The Heart is Deceitful

Asia Argento’s film adaptation of JT LeRoy’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things opened in New York last weekend. I saw it last night. It wasn’t bad. Actually, it was better than I expected. The only glaringly awful aspect of the film were all the celebrity cameos. It’s not that the actors themselves (all friends of LeRoy, all of whom now look like fools) did a bad job. It’s just that their presence in the film is incredibly distracting. People actually laughed at Marilyn Manson, Wynona Ryder, and Michael Pitt. Laughed at a film based on one of the most gut-wrenchingly depressing books of the past decade. Still, I’m actually pretty eager to see Argento’s other film, the semi-autobiographical Scarlet Diva. But that’s not what I was thinking about as I left the theater.

It’s only been a few months since articles in New York Magazine and The New York Times exposed LeRoy as a fraud. People have reacted in various ways, but the general consensus, as far as I can tell, is that the books should stand for themselves. I found this quote from the London Guardian on LeRoy’s own blog:

“But nothing has been taken from us. The books remain: as startling and disturbingly beautiful as they ever were. There is nothing that has sullied the New York Times's assertion that 'his language is always fresh, his soul never corrupt'. And what strikes me more than anything is that in this age of overblown celebrity, where people such as Paris Hilton can be famous purely for being Paris Hilton, mightn't JT LeRoy represent the precise inversion of this? The work is all. The identity is irrelevant.”

I disagree. The fact that JT LeRoy doesn’t exist actually does affect the work.

As a memoir, The Heart is Deceitful made sense. It was about catharsis, bloodletting. As a work of fiction, it’s just grotesque and more than a little absurd.

“JT LeRoy” was never a survivor’s story in the Oprah sense. It wasn’t about raising awareness or preventing the sort of abuses depicted in the stories. LeRoy never founded an organization or crisis hotline. He was more concerned with telling his story – over and over again – as a way to come to terms with the events of his past. It was about getting the poison out, examining it, dealing with it, and creating something beautiful and raw and honest out of it.

But now that we know it was all made up, that none of it ever happened, that JT LeRoy is a fiction, a mere character in these stories rather than someone who actually experienced the horrors they describe, it all just feels dirty. You have to wonder what kind of person imagines these sort of things. It’s not that I don’t realize that horrible things happen to children in this world. I’m not so naïve that I think there aren’t supremely fucked up people out there who torture their own kids. It happens. It’s awful, but it happens. What bothers me is that whoever has been writing as JT LeRoy – it’s now generally accepted that the real author is a 40-something woman named Laura Albert – has been exploiting these sort of tragedies in the name of fame, wealth, and the most obscene star-fucking in recent memory.

What’s worse is that we, the reading public, just lapped it up. It’s like Albert tapped into a sick voyeurism in all of us. Something in us wants to hear these kinds of stories. It’s the same thing that makes us salivate over the sensationalist evening news, the same thing that makes us lick our chops watching Judge Judy and Jerry Springer...only much, much worse.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to read JT LeRoy the same way I used to. The stories are still beautifully, disturbingly written. But what used to be so emotionally searing now seems callous and perverse.