The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things

So much has been written about J.T. LeRoy, Wunderkind author of last year's acclaimed truck stop-prostitute fairy tale Sarah, that one might worry his persona as reclusive genius would obscure the genius that is his actual talent. The release of these brilliant autobiographical short stories, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, proves once and for all there is nothing mysterious about LeRoy's gift for weaving heartbreaking tales of pain and neglect and infusing them with a powerfully raw intimacy. He has written what he knows, and it is clear that as a 15-year-old (his age when most of The Heart transpired), he knew too much too soon.

Essentially the prequel to Sarah, this collection contains 10 interconnected stories that map, in fearless and clinical detail, LeRoy's chaotic, nomadic, and abuse-filled childhood. Heart-wrenching from Page 1, with turns of phrase simply yet compellingly rendered, it's a paralyzing read. The book opens with "Disappearances," which chronicles the return of young Jeremiah to his birth mother, Sarah, an 18-year-old drug addict and drifter, after four years in a healthy, loving foster home. What follows is his on-the-road odyssey of physical, sexual, and drug abuse.

Set initially against the backdrop of Appalachia and continuing on to California, the stories relate, with brutal honesty, what can happen when a child of abuse tries to raise a child of her own. When the mother bottoms out in "Foolishness Is Bound in the Heart of a Child," Jeremiah is deposited with his strictly religious West Virginian grandparents. Physical contact with his grandfather consists mainly of beatings dictated by the man's fundamentalist Christian doctrine of hellfire and damnation. Jeremiah may come to know his Bible well, but he also comes to crave those beatings, often bringing them on himself, misguidedly equating them with love, insofar as they are the most consistent forms of touch he has known.

It is this schizophrenic dichotomy of coexistence with his rebellious, drug-addled mother and his strictly moral and stoic grandparents that confuses, bends, and warps his considerably pliable psyche. Ultimately it shapes a human being unable to understand love or gender, or to create safe boundaries, as demonstrated by the collection's final story, the profoundly searing and unforgettable "Natoma Street." Terrifying and compelling, it chronicles the teenage Jeremiah's overwhelmingly desperate search for love, attention, or even death, through a sadomasochistic encounter on San Francisco's Natoma Street; and though by book's end the reader can understand the why of the search, it makes it no easier a read.

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things is the literary equivalent of a highway pileup -- astounding in the knowledge that this was a life truly experienced. How can one so young write so eloquently, with such a mature sense of style and nuance? Perhaps an answer lies in LeRoy's childhood soul dying long ago, and his being reborn as an adult-child of vision -- one needing to tell this tale, to document the horror.