Alela Böcker gör J T Leroy intervjuer i UK, lååångt innan Kobra.

Interview with publisher UK, Pete


A-L: What would you say if on of Serpent’s Tails authors turned out to be someone else?

P: To be quite honest I am glad as long as it doesn’t happen to us, cause it can happen to anyone. You publish something because you believe in the writing, you think the writing is strong or good and because it is an authentic voice, but it shouldn’t matter whether it is autobiographical or not. The problem is in this age with the whole thing of the biography, the author , it is the media who is only interested when they think the writing is autobiographical, like there is all these chicanoclassics, written by Hollywood jewish blacklisted writers, I don’t think it should matter.

A-L: I think that she is talking about her own life but she is doing it from a voice young persons point of view cause she thought that she wouldn’t be able to publish as a 38 year old woman, because she’d had bad experiences with not being successful. She was desperate to get famous, I guess she wanted to become a proper writer because she wanted to get away from the pornindustry.

P: It is a reflection of our society, you know conceptual art, this is a conceptual author, it is a performance and it is only because this horrible collapse of literature and autobiography that people get sort of upset, but it shouldn’t matter, if the voice is authentic they should still like the writing.

A-L: Since the New York Post story noone is buying the books anymore and that is a shame because she is a talented writer, she is a good storyteller and she could write about other subjects too. But first I wish I could somehow get Laura to write a book about her proper life now. But everybody is saying that she will never fully confess about…of course she couldn’t write a book about the whole JT period because then she would incriminate herself in a way.

P: But that is the interesting thing, why she thought she couldn’t get success but as a young boy, it is an interesting story. I think it is ridiculous this response and I know Ira Silverberg, the agent, and she says “It’s immoral and I was used and…” I don’t know how much he knew it and how much he didn’t knew it. But these people must have been complicit somehow. There have been these things before, for example Virago had a competition a few years ago for I think “The best ethnic novel” and they wanted to publish this book by a young asian woman and it turned out to be written by a Vicar, a male white Vicar and they withdrew the book and all this kind of stuff. It was a big scandal, about ten years ago. It was a feminin publishing house and in those days they only published books by women. And Roman Garry he created this Emile Asha, a young arab and wrote a book and he won literary prices but anyone, the first thing they ask and of course the television programs always aska did you do this, is this your life, your experiences. It is impossible for writers these days to say “this is fiction”. Here it is and your either like it or you don’t. Live me alone.

A-L: Sarah was always said to be facts mixed up with fiction, they always said it was ficionalized so…but I can understand that all the famous people involved feel bad.

P: I think Dennis Cooper has been very upset by the whole thing. There is also an issue of aids in connection with the book and maybe the gay men think that no woman can write from their point of view. But it is the times we are living in, with people like Opera, there was this thing Fray’s book what is it called again “Million little pieces” very successful book about childhood abuse and then the guy said I invented it and Opera got very upset and somehow it is no longer worth anything. JT used all these contacts and milked the whole thing and noone likes to be made a fool so…

A-L: Most journalists I have been in contact with about this have a really good attitude, they are fascinated by the whole thing, I think the famous people are more upset then the journalists. Mainly because most of them never got so personally involved, the famous people didn’t meet JT because they were interviewing him but because he wanted to get to know them.

P: It is incredible if you think about all these years they did this!

A-L: Yeah, how Savannah coped too.

P: Didn’t you have any notions about this being a woman?

A-L: Yeah, but more afterwards, but it was hard because of the queer issue, JT was said to feel sometimes lika boy and sometimes as a girl, that was why it was hard to realise even if she had some facial expressions, like her eyes, she had really female eyes in a way and they were really soft and it was hard to picture a person who had been abused for so many years to have warm eyes, for the people who saw JT without glasses it was a bit strange. The eyes should have been harder or… Lauras eyes though, they were harder. Anyway, there have been other books about abusive childhoods why do you think JT got so big?

P: It was never one of my favourite authors but there is a rawness and authenticity to the story, people could feel this brused, hurt persona and threre is a rather unhealthy voiristic readership for these books and I suppose that part of the strength, the power is that the writer has been going through these experiences and they are dissapointed when they are told that they haven’t.

