Lies and the Memoir

In 1996, when I was gathering pieces for an anthology of memoirs, the writer Bruce Benderson, a friend, suggested I read the work of a 16-year-old boy he was exchanging emails with. I said, “Why would I be interested in the writing of a kid?” I’d collected pointed work from Phillip Lopate, Catherine Texier, and Lois Gould. In rich, image-driven pieces, each breathed life into a ruthless parent, capturing their seductivity as well. Peter Trachtenberg and Jerry Stahl, former heroin addicts, chronicled in rollicking fashion the pleasure of sooty falls. There would be no recovery or uplift in this book, no advertising for how we should live. I was interested in expanding the range of subjects we could speak about in public. I liked writers who didn’t try to win love.
     He’s literary,” Bruce promised.
     How can that be?”
     I don’t know, but you have to read his stuff.”
     He went by the name Terminator—a joke. A picture Bruce kept on his bookcase showed a gawky, towheaded slip of a thing. He’d contacted Bruce on the suggestion of Dennis Cooper. Terminator had started writing, the story went, spurred by his therapist, Terry Owens, who was teaching a course about at-risk adolescents and thought his students would benefit from tales by the real thing. The rest of the story went this way: He was the child of a teen-age mother who was dead and who had abused him. She’d dressed him as a girl, and he’d turned tricks in cross dress. He lived with his boyfriend, Astor, and Astor’s girlfriend, Speedy. He’d been addicted to drugs, had lived on the streets, and was still engaging in high-risk, S/M sex. He had AIDS, and because of scars from Kaposi’s lesions and sexual savageries, he didn’t like people to see his body. Bruce had helped other boys teetering on the edge, though no one with as replete a menu of hard knocks.
     The first pieces I read were handwritten, but their power was immediately clear, slicing along with lyrical images, eloquent silences, and physical descriptions that conveyed interior emotional states. The writing was startling for someone of any age but amazing for a person so young and virtually unschooled (the story). The writing drew the reader into the narrator’s love for his crazied, funny, dangerous mother and didn’t offer a way out. Its transgressiveness wasn’t in the lurid subject matter but in the narrator's refusal to reduce emotion to something that could be analyzed or controlled. The verb tenses were a mess, the punctuation nonexistent, the sense of where we were in time and space sometimes confusing, but the writer was 16 and had turned himself into an artist instead of a case history. He had to be some kind of genius, singing arias from the bottom of the food chain.
     Close to the Bone, published by Grove Press in 1997, includes “Baby Doll,” a memoir by Terminator (about tricking with his mother’s lover and then using Krazy Glue to tuck his penis back), the first published writing of the person who would change his name to JT Leroy, produce several books of fiction, and gain access to more celebrities than all the writers I have ever known put together. For a couple of years, I was among a crew—along with Bruce, Dennis, Joel Rose and Mary Gaitskill—who several times a week received breathy phone calls in a West Virginia drawl and long, confessional emails from a person we thought a kid with AIDS. He expressed interest in my life—what I was writing, who I was dating. It was flattering and sweet. He was also draining, emotionally skittish, and insatiable in his need to worry out loud. I found the star-fucking/name-dropping routine that quickly materialized tedious. And down the line, when he included “Baby Doll” in a collection of short stories, he didn’t acknowledge where it had first appeared. I thought this was bad form and assumed he or his editor wanted to erase the fact that the material had earlier been presented as memoir. I didn’t bring it up. He had AIDS, and he was a kid.
     As his own fame escalated, I dropped out of the loop. I was happy for his success, but I found Sarah, the novel that established his name, streaked with whimsy and sentimentality. I wasn’t interested in his cultish status as an inspirational survivor, although the question of his health affected all my thoughts about him.
     Flash forward to last fall when Stephen Beachy called to interview me for the story he was writing for New York Magazine, claiming that JT was actually a 40-year-old woman named Laura Albert and the 10-year escapade was a scam. I thought his theory was vengeful and nuts, but it turned out to be true. It was hard to absorb the facts—the enormity of the charade, the thousands of hours spent keeping so many plates in the air. I read over emails I’d received, long and detailed. Even if Albert sent similar ones to everyone on her list, the effort was still staggering. I’d never met JT, though I’d been invited to several times when the part was being played by Savannah Knoop, the half-sister of Geoffrey, a.k.a. Astor. But I’d talked to Terry Owens on the phone when Terminator was going through one his periodic—and now, I know, fake—plunges. Owens, it turns out, had conducted his sessions over the phone and was another dupe.
     No one likes being fooled, but I don’t feel hurt. Albert and I both gained something from our exchange: she launched her publishing career, and I presented a piece I admired. What I find loathsome is that she traded on the suffering of real people with AIDS and real abused kids to gain sympathy and vast amounts of time spent editing, counseling, and networking on her behalf from people who believed they were helping a young person in need.
