Living Without LeRoy

Savannah Knoop had been worrying about this night for months. And she knew she'd brought it on herself. She remembered perfectly well that after San Francisco's greatest literary hoax had been exposed three years ago, she'd managed promptly and almost completely to fade away from public view, while her co-conspirator bore the brunt of the backlash. Maybe now Knoop's time had come. Maybe what awaited her tonight was not a cultural coming of age and her community's forgiving embrace, but a long-deferred comeuppance — a battery of ruthless heckling, the figurative shower of pig's blood.

These were her worries on the mild Wednesday evening in September when Knoop, 27, appeared at A Different Light Bookstore in the Castro to read from her new memoir (which would be released on October 1) in San Francisco for the first time. She'd had plenty of readings before, here and elsewhere, over several years. But never as herself.

For those events, she had posed as the best-selling author known as JT LeRoy, a gay male HIV-positive Appalachian truck-stop prostitute whose transgressively chic autobiographical fiction had earned him — and, by extension, Knoop — a cult following. People flocked to JT's readings. They thought him precious and brilliant, a beacon of hope for other battered young lives. Celebrities like Winona Ryder were among those who counted themselves as fans of JT. Then they learned he was fictional, the golden brainchild of Knoop's sister-in-law, Laura Albert. And it all fell apart.

Nightclub chatter and thumping bass drifted in through an open back door. The store's assistant manager apologized for not having enough chairs. "Our readings don't usually get this many people," he said. Knoop had some friends in attendance, and some strangers, and some people in between.

JT always had so many decoys, she was telling herself, remembering her literary alter ego's public events. The wigs. The sunglasses. She felt suddenly vulnerable now without those props. Now, dressed in a dark slicker, sweatshirt, and decoratively banded leggings, all of which she'd designed and made herself, Knoop cut her own conspicuous figure. Now all she had was her real haircut, done by a friend to look like the kid from There Will Be Blood, and her unhidden silver-blue eyes, by turns steely and shifty as she tried not to make a show of sizing up her audience. She reminded herself that she wasn't interested in retreating anymore. But that didn't mean she wasn't scared.

She began by introducing the passage she'd be reading, from a period, she said, "when it got more interactive." At that, she raised an eyebrow, as if surprised to hear herself describe it that way. And she read:

"In practically all the interviews, this question came up in one form or another. The most direct had been in another city, when an interviewer said, 'You could be anybody. How do we know you are who you say you are? I mean, you sound like a woman to me.' The rest of the reporters muttered and shook their head at him, indignant that he had asked such a question. They considered him a nut. I would be saved each time by remembering Laura's 'Chinese Finger Puzzle' rule: always go in further to get out.

"'Um, you don't know. And you won't know. And I don't want you to know. JT could be back in Spokane, a 500-pound black man, like that guy, the voice of Elmo, right? Some people say I am Dennis Cooper. Some people say I am really Gus Van Sant. I like that. I mean, yer absolutely right. I could be anybody. As fer sounding like a woman, thank you.' I curtsied."

Chuckles bubbled up from the audience. Knoop stopped reading to absorb the reaction. Briefly, she smiled, but then she looked up, and nervously scanned the audience again. Was there someone in particular she was looking for?

One of her fears for this night, she would later explain, was that Laura Albert would show up, and somehow make a scene. This was not a rational fear, because by now Knoop and Albert had grown accustomed to not speaking to or seeing each other at all. But, rational or not, the fear was real. If Knoop had come away from their time together certain of anything, it was that Albert had a flair for making scenes.

Go in further to get out. That's what had saved her before. And that, in effect, was her rule for writing this book, which is called Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy, and is ostensibly about becoming Savannah Knoop. It was a good rule, but still, after all, Laura's.

The following day, over a lingering breakfast at the St. Francis Diner in the Mission, Knoop elaborated on all the anguish she'd brought to her literary local debut, and the deliverance she hoped it would bring her in return.

"I was really inspired by Laura," she said. "But I didn't want [the memoir] to tell her story. And I just wasn't convinced that I should be doing it. Laura was a big part of that. It took me forever to find my voice in it. To get over that fear that I have no voice. I kept reworking the chapters. It was a block. I could say what happened but I couldn't put myself in there. It took a while to claim it."

Before becoming JT LeRoy, Knoop, a Bay Area native who grew up in Marin County and went to prep school in Connecticut, had plans to become a clothing designer. She has her own company, called Tinc (a Thai word, meaning to throw away), whose small SOMA workshop is cluttered with clothes racks, old sewing machines, a well-worn work table, and many vinyl records. Knoop's clothes have been noticed, locally and elsewhere. For starters, her mother, Sharon, a San Francisco acupuncturist whom Knoop describes as "intensely creative" and entirely supportive, lately has been seen at her daughter's events, be they about literature or apparel or both, looking sharp in Tinc jodhpurs and an angular heather-gray duster. She's not alone in suspecting that Savannah has a promising future in fashion.