A-L: It is strange that fiction can’t be as stong cause if you write about things that might as well be true, why can’t writers write about things they had heard of or…

P: The power of fiction is to imagine, that have you left if you don’t allow the writer to the powers of imagination.

A-L: You can also ask if an autobiographical book is in fact 100% autobiographical because the way you look at yourself might not be the way other people see you. How many autobioraphical books do you have at Serpent’s Tail in camparison with fiction?

P: We have published like Jane County who used to be Wayne County and…

A-L: What would you say if Melissa P would be noting but fiction? Because that book has been very successful and it speaks for the “new” teenage generation, people identify with her and she is speaking up for a crowd of people. The diffence with JT though is that she spoke for a young queer generation that perhaps is far away from her own life.

P: We has always promoted Melissa P as fiction. We have also published this really successful book, “Let’s talk about Kevin” and it’s about a mother who has a kid who is a monster and people are really surprised when they discover that the author has not had children, but then they say “Oh it is amazing that you who have not had children have been able to put yourself as a writer in the place of a mother”, but the diffence is that the author never claimed to had children.

A-L: Do you think Laura Albert could had got a publisher if she would have been writing in her own name?

P: I doubt it very much. I think maybe yes, maybe no, I am not so sure. Because there is this thing now about authenticity, people want the suffering to have been experienced at first hand it is not enough if someone is saying I have invented this.

A-L: But “Let’s talk about Kevin” has been succesfull .

P: But it is a question of promotion, if we had put on the cover, “The author lives in London and has no children” it may not had been so successful. We just put “She lives in London”. But because you have this culture of interviewing authors, on television and so on, especially in America when you have these identity politics, “Can a straight man write as a gay woman?” “Can a straight man write as a gay man?” The gay people says that “No, that is our experince noone else can understand”.

A-L: Do you think that Europe and America will look at it in differnet ways?

P: Yeah, very much so. I think in a way England is sort of halvway between, but in countries as France and Italy they are not so hung up about the author and if their writing is authentic, but then the sort of the career of writer for example in France are not so determined by for example Operashows.

A-L: Do you think that Laura Albert can publish again? Get a new bookdeal?

P: Yeah, I think so, obviously it would be easier for her to get a bookdeal about the whole LeRoy affair but she probably cuold get a bookdeal writing fiction or something.

A-L: Do you think people would buy it?

P: Oh yeah, but I don’t know in which quantity, but if you put on the jacket “Previous worksd by this author as JT LeRoy” I think people would be intersted in her first book if it was good. It would probabaly be a small publisher though. But these scandals happens once a month in America now, the big publishers are very scared. When Kathy Acker did “plagiourism” it was part of the art, but she was out in the open with it, like Dan Brown when someone comes up and says “It was my idea, they stole the work from me”.

A-L: In the musicindustry now artist use rare samples from other people and that is acceptable but it doesn’t seem to be as acceptable in the literary world.

P: It is acceptable only if it is clear and if it is a method, it is ok if it is part of your estetics, but you have to be upfront with it. But there is so much money involved and that is part of the problem like in the Dan Brown case because if they win the lawsuit they will get millions. I mean the problem with JT LeRoy is that it was so successful, I mean as soon and they make films…

A-L: Yeah, they both were in Cannes, twice I think, first as a cowriter of “Elephant”.

P: He was the cowriter of “Elephant” ? That is a very good film. That was Laura as well?

A-L: Yeah. Well, she is a good writer.

P: Look at “The story of O”. Now people know but for many years noone knew who wrote it, and it wasn’t a problem. It sold hundreds of thousends of copies.

A-L: And also, for 100 years ago or so when women wasn’t allowed to be authors…

P: …George Eliot…

A-L: But then the difference were that the author was secret and never did interviews and that so it was easier to be another person.

P: It is like in Hollywood when all the Jewish filmmakers made films under another name. And they have been written holocaustmemoars where the story has been invented, if people would discover that Primo Levi was written by a publisher in Milan, it is crazy, because either the books are good or they are not good. But that is not the way people respond.

A-L: It has been a rather long period now when people have been obsessed with authenticy.

