QUILLBLOG

More hard times for JT LeRoy

Today, a guest post from incoming Q&Q editorial intern Stuart Woods, who joins us at the beginning of next month.

Ever since the true identity of author JT LeRoy was revealed, the career of Laura Albert – the ingenious wizard behind the curtain or the manipulative phony, depending on who you ask – has been in spectacular decline. Now, Alan Feuer reports in The New York Times on the accompanying demise of Albert’s personal and psychological well-being:

In the last two years Laura Albert has lost, in no particular order, her livelihood, her boyfriend, a piece of her identity, quite possibly her apartment and a civil fraud trial in Manhattan this spring….

Feuer portrays Albert as disturbed and vulnerable, a pill-popping pathological liar still hung up on her alter ego and conspicuously not writing new material (noting that it takes Albert seven hours to pack for a day-long road trip, he writes that Albert is “blessed with gifts, though not a talent for logistics”). Even TV producer David Milch – one of Albert’s few remaining high-profile supporters, whom she met on the set of Deadwood – gives Albert a not-so-private dressing down. Feuer describes how his scheduled interview with Milch “became an intervention”:

Mr. Milch was stern.

Shut your mouth, he told Ms. Albert. Quit this sick behavior. Disengage. Forget the press. Go home. Be still. Get healthy. Raise your child. And pray that you can write.

He then reached in his pocket and gave Ms. Albert five crisp hundred-dollar bills.

She took the money, and she sat down on the couch. She closed her eyes, opened her mouth; she tried, it seemed, not bursting into tears.

While the blatant schadenfreude from Feuer is less than surprising – after all, Albert built LeRoy’s reputation by manipulating journalists – Quillblog remarks with disappointment how the elaborate hall of mirrors around LeRoy/Albert’s identity has been reduced to a spectacle of sad and tawdry private details.

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