Maybe fashion isn't enough. Knoop says she's been interested in writing since she was a kid. She'd read a lot, and practiced, but later concluded that she needed life experience, because, she said, "As an 18-year-old, what was I gonna write about?" To her dubious fortune, it was right about then that her half-brother Geoff's girlfriend was concocting an elaborate fake identity, an "author" whose so-bad-it's-too-good-to-be-true personal backstory could help make them all stars.

As Knoop writes: "I thought how strange it can be when you meet some people, you want to devour that person, to consume their story, which seems larger and more profound than your own. At certain points in my life I've wished I were more neurotic, less passive, and emotionally hesitant. I've wished that something extreme had happened to me, which would have made me more extreme."

Laura Albert granted her wish. Arguably, she's still granting it, if in a very different way. To wit: Albert's sharp response to Knoop's memoir — in particular the comment, attributed to Albert by the New York Post's Page Six in June, that "just because you play a writer doesn't mean you are a writer." The Post quoted Albert as calling Girl Boy Girl "sad and sleazy," saying that "it disgusts me," and accusing Knoop of "really stepping on my feelings."

And what of the many other readers who had their feelings stepped on too, and would expect contrition, a mea culpa? The challenge Girl Boy Girl poses to our memoir-cherishing culture of pitiable public victimhood is the question of how much it matters whether the memoir's publication makes Knoop an opportunist or a revisionist. It's the question, in other words, of how much pity Knoop deserves, and whether it's compassionate or condescending for us to allow it.

The intention of JT LeRoy, Knoop has said many times, was never to betray people. But she has also told herself that she couldn't just go on moping about it, and pleading, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" forever. Ultimately, Knoop explained, she wrote Girl Boy Girl because she didn't want to find herself looking back on this in many years and wondering what the hell had happened.

"I wanted to write it as fiction," she said, "but I think the story was already too convoluted." Her family and her editor, though consistently encouraging, told her that people needed it not to be fiction. In fact, Knoop's editor wouldn't commission the book without meeting her in person first and being absolutely sure it was she who'd be writing it. Such was the enduring potency of Albert's creation.

It's easy enough to anticipate Knoop's memoir with wearied trepidation — to assume going in that it'll just be some gratuitously mundane exercise in plain old bad form, like the lady who gets sawed in half writing a tell-all about the magician. Or maybe something weirder but admittedly more intriguing, like the ventriloquist's dummy writing about the puppeteer. In this case, it's both a help and a hindrance that the puppeteer has been so beguiling.

Laura Albert and Savannah Knoop first met at a family Christmas dinner in Noe Valley, while Savannah was home on a break from boarding school. As was her wont, Albert made a bit of a scene that night, impishly oversharing about the phone-sex business she and Geoffrey Knoop shared. His mother wasn't pleased, but others, including Savannah, goaded Albert on and enjoyed the performance. What's more, Laura and Savannah each recognized in the other a fellow sufferer of an eating disorder. "Later this would become an important thread in our friendship," Knoop writes. "She was the first person whom I could speak to about my closet bingeing, denial, and fasting. Late at night, we would call each other after we'd binged. We would pinpoint what emotion we ate out of."

Knoop remembers devouring the first two JT LeRoy novels, Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, in a single day. Although she had the advantage at the outset of knowing JT wasn't real, she responded to the books as many other readers had: "I thought the writing was beautiful and true no matter who had written it."

For the first book, published in June 2001, JT was said to be shy about revealing himself in a dust jacket author photo, so the writer Dennis Cooper, one of his early encouragers, sent a 1967 photo of Cooper's now-deceased boyhood friend and muse, George Miles, to stand in. (Cooper was not in on the deception at the time.) Both Albert and Knoop would later comment that the boy in that picture looked and seemed like Savannah.

So perhaps that phone call she got from Albert one day not long thereafter was inevitable. "'I need you to do me a favor,' she said. 'I need you to be him.' A part of me had been hoping that it would come to this. 'Who?' I asked innocently. 'JT. Just once. Okay?'"

By then Knoop, having bailed on UC Santa Barbara, dabbled in the City College of San Francisco, and taken a weekly lunch-shift bus-girl gig at a Thai restaurant near her mother's house, didn't figure she had much to lose. Compensation for this new opportunity would be negotiated.

