I couldn’t think of two more different writers if I tried, but both JT Leroy and Anne Lamott are influential for me.
Anne Lamott is, perhaps, obvious. She’s the author of Bird By Bird, which most writers have read. (And if you haven’t, you should.) It’s part memoir, part instructions on how to be a writer, and definitely helpful for anyone who is stuck or staring at the blank page beating herself up.
After years of pretty notebooks being given to me by well-meaning relatives, I had a fear of “ruining” the pages with my words, and Lamott had something extremely useful to say on the subject: don’t buy pretty notebooks, because first drafts are always shitty.
It’s why I favor the black and white composition books that no real schoolchildren ever use (also apparently the favorite of Harriet the Spy), as well as the super-cheapo 70-sheet spirals with green covers. You have to let yourself be messy in order to get anything good, so I buy the cheapest notebooks possible and let my mind run wild. They’re not for public consumption, so who cares what they look like on the outside?
JT Leroy, on the other hand, is not about inspiring so much as destroying. Or, perhaps more correctly, revealing difficult truths. Though Leroy originally claimed to be “a teenage hustler who’d been pimped out as a cross-dressed prostitute by his mother at truck stops throughout the South,” it was eventually revealed that this was a character created by writer Laura Albert and portrayed by Savannah Knoop.
The literary hoax caused quite the furor, as Leroy had a lot of celebrity admirers who felt duped. But guess what? I don’t give a damn about any of that. I’m interested in the writing behind the author, and that writing is really good.
If you haven’t read Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, go grab a copy of each right now. (And don’t cheat and watch the Asia Argento movie version of the latter, dammit.) They’re disturbing, but they’re meant to be. And it doesn’t matter if they’re true stories or not; they’re just damn good ones. Sad ones, too.
As Albert says in this interview with the Paris Review:
Everything you need to know about me is in my books, in ways that I don’t even understand. I think some people take it for granted to be acknowledged and not overlooked. My experience was to be completely ignored and disregarded and disdained. That’s what I write about.
Was JT Leroy a lie? No. Leroy was a persona, and authors all have them, whether they admit it or not. It seems to me that people were upset because they thought they had connected with Leroy, at first by reading his writing and later in person, but when they discovered “Leroy” himself was a fiction, it somehow made his work invalid or deceitful. It was a fiction on top of a fiction, but they were upset because they had mistaken Leroy’s fiction for reality.
This is why I am so annoyed with people who cannot seem to accept the concept that writing labeled fiction is made up. It may be inspired by a person’s real-life experiences, but when it’s written on the page, it’s a story—a creative work, an interpretation, a drama. It’s the lie that tells a truth, as they say, but it’s not a literal account of what really happened. Fiction is make-believe. Don’t ever mistake it for reality and you won’t get hurt.
What do you think about JT Leroy and Anne Lamott? Who’s your favorite L author?
P.S. If you’re hankering for more A to Z Challenge madness, don’t forget to check out my “Ninja Weapons from A to Z” post at rebelsofthe512.com!