P: Yeah, maybe 10 or 15 years.

A-L: Do you think it will stay popular or will people get tired of it?

P: As long as there is such an importance to the kind of realityissue, look at television, Big Brother programs and so on, if it turned out that one of the persons there were an actor the viewers would feel swindled. The people want Big Brother to be authentic.


Interview with Paul Flynn, journalist UK

A-L: Did you read the article I told you about?

P: No, I didn’t get the chance. I should have but I have just been so snowed in today.

A-L: Ok, cause they actually explain who Laura Albert is. The actual writer.

P: Oh, really! I should definitely read it then. Yeah.

A-L: Cause that is going to be my main focus. I feel bad for her in a way, everybody is saying that it is a fraud and nobody asks why she did it, about her background and why she took that persona. And know…I don’t know what Savannah is doing, she is a fashion designer, she probably just sits in her flat and will not get rid of the JT persona. She is so hung up in it.

P: Did she actually write the books?

A-L: Yeah, she did. She is the caracther who was travelling with JT, I don’t know did you do an interview by phone or?

P: No, no, no, I met her, I mean I met JT.

A-L: The woman who was with JT, that was Laura.

P: Yes.

A-L: I spent four days with them in Stockholm so I kind of got to know them a little bit, around the interviews and the reading and stuff so…Laura then told me she grew up in England but that was a lie. She grew up in New York, her mum was a playwrite, in a Jewsih family, her parents divorced when she was young. She moved to San Fransisco when she was 16 maybe, when she was allowed to live on her own, before then she lived in fostercare. That is between she was 14 and 16. Then she got involved with the punkscene in San Fransisco for many years, she was in a band called “Daddy don’t go” and they wrote lyrics about abusive parent or fathers. That is interesting stuff if you looks at her books. At the time she also worked as a phonesex-operator. She did that for ten years and I think a lot of her imagination comes from that, all this roleplay with the customers over the phone.

P: That makes sence in terms of the books I mean some of the scenes in the book have been written slightly titallating, there is an element of titallation to the books. And I think for a lot of people, the fantasy of this sort of truckstop idea is, it represent a fantasy to them. And I think the prostitution is a sort of fanasy for them as well.

A-L: I am going to write about why she did it and who she is, sometimes the writer shoudn’t be as important as the books, but in this case …

P: …she made it as important as the books…

A-L: Yeah, it has to be explained. She is smart, she had this band Thistle, they are crap.

P: Yeah, they are rubbish. They gave me one of their cds when and I took it home and it is absolutely impossible college rock.
A-L: The thing was that when she talked about the band she said that “I was the singer but then a realised that I wasn’t young enough and there is an age issue cause she realised that like with Dennis Cooper that if she called him as a 38 year old woman he would never, ever had talked to her, but when she called as JT the teenager he was interested and my writing with have an angle on rebellion, it is ok for teenagers but it is never ok when you are older, then it becomes unattractive and in a way she grew up as a punkrocker, now she is a mother and wants to get out of the porn industry where she worked for like 20 years or so. She wants to be a proper writer cause when she stopped doing phonesex she worked as an internet sexadvisor when the internetboom struck California and she saw a lot of her collegues get tv-programmes and they got famous. And she wasn’t. If you looked at her picture on her website she is dressed like a hippie and wasn’t ususlly as sexy as the other sexadvisors were. I think she is really interesting.

P: I mean, absolutely fascinating. Whatever you think about her nad what she has done, she is a fascinating writer. The essenciall problem for me with the story is, yes, she couldn’t have turned it into a phenomenon by putting her own name to it, but then she wouldn’t have turned into a fake. Why she decided to make the decision somehow discredited the future rather then being known as the valid fantastic writer that she is. But then it wouldn’t have been the phenomenon. Can I tell you an interesting story?

A-L: Yeah.

P: The first time I heard that this might be a fraud, do you know Antony and the Johnsons?

A-L: Yeah, yeah.