     According to Knoop, who admitted to New York Times reporter Warren St. John (February 7, 2006) that he’d managed the day-to-day business while Albert wrote the books, Albert believed she needed to package herself to gain access to the publishing world. Even after being exposed, she hasn’t admitted the deception. She may not think she’s done anything wrong. In his admission to the Times, Knoop made a perfunctory apology to people who’d been injured, without specifying who they were or the damages, but he appeared less contrite than eager to rid himself of a personal hassle: “If you're feeling more and more suffocated by the complications and lies, it's not worth it.”
     Where did these people get the idea that in order to exist in the public sphere they needed a marketing gimmick that could be turned into a brand? How did they come to feel that acquiring name recognition justified anything it took? Gee, I don’t know. Maybe Satan?
     By the time the jig was up, the Leroy brand wasn’t selling transgression. Transgression is what resists being a brand. It was selling rags-to-riches inspiration, surviving with H.I.V., and hanging with cool people because you had done risky drugs, risky sex, and other louche and nihilistic harm to yourself and written about it.
     Albert was exposed around the time The Smoking Gun website revealed that James Frey had falsified pivotal facts in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, presenting himself as a meaner, tougher, and raunchier dude than he was. The stories have been linked in press coverage and they’re related in some ways. They promote a similar brand: bad behavior worn as a badge of coolness on one hand and a tattoo marker of recovery on the other. Even though Albert published her work as fiction (except for “Baby Doll”), the brand depends on the public’s assumption that the stories have been lifted from real life. Similarly, Frey’s publisher, Doubleday, wasn’t interested in marketing his book as a novel, which was his preference. Doubleday believed it could sell more copies feeding readers a sensational story about an actual person (the candy) packaged with redemption, inspiration, and a cross here and there (the medicine).
     Frey wouldn’t be condemned (at least not for being a liar) if his potboiler had appeared as a novel based on his life—like the stories Albert-as-Leroy put out. Albert-as-Leroy’s books have turned out to be plain old fictional fictions. Albert misrepresented herself, not the genre she was writing in (except for “Baby Doll”). Frey’s offence was in writing a false nonfiction book. The fact that it was also a memoir and that memoirs are different from other kinds of nonfiction works has not reared its hydra head much in the ensuing discussion.
     I watched Frey sit across from Oprah after The Smoking Gun revelations. She made him own up to every lie, and they were whoppers. He hadn’t spent time in jail. He hadn’t endured root canal without anesthesia. On and on. By the end, with brow furrowed and head slumped forward, he looked like a chimp who’d been shocked over and over in an electrified maze. Breathing fire, Oprah defined the memoir as a document whose statements had to be verifiable.
     Frey didn’t dare add gray to her black and white view, and no one else piped up to say the memoir is a type of imaginative writing. Memoirs chronicle actual people, but in order to tell a story we can reflect on, rather than merely mirror reality, a writer needs to create a dramatic narrative: move back and forth in time, use description and dialogue that no one’s memory can exactly transcribe, edit out nonessential details. At its best, memoir bears witness to the contradictory nature of human emotions, revealing that we don’t have pure feelings. If we are careful not to edit our responses for the sake of consolation or resolution, memoirs show—as does great fiction—that there is pleasure in pain, ugliness in beauty, relief in failure, boredom in love.
     Frey’s book isn’t fiction disguised as fact; it’s dishonest writing without stakes. When Kafka said that “books must be an ax for the frozen sea in us,” he meant that in order for literature to have something to reveal, it needs to tell the truth without concern for the protection of anyone, especially the author. It needs to be ruthless—not translate itself, not pretty up the facts, not promote the virtues of your nearest and dearest, including yourself. If you tell a story about being abused but omit that you are also an abuser, there are no risks for the writer and no stakes in the work. In Frey’s case, wanting to generate amazement, he concocted a Mt. Everest of abasement in order to ramp up the macho of surviving that much peril. The result is self-flattery. Finding stakes for him would mean discovering a story worth telling about being the schmendrick he is.
     Similarly, Albert might have revised her drafts and sent out her manuscripts to magazines and journals in her own name, in order to earn her niche instead of mugging the public for it. The attraction to outlaws and risk takers is understandable, especially in a milieu that tries to tame, desexualize, and organize people into good consumers (good Christians, Muslims, Jews, ad infinitim). Rather than adopting the badass persona that no one, really, is, a writer wanting to ramp up the stakes in a piece of work needs to investigate the desire to make it in the established world while still identifying with outcasts. When you scrape off the JT Leroys, there is probably always a Laura Albert inside. And what an interesting amalgam that is! Rather than scrutinize their uncertainties, Albert and Frey chose routes that were safe, and despite the trappings of the wild side, they were as conventional as it gets.
     Against the background of the mega lies that governments and corporations tell, what’s the big deal about a writer profiting from a little lie, Albert and Frey may have asked themselves. Jon Stewart compared the huge attention the press paid to Frey with its relatively puny coverage of the government’s lies about Iraq and spying on citizens. The press isn’t interested in lying in either case. Frey and Albert have been fodder because they’re celebrities. Small choices do alter the world, and little lies are like little murders. Something is decaying and stinking up the place.