Customer Reviews

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(38)

 

 

I approached this volume of stories desiring not to be swayed by the current tides of public condemnation, which shouldn't really matter in terms of fiction anyway. Nevertheless, I can honestly say that it isn't importnat who wrote this book. Leroy or Albert, it's still a stinker, and a grand stinker at that. Perhaps now the dialogue should turn toward why so many were willing to praise this book in the first place, because the story, writing, and talent behind these stories is as transparent and meaningful and unique as cotton candy.

What an incredible disappointment to see such personally revealing writing turn out to be a scandal. I know people who have been personally affected by J T Leroy's writing and have "corresponded" with someone, who we now know, does not even exist. I don't feel that the hoax is brilliant in any way.

I have a lot of people reaching out to me because of Go Ask Ogre and they have confided very personal things to me by way of land mail and email. My book has only been out for 6 months so I can't even imagine how many people have reached out to J T Leroy. I think it's a very messed up thing. I have no respect for liars, even crafty ones.

Your own agent summed it up best: "To present yourself as a person who is dying of AIDS in a culture which has lost so many writers and voices of great meaning, to take advantage of that sympathy and empathy, is the most unfortunate part of all of this," Mr. Silverberg said. "A lot of people believed they were supporting not only a good and innovative and adventurous voice, but that we were supporting a person."

No matter what you do from this point forward, no matter how good or not, no one will take you seriously. By treating your fans like tools your creative power is now officially negated.

Too bad Laura Albert couldn't cut it on her own as a writer. Too bad she had to conjure up an identity of someone much younger than herself to be taken seriously as a creative entity. And too bad that so many in the publishing world--agents, critics, artists, writers, etc.--jumped at the opportunity to champion the work of a reformed teenage junkie male prostitute . Doesn't matter if the writing is more suited for a grad-level creative writing class, just as long as it came from a reformed teenage junkie male prostitute instead of a 30-something wanna-be wife/punker from Brooklyn: because that makes all the difference, doesn't it? In any case, it might not matter at all to JT...uh, Laura...that she/he might be real or not; however, it CLEARLY mattered to JT/Laura that the writers and people she manipulated to gain so much attention were, in fact, very real: truth be known, she was banking on it. Whether this scam will pan out in the long haul for Laura is still up in the air, but from this point forward she'll have to prove herself as she is, which might be a lot harder than using the fabricated, cruel abuse of a child/wunderkind who never was. High-level performance art? Maybe. But it's true motives are as transparent as can be. The real victims here, however, are the young people who found a voice in "Leory" and believed someone they understood and trusted could put a voice to their lives and feelings when they couldn't. Let the heavy karma now unfold. Should be interesting.

First off, I'm giving this collection two stars based solely on my reading of it and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that J.T. Leroy is a hoax. I read it before the hoax came to light, and found it to be so poorly realized on so many levels that I was shocked by the praise and hype driving it along. As someone born and raised in the South, it became very obvious to me that "Mr. Leroy" wasn't from this part of the world but had created an entire fiction based on little else other than imagination. Unfortunately, the fabrications weren't very interesting to me. [...] I find that very troubling, as it seems someone is trying to prevent the disappointment and anger many feel for having been duped from being heard. That form of censorship in order to keep an already dying myth afloat will only backfire.

For Laura Albert-the woman behind this whole myth-I urge you to own up to the fact that the hoax is done with and it had a very good run. Why you decided to invent J.T. in the first place, as well as other characters involved in his story, strikes me as ten times more interesting than what this ill-imagined collection offered. My advice to you is to retire "J.T." with some dignity and put yourself forward in as honest a manner as possible. You might be surprised how many of us would now be willing to listen to your story instead. Otherwise, I fear "J.T." is going to have a rough road ahead, because few are going to champion his story anymore (something that was much easier to do when we though he was alive).

No, there's nothing remotely COOL or WONDERFUL about this kind of hoax. The issue isn't about a 40-year-old woman pretending to be a teenage boy, rather the issue is about a 40-year-old woman pretending to be a transgendered, HIV+, abused, drug addicted teenage boy--and then using that persona to gain access, success, and sympathy from others. Some might love that she fooled "the genius literary elite," but that speaks more about someone's own resentment toward those who've made honest names for themselves as writers, etc.

