JT LeRoy

LeRoy was presented as the author of three books of fiction, which were purportedly semi-autobiographical accounts by a teenage boy of his experiences of poverty, drug use, and emotional and sexual abuse in his childhood and adolescence from rural West Virginia to California.

[1] The works attracted considerable literary and celebrity attention, and the authenticity of LeRoy has been a subject of debate, even as details of the creation came to light in the 2000s.

[2] Work credited to LeRoy was published in literary journals such as Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Memorious, and Oxford American magazine's Seventh Annual Music Issue.

LeRoy's work has also appeared in such anthologies as The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, MTV's Lit Riffs, XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits, Nadav Kander's Beauty's Nothing, and The Fourth Sex: Adolescent Extremes.

[6] Additionally, LeRoy was credited with liner notes and biographies for musicians Billy Corgan, Liz Phair, Conor Oberst, Ash, Bryan Adams, Marilyn Manson, Nancy Sinatra and Courtney Love and profiled award-winner Juergen Teller.

Calling a suicide hotline in the 1990s, Albert reached Dr. Terrence Owens, a psychologist with the McAuley Adolescent Psychiatric Program at St. Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco.

[9] Albert explained the circumstances of LeRoy's existence in a 2006 interview in The Paris Review with Nathaniel Rich; she described her troubled history and her alleged personal experiences with abuse, abandonment, sex work, gender identity, and her need, since childhood, to create alternate personae (chiefly over the telephone) as a psychological survival mechanism, through which she could articulate her own ideas and feelings.

In August 2005, journalist John Nova Lomax published the article "Coal Miner Mother of a Mess" in the Houston Press, casting doubt on the particulars of LeRoy's story.

[20] At a 2013 symposium with filmmaker J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst in New York, actress and writer Lena Dunham said that LeRoy "co-opted my imagination for a full year of my life.

If I had done the Roberta thing ten years later, I would have faced the same problems.The story of JT LeRoy was the subject of a 2018 feature film based on Savannah Knoop's memoir.