Knoop's "first JT trick," as she calls it, was a photo shoot in the spacious SOMA loft her parents had rented since the late '60s. For the occasion, she made up an excuse to get rid of her roommates, swiped some of their clothes, wrapped herself in an Ace bandage to conceal her breasts, and tried to let Albert — evidently already enjoying her role as JT's handler and prompter — do most of the talking.

As she would many times while playing this role, Knoop felt awkward and was afraid of getting found out. But when the photographer noticed and commented on her small feet, "I wondered why I was worrying," she writes. "Laura was only paying me what I would have made in one shift at the Thai restaurant. Plus, she'd offered to get me a bikini and chin and upper lip wax. It was quintessential Laura to hone [sic] in on one's soft spots. The truth was I did want that wax."

Later that evening, as Knoop unwound from the shoot, Albert called and sprung it on her that another JT meeting had been set up for a few weeks later. This one was important. It was with movie director Gus Van Sant. "I could have quit," she writes, "but I was also intrigued. Pretending to be JT was like starting a love affair. I felt energized even during the most mundane parts of my day."

And so it went. With each appearance, it seemed, more famous people fell into JT's orbit: Lou Reed, Carrie Fisher, Courtney Love, Winona Ryder, Billy Corgan, and many others. They read his stories in public; he wrote their blurbs and liner notes. Everyone basked in the aura of self-propagating fame.

"Laura wanted to connect with artists she admired," Knoop said over breakfast at the diner. "She was meeting the people that inspired her. I don't think it was my list, necessarily." But when Calvin Klein made clothes for JT, Knoop's attention was piqued. And when the Italian actress Asia Argento directed and starred in an appropriately repulsive film adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, Knoop was smitten and the two began a bizarre sexual affair.

Girl Boy Girl begins with the two of them getting some much-anticipated time alone together in Argento's hotel room at the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton. The atmosphere is variously charged.

"There really was no experience — even this most intimate one — that guaranteed authenticity," Knoop writes. "If Asia knew deep down that there was no JT, she would tire of me quickly and move on to someone who wouldn't be once removed, who wouldn't be fake. If she didn't realize what was going on — if she believed surgery had gotten this good — if she still thought I was a boy who became a girl, still pretending to be a boy — then I wasn't registering at all with her. But that was what I had told her. Either way, I felt trapped."

It should come as no surprise that the affair was not sustainable. What may be surprising, though, is how Argento exacerbated tensions between Knoop and Albert.

"As soon as they met, Asia dismissed Laura as the hang-on, the hired help," Knoop writes. "Laura was acting like she was trying to convince Asia who the real talent around here was. ... There was also a glint in her eye that implied that she hated how I left her out. And it was true. I would remain silently ambivalent when publishers implied that Laura should buy her own ticket to travel with JT. ... It was easy enough to take their cue and resent her. I was definitely starting to resent that I was pretending to be someone who had nothing to do with me, representing something I hadn't created."

What emerged, also unsustainable, was a strangely possessive tug of war over JT, with Albert apparently willing to risk exposure of the whole charade in order to get her due recognition, and Knoop acting proprietary in response: She began keeping a journal, to feel and look more like the writer she was pretending to be. And the raw material she gathered there became a certification of sorts for the writer she now is. Albert had driven her to it.

Through a steady push from local publishing — McSweeney's, Zoetrope, 7x7, Last Gasp Books — into national best-sellerdom, and buzz from celebrity scenesters, the mystique of JT LeRoy swelled up like the dot-com bubble. It was a time when boundaries were being redrawn at the frontiers of literary and journalistic veracity. San Francisco literary mainstay Armistead Maupin's 2000 novel, The Night Listener, fictionalized his own relationship with the author of the harrowing and in fact fabricated memoir A Rock and a Hard Place, an allegedly AIDS-afflicted teenage writer named Anthony Godby Johnson who turned out to be the woman who'd claimed to be his adoptive mother. By 2003, while JT LeRoy was the star of Dave Eggers' second annual Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology, James Frey was bringing out his fictive rehab memoir A Million Little Pieces.

To some, Albert and Knoop's ruse, however fascinating, had always seemed suspicious. The novelist and University of San Francisco creative writing teacher Stephen Beachy went public with his misgivings in an October 2005 New York magazine article, and they were confirmed the following January by reporter Warren St. John in the New York Times.

The cognoscenti called it a hoax. Albert, in an interview with the Paris Review later that year, called it "a veil upon a veil — a filter." Beachy, in his sleuthing exposé, had called it a lifestyle. Maybe that nuanced take was the most perceptive, and had something to do with how things work in San Francisco.

