Literary Camouflage
by Steven Hayward
Wall Street Journal
June 23, 2011
Eric Blair contemplated calling himself H. Lewis Allways, P.S. Burton, Kenneth Miles””or George Orwell.
Eleven years ago, a writer named JT LeRoy stormed the literary world. The 19-year-old son of a truck-stop prostitute, LeRoy published a semi-autobiographical novel called “Sarah” recounting his experiences as a “lot lizard”””a child hustler and prostitute””in the truck stops of West Virginia. The book quickly accumulated prominent supporters, including Winona Ryder and Madonna. Obsessively reclusive, LeRoy allowed himself to be interviewed only by telephone; he refused to give public readings, often having one of his famous admirers stand in for him. There was a second book, a movie deal and by 2005 the literary tastemaker Dave Eggers was commending the young writer to posterity: LeRoy’s two titles would “prove to be among the most influential American books in the last ten years.”
Less than a year later, LeRoy was revealed as a hoax: Laura Albert, a woman old enough to be LeRoy’s mother, confessed, amid mounting media speculation, that she created the alter ego””and had never even visited West Virginia. The film company that had optioned the novel successfully sued Ms. Albert for fraud. Throughout the trial, Ms. Albert defended her right to use a nom de plume, contending that her work should be read as part of a long and distinguished line of pseudonymous texts. “LeRoy was a veil upon a veil,” Ms. Albert later told the Paris Review, “I never saw it as a hoax.”
As Carmela Ciuraru observes in “Nom de Plume,”