James Frey and J.T. LeRoy are bad examples for writers looking for a break.
A lot of my friends are writers. It's great for when I need concert tickets or a galley of a book. Inevitably one of my nefarious cohorts will know the name of a publicist who can get me on the list or messenger me a new release, stat. However, writers being writers, they tend to sit at home alone and spend too much time inside their heads, which is neither healthy for them or the people they attempt to drink with at night. (Or early afternoon. Who are we kidding?)
Many a great writer has made their way through New York City. I would argue that there's more stimuli per square inch in this town than anywhere else. (Paris may be a close second, if you can get over the language barrier.) New York is a place to be inspired, to be caffeinated, to be drunk and to create.
The problem with being a writer in New York is that a lot of people who want to be taken seriously as deep-thinking scribes come here. New York is to writers what Los Angeles is to actresses. Shake a tree, and ten fall out. In order to stand out you need great talent, great connections or a great shtick. A perfect storm would be a culmination of all three, accented with movie-star looks. (Which most writers don't have, otherwise they would be in showbiz.)
So what's a writer to do to stand out? Thousands of books are published every year, yet maybe 20 or so receive attention. After the months and years it takes to write a book, you'd think a little validation would be in order. Not so in the publishing industry. There is no applause, no calls for an encore. You write your book, take your advance (if you're lucky) and hope that your family doesn't ask for free copies.
Enter James Frey and J.T. LeRoy. In order to get people to pay attention to their work, a memoir and a few novels, they took on a persona. For J.T. LeRoy, it was the abused, reclusive transsexual, still trying to get comfortable in his/her own skin despite the admiration of literary and Hollywood hot shots. For Frey, it was a grizzled, recovered addict, a suburban rebel without a cause.
James Frey charmed and shocked audiences with his tales, marketed as a memoir, about his time spent at the Hazelton clinic in Minnesota. Readers were pulled in by his physical struggle, his refusal to take on a 12-step program and by the characters he met along the way. He was so impacted by this time in his life that his second book, My Friend Leonard was a spin off of the first. Frey's language was so powerful that it brought Oprah to tears, and him onto her show.
I interviewed Frey three years ago when A Million Little Pieces first came out. I found him to be charming, intelligent and most of all, believable. I didn't doubt for a second that his book wasn't 100% true. I was a little shocked to learn he had snow jobbed me and countless other journalists, all in the name of a little publicity. The thing is, had he flagged the book as fiction, no one would have cared if it wasn't true. But Frey said in almost every interview, including the one with me, that his story was true. This was his life. He had nothing to hide.
The bigger bamboozle came from J.T. LeRoy. When Sarah was published in 2000, critics were amazed that this former teenage prostitute could rise from the ashes and makes something of his life. Then questions started rising about his identity, why he was hard to reach and why checks were being sent to a third party. New York Magazine looked into it, as did the New York Times. Eventually, J.T. LeRoy was outed as a woman who has her sister-in-law appear as him in public.
Frey and J.T. LeRoy anger me because when I think of him, I also think of myself and all the other writers I know in New York and beyond. We write and create and hope and get rejected (which is all an accepted part of the game) hoping that our books, our ideas, will garnish some attention from someone wielding big checks. And it never comes.
Then someone like Frey and the circus behind J.T. LeRoy bubbles up they become media darlings because they are tortured. People flock to see them and read them because they think they've discovered some gem not only of a book, but of a person, brave enough to tell their stories.
It makes me wonder how many other James Freys and J.T. LeRoys there are out there, giving readings, signing books, and laughing all the way to the bank.
Dispatches from NYC is a bi-weekly commentary on America's largest city and its impact on the wider world.
