she was still fictionalizing, she was still writing.
I think Jack Boulware asserted that very nicely, and far less ham-handedly than I just did. It's a fine deconstruction, analytical without judgment, insightful without babble. And considering the silence Mr. Boulware must have met with during the article's research, it's a good piece of detective work, to boot. The connections Boulware drew, the implications he made, they all ring true to me. You've got Albert's need to create narratives, her need for contact and support and affirmation, and her willingness to get her narratives out there by any means, medium, and conduit necessary. Anyone who reads critically knows to ask of the material at its close, "So what?" And in this case, the "material" is the life--the real life lived by a semi-fictitious person--the life of LeRoy and its divergences and coincidences with its maker. That is to say, it's never a question of who, but instead, why. Boulware's snapshot, however grainy, seems valid and truthful. And it's a striking one.
Frankly, I find JT LeRoy more interesting, and more real, now that he's finally been uncovered, and better yet, revealed. So thanks, Mr Boulware, for this narrative about Laura Albert; it was a great read.