Sarah's AntidoteIs the J.T. Leroy scandal what you think it is?
Posted Wednesday, June 27, 2007, at 1:08 PM ET
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StumbleUponAlbert did her research: A number of details in her book (slang like "lot lizards") derive from fact. But none of the major characters, sites, and events—not the Doves, not Glad, not Le Loup, not the Holy Jackalope—could be real. Sarah looks now like a book about the risks and thrills of false identity, of claiming that you are what you are not. What it does not look like—what it never looked like—was an autobiographical document. Those critics of Albert who liken it to memoir seem not to have read it. Much of the novel's power, in fact, comes from the glee with which it refuses realism: multiple subjects (sexual trauma, coming out, rural poverty) that American fiction usually depicts with flat-footed seriousness instead come together for a Technicolor romp.
When I taught Sarah, I thought LeRoy was real: We even listened to one of "his" radio interviews. But we did not discuss the novel as fact. Instead, we discovered two ways to interpret the fiction. First, we looked at how easily almost any setting (including a scandalous, sexually transgressive one) can be made to fit a conventional plot. If not for all the sex, and all the drugs, Sarah would feel like a book aimed at teens: well-crafted, inventive, and just slightly more believable than Harry Potter.
Second, we looked (I now wish we had looked longer) at the ways in which Sarah parodies confessional narrative, making fun of our hunger for true-life tales. The plot shows the ridiculousness, and the dangers, of a religion of authenticity (in which pride of place goes to real girls, real virgins, real men) in a world where everything of value is fake, created with conscious skill (the jackalope, Cherry-as-girl, the food at the Doves). The story also offers cartoonish or supernatural versions of precisely the issues (absent parents, early sexual initiation, repressive religion, the wish to escape no matter what) we expect from nonfiction about a traumatic childhood—or from fiction that asks us to read it as fact. If you believe this story, Albert implies, you must be so hungry for traumatic memoir that you'll believe anything. Better to recognize, and to take pleasure in, the ways in which human beings enjoy making things up.
The LeRoy persona (whatever its supposed links to mental illness) looks now like a fine bit of Authors' Revenge. "You want a marketable author?" Albert (and her accomplices) seem to have said. "You don't want to judge fiction on its merits, as a product of human invention? Fine: I'll give you as marketable an author as I can dream up, an author appropriate, too, for my novel's subjects: teen sexuality, sexual fantasy, impersonation, extended deception. Then the works of my imagination might get a chance—however small—to bloom."
"LeRoy" is gone, but Sarah remains: I expect to teach it again. Steven Shainberg, who would have directed Antidote's film, says he hopes now to make a film like Adaptation, in which Albert's life, "LeRoy's" story, and the events in the novel are intertwined. Such a work of art could show how deeply the conventions of fiction (for example, the coming-of-age tale) affect our responses to real life, how fixated we have become on the lives of authors, and how easily we believe what we want to believe. But such a work of art exists already: It is the novel Albert wrote.
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Remarks from the Fray:
The Sarah fracas is just another element in our current fascination with "reality" as porn. First we had Jerry Springer, but then, as his disgusting display of circus folk became too unreal and stagy, his audience left.
Next, we got higher-toned, prime-time reality shows. Not high-toned, mind you. But certainly higher-toned than Jerry's show. Survivor let us look into the (literally) naked life of a real "evil gay" (the Shylock of our times). Dating shows like The Bachelor let us look at people behaving foolishly over sexual competition with the "but he's looking for a wife" veneer to let us pretend that we're not watching a televised version of a letter to Penthouse. And VH1 and E! take us even closer to the edge with reality shows about a very old pornographer's very young trio of live-in girl friends, or about the skeeviest of scum having sex with the scummiest skeeves.
But literature is above that, right? Except when it's not. And the entire memoir craze is a part of it. Any twenty-something who has lived enough life to write a memoir probably hasn't lived enough life to have a perspective on those events. Instead, the readers are looking for the raw, the real, the immediacy of real, dark depths - the vicarious thrills. They are looking for the porn of pain. And now we've reached the point where fiction authors have to provide us with the porn of the real. It makes me wonder what would happen today to Acton, Currer, or Ellis Bell.
--DeaH
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Laura Albert committed fraud, regardless of how good her writing was. She deliberately concocted a persona of an abused and sexually confused teen--a person to whom many well-meaning people reached out with heartfelt guidance and support. She knew that in our climate of hyper-awareness of sexual abuse there would be a sympathetic audience. This wasn't just someone writing under a pen name; she wasn't disguising her own identity through any kind of demure modesty so much as purposefully making a buck off a hot topic. Being ambitious is fine; even concocting a false persona is not the world's worst crime. But please don't try to spin it as some therapeutic device that helped you through your own history of abuse (a history we have no proof of, and which we can never verify), especially when you had a willing group of cronies eager to help along the ruse. You played with fire, Laura, and you got burnt, big time.
--Wordman
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Half of what sunk James Frey was that his book was purportedly a memoir. The other half was how revolting his fetishization of addiction-and-recovery culture was given that he, you know, made most of it up.
The same goes for Laura Albert. Though obviously and openly fiction, her (crappy by any yardstick) novel's sex-trade fetishization of good ol' white trash's only defense was that there was allegedly some real-life, experiential truth behind it. Turns out it's just more "highbrow" NYC lit-scene porn of the "other," dredged straight from the mythic swamps of flyover country.
Agreed, the suckers who got hot for this deserve every "deception" they've suffered. But authorship does affect the meaning of a text, some more than others. If, say, Pinero turned out to be some east-coast literati scumbag, Short Eyes would be flat-out offensive. And Laura Albert makes Deliverance look affectionate and evenhanded.
--literalapse
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(7/3)