In truth, it speaks volumes about the writers, artists, publishers, editors, and others who went the extra mile to help a young man pull his life together and get his work published and read. There's nothing cynical about creative people doing that for a person (in fact, I'd argue it is admirable that they would go out of their to do so), but it is incredibly cynical and cruel to take advantage of those intentions. By doing so, Laura Albert has probably made it impossible for a real young person with real problems and real talent to be taken seriously by those who were duped. Her sins aren't in the books or the quality of the writing, but in her intentions to shortcut her success by co-opting the problems of others who rarely have a voice and by lying to those who would seek to help those people. And, of course, don't forget she then went to incredible lengths to discredit anyone or anything that sought to reveal the truth.

In other words, real abused children feel real pain, and stunts like this only serve to avert good intentions that should go to the right places.

So judge the books on the merit of the writing, if you want. But please remember the one unerring mark of a sociopath is, essentially, that they'll try to make you feel sorry for them even as they're screwing you over.

Some might find it predictable to read the cult of enthusiasm in the reviews before the "scandal" hit, and the snotty rejection afterwards--although it should be noted that a large portion of those earlier reviews were actually written by the author under different guises. People like "Emily Frasier" gushed over Sarah - echoing the same sentiment from review to review, as if everyone had just seen the face of God in such sub par prose. Remember, this was a marketing hoax more than anything, and the writer went to amazing levels to create her own cult of personality from out of nothing of value and precious little talent.

After the scandal, the real reviewers finally took aim, only to find a large portion of their more telling reviews mysteriously removed from Amazon from time to time when they didn't fit with the agenda of someone else (hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...?).

The dust, I think, has at last settled. And after I revisited the LeRoy books I bought years ago, it struck me that it will be nearly impossible for any new readers to find anything of value in them. They aren't really original--liberally stealing from Gaitskill, O'Connor, and Cooper--nor was the hoax even all that unique (the blueprint obviously borrowed from Anthony Godby Johnson scam a few years before "Leroy" surfaced). In the end, this was just a con job, pulled off for a while by someone who did nothing more than appropriate the ideas, talent, and vision of countless others while fobbing it off as her own.

Okay, I always figured there was something suspect about Leroy's background. Now with the cat out of the bag, I have to confess that there's something about the writing that will perplex me for a while to come: When I believed SARAH, HAROLD'S END, and HEART were written by a young wunderkind with a heartbreaking past, I allowed myself to forgive much about the writing that seemed forced, over the top, and just downright questionable. Now that it's been revealed the writing comes from a 30-something woman who opted against the understandable use of a moniker and decided to pass Leroy off as real (ten points for the marketing coup, but minus fifty points for manipulating so many of us who felt real empathy for your invention), I just can't take this writing seriously anymore. Instead of coming off as the creative purging of a painful childhood, it now just reads like what it has become: the ramblings of someone who never was a child prostitute, never an addict, and never lived the life she is writing about and claiming to be real.

Perhaps J.T. is the product of a troubled woman with multiple personalities, and if that's the case there's at least a couple of more books she can write about along those lines.

Anyway, I'm very sorry to learn about Leroy being hoax. And, yes, it does make difference for how I feel about the writing.

When I read Heart for the first and only time, I

couldn't really believe what I read. It struck me as

such a badly realized book, cliche, unimaginative

language, aiming to be a dark and tragic story yet

failing on most levels, and written by someone who

never lived in the world they wrote about, certainly

not a young child who doesn't know anything else but a

calculating adult instead. The lack of true innocence

and the absence of truthfulness hit me very hard.

Later I learned about young JT Leroy being created by

the much older Laura Albert, and it just confirmed

what I understood from reading the book, this is

written by someone who has sought to use and exploit

the relationship between parent and child in a very

twisted and cruel manner, cheapening such an important

bond, a bond also made with readers who fell hook,

line, and sinker for Mrs. Albert's stab at celebrity

via her unreal creation of J.T. Having worked with

kids in danger, I'm fully aware of how adults will

sometimes manipulate and use them to get what they

want, and this writer and book is no different.

Heart is a joke of a book, the others written by Leroy

are also just like it, with Sarah being where the

manipulation and fakery began.

JT Leroy is a hoax, and, regardless of what others

might suggest, the hoax matters because it uses

serious situations and serious problems as a means to

inflate its own wrongly conceived importance. In

other words, it has used the persona of a street child

not as a way to help others but, instead, as a way to

use others in order to achieve it's authors goals of

control and success: the author being a middle-aged

woman who never lived on the streets or had the life

she claims is J.T.s. If J.T. had really existed he

would likely be disgusted by this sort of "literary" abuse.

As readers we've been lied to again. He doesn't exist. He never existed. And those of us who believed in him have been betrayed. Thanks a lot, JT, for making us think someone else felt the way I did instead of using my emotions as a means to pad their pocket and exploit their own need for literary/hipster cool "credibility." You'll pay in hell!