P: I went to interview Antony Haggeton for “I am a bird now” way before this had blown up. I had just heard about the album and thought it was fantastic. I was in New York anyway doing another interview and I looked him up, sent him an email and said “I really like your record, can I come and interview you?”. So I went to interview him nad he was wearing a very JT LeRoyish persona. He had the wig, he had obviously another type of body size but the sort of the distressed clothes, costume widow look, that was very very traceable to JT LeRoy. He reminded me of JT LeRoy. There was also the connection that both of them had with Lou Reed, both were friends with Lou Reed, well JT…after the interview I walked with Antony to this meeting and talked about his involvment with Lou Reed and he took up the subject of JT LeRoy, which I obviously wasn’t going to do, I made the connection in my mind…and he said “Have you heard this rumour that JT LeRoy is a fraud?” I said “no” and then he said “Cause Lou told me the story is circulating in New York at the moment. And I said “It would make sense because the thing that JT LeRoy has done with the British media, it is like she had conducted by email, she has found every important journalist in London. And this has happened with me and of lot of my friends…and it had turned into this enourmous sort of marketing, so it made sort of sense to me.” And I said to Antony, “what would you think if it was a fraud, what would you feel?” and he said “Well, do you know what, I don’t care, the books are amazing, the books has sold a million copies, this guy is a huge star in Australia, Europe, basically everywere, he managed to become a superstar and I don’t care, the authenticy is in the prose”. And when I then listened to the Antonyrecord, it was like…he obviously had this undefinable sexual being that was the “musical JT LeRoy”. He had a major image shift from this very Lee Boary and with the influences from the “new romantics” and then turned into a musical version of JT LeRoy. It probably says more about Antony then it does about the JT LeRoy story but I just struck me, how far the thing had come, if you look at what happened with Antony, that is exactly the same thing that happened with JT. It became this thing, it was an absolute word of mouth phenomenon, he was released on a tiny label and ended up turning…

A-L: He was the top one record in the biggest Swedish music magasin.

P: This record would prpbably have sold about… I asked him at the time, was is your estimate sale and he said “If we can sell 5000 copies of the record it will be amazing”. It ended up selling about 200 000. Yeah, that was my last recollection of it before the story broke. It is absolutely mental.

A-L: I have a friend who said it was a fraud from the start.

P: Very good!

A-L: I think he was very anti the very…the hype and he didn’t believe in the caracter in “Sarah”. I was the publisher of “Sarah”. And I translated the second one for another publishing company.

P: Did you have it first of all? Amazing. In Sweden? Incredible! How did he/or she found you?

A-L: It was me who found him/her basically, there is this journalist called Marcus who wores for radio and he also wrote for a small teenage magasin called Chili which are distributed around schools, but sometimes in Stockholm it lies around in cafés and I just read something about “Sarah” which has just recently been released on Bloomsbury then and I though, because I was starting up the publishing company, it was one of the books I tried to get the rights to, and Bloomsbury gave me the rights, because then he wasn’t famous yet. And I just thought it was fascinating. I really liked the book. And I have also made a 15 minutes documentary when JT was in Stockholm, that includes the reading and everything. I am doing partly doing this because of a phonecall, I think that are a lot of journalists are irritated or don’t understand it.

P: I don’t feel like that at all. I remember the day that we met JT for this photoshoot for Attitude Magasine and he was seeing Madonna that evening.

A-L: That must have been just after they had been in Stockholm to see me.

P: The thing is, the amazing thing for me is that it became…Sarah almost became like a badge to wear, I am not sure if half the people had read it, it became one of those bookshelfsbooks, like “I am interested I the modern condition and in the age of the confessional”. That is why memoars are more written then fiction now. It is a part of the times we are living in, it became so symbolic of something. The thing that fascinates me about it now is what it does is, it slightly messes up the idea of what abuse is, I wish I had read the article now, but she has obviously suffered some form of abuse so…and it is kind of like is there somewhere within the abuse a wish to make it more fantastical and more grander and more theatrical than other peoples abuse. If you have been abused would you really like it to be put it into fiction? It is a really fascinating story. How did she worked this is sense of money, how did she…did she have a bankaccount in the name of JT LeRoy?
A-L: I think they said in the New York Post article that the money was sent to an account form the publisher in one of the names she uses, I don’t think it was Laura Albert. She said that “It isn’t enough money to buy a house.” All writers are not always rich but she talked about the band and hoped they would hit off and that would give them money but…it is interesting because…partly why I think that Laura is more intersting then the JT figure is that she has been a looser all her life, she was the looser as a punkrocker and they talked about a book in the Salonarticle that was written about the punkscene, I think she gave the author 2/3 of the material for the book and she was interviewed there as herself. Then she was like 14-15 girl riot wasn’t happening so they were nowhere for girls to be in bands, the only way to become a part of the scene was to sleep with the guys in the bands. So she ended up using that but at the same time being a victim.