"Savannah, I presume, is probably better able to get on with being Savannah after writing this book," says the Chronicle's executive Datebook editor David Wiegand, who never met Knoop but did work with Albert in her authorial capacity as JT. "I think that while New York was a bit aghast about the whole JT masquerade — or at least, New York media — people seemed to take it more in stride around here when the truth broke. ... I think people found it intriguing and moved on a bit."

"I do think the story matters to San Francisco, a place where people often come or stay in order to reinvent themselves," Beachy says now. "But as a story about how a girl gains a sense of power and entitlement by living as a boy, Savannah's insights are pretty shallow. There's a huge community here, including many writers, who are living and examining gender roles in really complicated ways." 

He allows that Knoop's memoir was inevitable, and that, given her relatively passive role in the construction of JT LeRoy, her role in her own book is inherently sympathetic. "Getting sucked into a surreal adventure involving Asia Argento, cross-dressing, and glamour shots would be a pretty hard path to say 'No' to, I think, for many curious 19-year-olds, especially in the face of such a master manipulator as Laura. ... The book is most interesting, I think, for its glimpses into the mind and behavior of Laura. This will certainly not be the last word on the subject. I can't imagine that Laura would ever let somebody else have the last word."

More than a few people say they want to know what's next from Laura Albert. Last Gasp publisher Ron Turner points out that he still sells quite a few copies of the third JT LeRoy novel, Harold's End, and he'd be glad to publish Albert again. "Laura got hit with the same stick that they used to hit James Frey with," he says. "Which is a shame, 'cause that's a real fraud."

As for Albert herself, on the subject of Knoop's book, at least at the moment, she's staying mum. Phone and e-mail requests to confirm or elaborate on the comments attributed to her by the New York Post yielded only a simple e-mail reply, a backhanded compliment: "Savannah Knoop is a very talented designer. Hope that answers your questions." The note is signed "Laura" but the sender is identified as JT LeRoy. Later, cordial afterthought apologies for not being of any more help come from the same address, but still no real comment.

Readers of Girl Boy Girl will have to decide for themselves whether it's self-serving or self-asserting when Knoop writes, for instance, that "Laura was always censoring my words, vigilantly guarding my true desires and voice." The truth is, Knoop doesn't have the disposition to write the sort of tell-all on Laura Albert that some readers might have hoped for, but that, in part, is precisely why Albert used her.

Knoop hadn't slept for days, but this time it wasn't from worrying. This happens, she said, when she's being productive. Like with the book. In this case, her production was a late-October fashion event and book signing at the Lincart Gallery on Market.

With bottles of beer or cups of wine in hand, visitors milled, chatting and anticipating. A flat-screen TV on the wall played Alfred Hitchcock's mistaken-identity chase thriller, North by Northwest. Exotic, urbane music floated down from the ceiling.

On the threshold between shame and titillation, Knoop had assembled a handful of evidently unabashed sexy-goofball models, and attired them in virgin-white underthings — with veils and straps and translucent mesh and no shortage of visible skin. They took turns getting blindfolded and swinging a bat at a big furry baseball piñata, to nervous cheers from the 50-strong crowd. How could it not be cathartic? She was Laura-less, and making a scene of her own.

Now Knoop has a book with her name on it, and, between its covers, a version of the story she says is hers. Does that make her a writer? As such, her future prospects may depend, at least in part, on Girl Boy Girl's success. And on whatever balance she strikes between that and her budding career in clothing design.

What's not in the book is what went on between Albert and Knoop during the course of the past three years, the post-JT wedge that pried them apart. Was that the book itself? Or — let's just say it — is their apparent standoff just another improvised public stunt? For now, there's no telling. But in any case, Knoop has made some good headway on that life experience.

Thinking back, she remembered hoping they both could be on the same page about the JT LeRoy experience now. When the thought of writing a book about it all first came to her mind, Knoop instinctively turned to Albert, her prolific inspiration, hoping they might write it together. But eventually she got the message: That wouldn't work; she'd have to sort it out alone.

And she started to, in the book:

"At the readings in New York and Los Angeles, I met fans who were hungry for JT's acknowledgement. They told me how the books had affected them, and they recounted their own life stories. I listened silently and held their hands. I rationalized to myself that JT was a conduit for many people who had suffered and survived. JT existed as a force of energy flying above our heads, a symbol of hope for those who had undergone the same kind of trauma and lived through it. Laura, JT and I were a trinity. I didn't know what our mission was yet, but I knew it was something bigger than our trivial problems and rivalries."

It's true that what makes you a literary golem or a Zelig or patsy is not easy to define, but what makes you a writer is writing.

After her small parade of self-exposure had been staged and applauded, Knoop sat in the back room signing books, comfortably it seemed, as herself.