The lying game | 28 July 2016

JT LeRoy was a teenage hustler who emerged from a childhood of abuse, drug addiction and homelessness to write about his harrowing experiences and become a literary sensation as taken up by Madonna, Bono, Winona Ryder, Carrie Fisher, Courtney Love, Lou Reed and Gus Van Sant, among many others. His back story was shocking — raped at five; pimped out by his prostitute mother at truck stops; HIV-positive; heroin-addicted …sit on that, Angela’s Ashes! — but the biggest shock, when it arrived? He did not exist. JT, it turned out, had been confected by Laura Albert, a 35-year-old woman from Brooklyn. This is Laura’s version of events, and whether you’ve heard of JT or not — I hadn’t, I confess — it’s a gripping account of psychological disturbance, fake authorship, and how impossible it is to get Courtney Love off the phone: ‘There’s a small line of coke here and I don’t want to put you on hold,’ she says, mid-conversation.