P: It is like somhow “artistic prostitution”.

A-L: There has been a lot of different layers of abuse in her life and she has always been in a looser position because her band never happened, she tried for years and years and years, I think she was good at working in the sexadvice scene but when you are 40 you don’t wanna do that and of course you are not as popular cause they want younger people, so she is kind of used to be a looser and she got so famestruck with JT that she couldn’t really let it go and when the fraudstory is out she is a looser again. And that is more honest and real then the whole Jt success story, do you understand what I mean?

P: Absolutely. The ironi in all this, have you read the Armisteen Maupid book? The fact that this came out at the same time, it is exactly the same story. The fact that she is a looser now is not because of circumstances out of her control, not because girls cannot get into bands or so, but because she has done something that is fraudulent. That was totally within her control. Do you want fame or do you want authenticity? I don’t think she should be punished for this, but I do feel that in the end of the day she made that choice, she marketed this thing to become a phenomenon, maybe it got out of her control I don’t know?

A-L: I think it did because, when I met her she was like…in the film by Asia Argento they got really hooked up by having famous people in it.

P: Yeah, if you think about her relationship with Asia Argento, I mean that is crazy, I mean did Asia know anything about it?

A-L: No.

P: I mean if anyone should feel stupid, if anyone has been kind of used it is Argento isn’t it? That is fucking up someones credibility, intergrity, it is like bonkers. The whole thing is bonkers! I went over to see a friend in Paris and she said “Fucking hell, like who else is fraud?” It just roles up the whole idea of authenticity, the whole idea of authenticity culture. Another intersting one for me is Augusto Borroughs, he has wrote this confessionals about his fucked up upbringing, he is a brillient, brillient writer, it is so hard-core…but when I spoke to him on the telephone I was like, there is something that doesn’t ring true about you, I think he was making a pervesion of his life that suits him. Maybe that was was she was doing?

A-L: Can you tell me a bit about when you interviewed JT?

P: Yeah, sure. It was for Attitude Magazine, the gay magazine here, they were collecting all sorts of people who had been involved in the British Gay culture and photographing them all on the cover, they didn’t do them all at once, I was working at the office at the time and we made a list of the ones we thought were great, made a list of people and I suggested that JT should be one of them, I was like, it is a very important piece of queer fiction, “The heart is deceitful” was out about this time, it was a genuine modeified phenomenon. And I also had a finger in ID magazine, I still do, I write a lot for them now, and JT was one of our contributed Editors, it was crazy, but it was this really cool thing in Britain, it was though like he/she made abuse called, the whole thing, now it is fictional, it brought a little bit of fairystuff to the story. If it was real you would still feel like, it was telling your truth. But that not the point . We were doing this composit cover and JT and the woman turned up at the studio, JT walked into the studio in this sort of cockeyed wig and was shaking all the way through it, and we had a make-up artist and she was genuinely disturbed by it, she said “We can’t do this, I can’t touch his face”, she was deeply distressed so I went over and spoke to him and I went “Oh, look are you ok with this?” He was shaking violently but kept saying “Yes, it is fin, yes it is fine” and then we did the shoot and I went to do an interview with him which was just, looking back at it now I understand why it was an astonishing thing to sit through, but at the time it feelt like, It was almost like the abuse was talking to him, I almost felt like a sort of… I think if you have any degree of sensitivity as an interviewer or sort of you sort of worry about people, you have a sort of humanitarian instincts as an interviewer or as a journalist, you want people to be at ease, because you want them to be able to say want they want to say or not say want they want to say so they don’t end up saying things that they either regret so the whole thing just snaps. It was an absolute disaster. I can just remember coming away from it and I phoned up the editor straight away and said this was the most crazyest experience ever and the thing was everyone was talking about it at the internet at the time as well, there was a girl who worked for “The Face” magazine, Alex Fisher, she was going out to dinner with him that night and it was all just absolutely bonkers, I cut the interview to an absolute minimum, and we left and that was about it. But everybody, everybody in London was talking about it. They had done that amazing 25 page fashion shoot in Pop magazine, they did a shoot for ID, Dazed and Confused was going to put him on the cover which for an author, no author has been on covers, not since Irvine Welsh, they were not in the starpress, they don’t talk the language of the starpress, it was incredible. When I was sitting in on the photoshoot and then the interview I though “This is like crazy Americans”, you know what I mean? And that thing about the therapist was supporting his writing…

