Should Madonna ever leave a message on your voicemail offering to lend kabbalah books, you’ve either joined a high-end, wearisome book club or you’ve gone too far. Laura Albert, the woman behind the early noughties “avatar” publishing sensation JT LeRoy, and author of Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, went far, deep and in over each of her Russian doll heads.
Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story, assisted by cartoon illustrations, Jamie Reid-type punk flourishes and contemporary clips, looks at how Albert’s multiple personas lent themselves to a glittering career, notoriety, scandal, and a fretful, balancing-act existence. Indie darlings Winona Ryder, Courtney Love, Asia Argento, Billy Corgan, Gus Van Sant and a whole lot more are shown circling and drinking in the mysterious LeRoy, donned in sunglasses, lest we see a wide-eyed dilettante fictional creation caught in the glare of a flashbulb. This physical representation, supposedly a transgender male, was in fact Albert’s partner’s sister Savannah Knoop, who in the present tense makes just one, frustratingly brief film appearance.
Albert, an introverted mother who at one point weighed 320 pounds, didn’t fit the doom generation pin-up or the spun tales interpreted as biography (but crucially, sold as works of fiction). With her face to camera, Albert links LeRoy’s beginnings with an abusive childhood (there is a particularly disturbing snapshot of Albert as a little girl beside a congregation of naked, bent-over Barbie dolls) and subsequent phone calls to a helpline and pretending to be a boy in trouble. Confusion, unhappiness and an escapist imagination are understandable, but her own narrative colludes with a tone that, though fascinating, invites little empathy. Albert is undoubtedly drawn to the cooler echelons of celebrity culture, despite feeling around it through vicarious gloves. Posing as another alter ego Speedie, the London-accented assistant to JT LeRoy, Albert’s book wrap was bound to burst, if not from a web of inaccuracies, then from the sheer weight of a needy subculture’s pursuit of cool. When JT’s cover is eventually blown, so many of the celebrity hangers on withdraw and avert, ashamed that they’ve been had. With informed hindsight, their prior, collective fawning is a comedic joy to watch.
A decade ago, Feuerzeig’s remarkable film The Devil and Daniel Johnston chronicled the life, music and mental illness of musician Johnston. Fueurzeig was lucky in that a wealth of material (Johnston’s many illustrations, home movies and tape recordings) were already there for him to shape and edit. There is a similarity with this film. Taped messages and phone conversations between Albert's aliases and her doctor, notable authors and celebrities are rich pickings that serve the story. But why were they taped in the first place and preserved from the 1990s onward? Albert is never asked this question on camera. Are the recordings as authentic as they appear? After all, Ms. Albert is well acquainted with tall tales. Feuerzeig has allowed the creator of what The San Francisco Chronicle once called “the greatest literary hoax in a generation” to tell her story, seemingly without any grilling. For this reason the film is compelling if at times frustrating. While Albert's novels ought to be left to speak for themselves, the story behind the lies still has its secrets.
