“JT.” heh

The JT Leroy saga—Just when you thought that dead horse was flogged into the muddy racetrack, a new development comes along to reopen the story. As you’ll recall, JT Leroy was a “subversive” writer (actually, a very traditional [but good] writer who wrote about taboo and graphic subjects—mostly autobiographical tales about being a teenage gutterpunk prostitute) who was recently revealed to be a middle-aged Mom from Brooklyn who made the whole “JT Leroy” persona up, and who was certainly not a fey, publicity-shy, suicidal AIDS victim with a preternatural gift for prose.

Now, Laura Albert—the woman who created the Leroy character and wrote all the books—is being sued by a film production company who says they signed a contract with JT Leroy, not Laura Albert, and since Leroy doesn’t exist, neither does their agreement. You can read all about it in this great New York Times article, which can be slippery to keep track of at times, what with all the imaginary people and lies and everything.

The trial, in Federal District Court in Manhattan, promises to be an Escher-like convergence of the movies, literature and journalism with references to sex in truck stops thrown in and a documentary filmmaker, considering a project on the case, sitting quietly in back.

Ms. Albert’s lawyer, Eric Weinstein, began his own remarks with the memorably understated line, “Laura is a complicated person.” He said she was physically and sexually abused as a child. He said she was institutionalized in psychiatric wards and in a group home as a ward of the state. He said she was in therapy for 13 years with a psychiatrist whom she spoke to by telephone while posing as a teenage boy named Jeremy, an embryonic version of JT Leroy.

By the time the psychiatrist advised her to write, the persona of the teenage boy had become engrained as Ms. Albert’s alter ego, what Mr. Weinstein called her “bridge to the world.” Ms. Albert herself, in conversations before the trial, called JT “her respirator,” an unreal, though entirely necessary, entity that allowed her to breathe.