A-L: That was probably Laura who did that in the role of JT, it was all done by phone. The website is now pro-Laura Albert but she is still not admitting to have written it, but it says there that who wrote the book doesn’t matter, they are still good. But as the books are not selling as good because of this she might have a really hard time to get a new bookdeal after this. And she is in a divorce with her husband Geoffrey, and he has apparantly sold the filmrights to reveal the story and that will not be good as he is now angry at her. But he was exactly as much involved as her. And also Savannah who played JT, many people got so affectuated about that person that they met, she is just as interesting.

P: To me that is more interesting than the writer, was she the one doing all the writing to people or wsa Laura doing that?

A-L: Laura was doing that. When they were in Stockholm mentioned something I wrote in an email that JT didn’t know anything about, but then Laura covered the story.

P: Yeah, that happened to me too.

A-L: What is interesting is that when they were in Stockholm, I didn’t like Laura, I liked Savannah, and she has written this books and it is a lot of empathy there and I didn’t feel that empathy in her.

P: Bear in mind though, that before this was uncovered she wasn’t only holding the puppetstrings, she must have been incredible nervous and defensive. She must have been worried sick about the whole thing unfolding in front of her eyes, I mean when she went to Cannes! Astonishing! What was going on there? Absolutely nuts, it really is. What is interesting to me is as well that in a fictional context it puts Laura in the position of the mother, you know she is pimping out this thing, this product and the face of this product, it is a form of prostitution in itself.

A-L: And also, especially in Sarah, the protagonist has a lot of love for his mother, and that is a bit unreal.

P: Yeah, the books definitely stands up for forensic examination now, I should read them again actually. Also the story says a lot, maybe not about publishing but about our readinghabits, we want that element of authenticity, we need it to validate things, like there is this guy called David Segaris who confessionals, it is the same thing. There was a big thing here about a girl called Andrea Ashworth and she wrote a sort of confessioanl memoare about an abusive father, it is a very very good book. It is not alternative literature at all, people loved this book, JT began a whole series of confessionals, didn’t it? It became the kind of benchmark about what the confessional age was. It is interesting to ask also, did we need it, did we need that book? It ended up almost as a seditive, it was like “I am ok”.

A-L: I think it made a point in showing a part of America that exists, maybe people didn’t notice the young children in the streets before, they looked at them in a new way? It is like it could have been real.

P: I think it became an important part of the picture of trailertrash America, the film “Boys don’t cry” was being made, Eminem had happened, from a mainstream point of view you couldn’t have done anything better, a lot of people were into whitetrash America. I wonder what the idea to it came from?

A-L: They mentioned a book in the Salonarticle that was published and an earlier date that might has inspired her to write “Sarah”.

P: What is most intersting to me is that we took the whole thing on, it is not just a massive stoke of deception we thought it was the books were useful and we loved it.

A-L: I really liked the article you wrote for “The Sunday Times” about how literature had become hip.

P: Yeah, it was about that time, fashion had become dull and so on…so people got into reading about peoples lives, or subculturall lives, it just touched an authentic point when we needed it, suddenly literature became far more radical then a lot of popmusic a lot of fashion a lot of art even, and that book came and it became a whole new benchmark, it was a real hipster thing. It would be so fascinating to see if she regrets it. If she can see another way around it.