Is this the face of J. T. Leroy?
In terms of showy San Francisco-based author biographies, J. T. Leroy's always had Danielle Steel beat. She may have a zillion parking spaces in Pacific Heights and some colorful marital history, but Leroy's alleged life story, complete with trailer-trash teen mother and lurid sex-n-drugs anecdotes, is both mediapathic and the purported foundation for his fiction. It is not, however, any sort of foundation for author appearances. Leroy's fishy public appearances are a postmodernist's wet dream, and "Who is J.T. Leroy, really?" has turned into a parlor game among some folks.
Photo from MonkeyView Photo Server
SFist Lisa, contributing
Last fall, New York magazine advanced the theory that Leroy's an ongoing performance-art piece by ex-rockers Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop; today, the New York Times posits that Knoop's half-sister Savannah Knoop is standing in for J.T. during the author's public appearances. They've also helpfully provided links to pictures of Knoop so the reader can compare her face to that of Leroy's during a public appearance in May 2005.
Our favorite part of the article: "Reached by telephone, Ms. Knoop said, 'I don't need this in my life right now,' before hanging up." We love that response, and are thinking about using it the next time we're fielding an unwanted phone call.
The parallels to San Francisco author Armstead Maupin's The Night Visitor are kind of ... well, if they showed up in a novel, a critic might call it too formulaic. However, we're a little put out that the reporters digging into the identity question are 3000 miles away from San Francisco. Local coverage of the "Who is J. T. Leroy?" question has been pretty toothless by comparison: a December 17, 2005, article in the San Francisco Chronicle notes that the Bay Guardian passed on the New York piece, and basically spends the piece defending the idea that a literary hoax is no big deal.