Some people dream of becoming an Olympian, or an astronaut, or a pop-country star, and some of us dream of interviewing the mysterious, Gen X punk icon who took the late 2000s literary scene by storm—Laura Albert, aka JT LeRoy. Well, I’m here to tell you that dreams do come true because last year Pioneer Works reached out to ask me and my dear friend Steven Phillips-Horst—co-host of our podcast, Celebrity Book Club with Steven & Lily—if we would be interested in interviewing Albert? Um, that’s a heck yes!

Years ago, before I really knew who Laura Albert was, I did know one thing: in the 2000s it was really cool to have a JT LeRoy book on your bookshelf. But then his three extremely popular autobiographical novels—which recounted a life of poverty, drugs, sex, and abuse in West Virginia and California—were revealed to have in fact been written by Albert, who was exposed by a family member. It was a top cultural controversy of the 2000s, featuring lawsuits and a major motion picture as well as Jeff Feuerzeig's feature-length documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story. Albert came out a cult hero and literary star. Cut to present-day Red Hook and my semi-literate ass is somehow at the fabulous Press Play literary festival interviewing Albert, author of Sarah, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and Harold's End.

Let me set the scene for this iconic interview: I walk into the green room and see a woman in a gothic outfit—she’s not giving mall goth, more like Stevie Nicks meets The Cure with a touch of macabre Victorian child. Laura is wispy yet intense, and instantly pulls me in for a slow dance before showing me and Steven photos of her flashing the festival goers downstairs as she posed in some sort of art exhibit about January 6. This is how you create intimacy and chemistry before an interview. What followed was a riveting conversation teen Lily could only have dreamed of. Picture it: Steven and me, curled up on a small vintage couch with one of the most controversial contemporary American authors. An audience of funky New York intellectuals and two small yet shockingly loud dogs. We talked about the meaning of authorship, the unwritten rules of memoir writing, sizeism in the punk scene, gender as performance, Laura’s unexpected relationship with the mafia, and got a sneak peek into her new book.

—Lily Marotta

Thank you so much, Laura Albert, for being here. I thought maybe we could just start talking about fashion and your outfit because you look amazing today.

I already did the flashing downstairs.

The girls were out?

The girls were out. This is actually an American Apparel skirt, from the rapist guy. It was probably made for a 13-year-old girl.

Indie sleaze revival. And you're wearing your iconic raccoon penis.

The designer Levi Palmer dipped an actual penis bone—featured in [my book] Sarah, where the best prostitute gets a raccoon penis bone—in silver for me. So, I'm also werewolf-proof.

Do you type hard? Are you a Carrie Bradshaw?

I wish I had that internal [monologue]. It's more like, "Oh, fuck, this sucks so fucking bad. I'm going to have to edit this." It's kind of like you’re in your pajamas. I don't know how people don't eat constantly through writing.

Anytime I have to write one email, it's a snack, sandwiches, sauces.

For me, it’s a lot of porn—that helps me punctuate the process. So, if we've got seven tabs open, six of them are porn and then there's the document. It's about procrastination, ultimately.

For me, it builds up. There's a point where it's more painful not to write than it is to write. So, it gets to that point where I absolutely have to, because I've exhausted everything. There's nothing else.

And then it becomes the path of least resistance at that point?

Or most resistance, but it still happens. It's like when you're doing something and you’ve got to pee, but you just don't want to pee. But, finally, you know—

It has to happen. You're watching Wicked and it's two and a half hours.

You’ve destroyed your kidneys.

One of the first times I really had to pee terribly was during Titanic as a 12-year-old, and I held it and held it and held it. And I've never peed like that. Every time I really have to go, it conjures that trauma.

Which brings me to phone sex. I was wondering if we could talk about it a little because it's a big theme in your life, in your work. You were doing phone sex before you were a writer.

Before I was born.

When you were creating your characters, would you actually enact them in phone sex with a client? Would you be playing this character for them and developing it in the process?

Well, it's complex. I was very good at creating connections if that was what was wanted. The name LeRoy came from a client. His name is Bruce, he’s from Wisconsin, and we became friends. I was really interested in people's lives, so I would take him off the clock. That's how I found out about lot lizards. I was really fascinated with hidden worlds, with subgenres.

This was the early ’90s. I had never heard the term “lot lizard,” which is used to describe prostitutes who work truck stops. I just started asking him questions. As writers, we collect these things. I have always been really fascinated with people's stories.

So, when you were creating JT LeRoy in the very first stages, it was all mediated by technology. You were having conversations. It could live in this imaginary space before you then had to bring the doll to life.

JT is one of many. There was a dissociation that happened a long time ago. I watched these stories of boys, and for me it was a safe way to allow myself to feel and legitimize what had happened to me. Growing up in the ’70s, when they were just starting to talk about abuse and inappropriate behavior of adults towards kids, it was always this blonde, blue-eyed boy on after school specials. I mean, think about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, or even the girls, you had Tatum O'Neal and Brooke Shields. You had to be a marketable kid to get empathy and sympathy. I was a chubby tall girl. I remember boys pulling out the chair from underneath me and people laughing. I was called Fat Albert. It was very clear that I needed to look a certain way in order for people to say, "Hey, that's not okay.” It was okay to make fun of girls who were overweight. You were never allowed to be the protagonist. You were the joke, the hang-along.

In Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary. Author: The JT LeRoy Story, you talk about getting into punk—and I love this line, you say, "I heard the Stiff Little Fingers record and it changed my personality." That happened to me, too. You're like, "Well, now I have a personality, so it's cool. I'm punk now." But even within that subculture, where you thought you could be whatever you wanted, people were glorifying heroin chic and being thin.

As I say in that documentary, there's nothing worse than a fat punk. That's not my position, but it was made very clear to me. Guys could be big. But girls were relegated to the girlfriend or maybe a bass player. I was an early pen pal with Chumbawamba and Alice Nutter. And I was highly, highly involved in the scene. But at the same time, I really felt like I needed to keep myself hidden. There were a lot of guys that were into boys, and they took out their hostility on girls. It was a very painful scene to be in because I thought, "Oh, finally this is my family." But then I was like, "No, not really."

One thing I think is interesting about JT LeRoy, the character, is that he is almost a fetishized object of gay male desire. Thin, young, blonde, prostitute. He has the vulnerability of a character in a Dennis Cooper novel. Did you create him in relation to gay male desire?

I think it was desire in general. I wanted what I saw on the street, which was, again, that Huck Finn [archetype]. But also it was important that he was mischievous, because a lot of books about abuse had protagonists who were very innocent. We like our abused kids dead. I was in foster care in a group home and they tried to evict us because we were too inconvenient. We weren't dead. But when you go through shit, you learn how to hustle, you learn to manipulate. I would not talk to my social worker about what was going on. I had no way of saying, "This is what happened to me." I felt so much shame and disgust and removal.

Did you distrust the authority figures around you?

Yes, but also, you have to remember the time period. As Werner Herzog said, "Context is everything." PTSD had just entered The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as related to noncombatants. They didn't really apply PTSD to us in foster care. It was more like three hots and a cot. The social worker actually said that if we talked about how we felt, if we got into what had happened to us, it would be too destabilizing.

I had a severe eating disorder and I told them. But there was no help available. I was basically hiding everything, and I would call hotlines. My memoir gets into this. JT was not the first [character I created]. He was an iteration of many and someone who just really stuck around.

In the documentary, and also now, you refer to him as "he." Do you see him as different from you? And when you were writing this memoir, did his story feel separate from yours? Do you see your life happening side-by-side with his?

When I was writing the memoir, I was so surprised that there was a one-to-one correlation; I did not know that before. At the time—again, context is everything—there was no idea of gender fluidity. After I was outed as JT, they referred to JT as trans. We never used that word. [In his public appearances,] JT was clearly a girl, using a male pronoun and wearing makeup and sleeping with everyone, and that was okay. There was a need in the culture, and I needed that. They say an artist often creates what they do not see. And to this day when people say, "How do you identify?” I reserve the right to say, "Any way I want to."

Let’s talk more about your memoir. We read a lot of memoirs for our podcast. A lot of them are rather insipid. They're written by celebrities. But there is a real consistent trope to the narrative that surrounds each release of one and even the whole artistic direction. It's often a black-and-white photo of the celebrity on the cover. And it's supposed to signal that this is finally their authentic self. It's a revelation. We're setting the record straight, which kind of implies that there has been a misunderstanding, and that it's probably the media's fault. Have you felt that sense that this is finally your time to tell the truth? Or has that been put on you at all?

I am really grateful to have a wonderful agent, Bill Clegg, who was very gentle with me. When I was outed, another agent, who's a very big deal, said to me, "No one's going to care about you in seven months." And I said, "Nobody cared about me seven months ago, so what do I lose?" I am not doing a David Copperfield "I was born" thing. I mean, I come from a family that was lost in the Holocaust and that definitely informed what was passed on to me, my survival techniques, whatever you want to call them. But I did not want to write about the celebrity stuff. That will be book two.

Right now we are facing an incredible crisis. I think a third of available psychiatric beds for adolescents have been cut. Where do these kids go? A lot of my memoir is about this group home where I lived, which was not perfect, but which I was very fortunate to be part of. It saved my life for all its faults, and I'm still in touch with my social worker and other people.

If I had just written about the celebrity, all that, it wouldn't have been a lie. That just came later. I needed to unpack what formed me. To answer your question, when I was outed it felt like the media made me in its image and ascribed to me its motives. People assumed I wanted money, fame, to meet Madonna. They could not comprehend a completely different sense of desire. They didn't have a trauma-informed approach to truth-seeking at all.

There was an avalanche and someone said to me, "You cannot stand up in a tsunami, just shut the f— up." It was very difficult to do because I was being called everything, you have to remember the news cycle was very, very long. It really was like I had destroyed fiction. The New York Times called me a fake fiction writer. Really, they did. I can make up a lot of things, but not that.

There's always this idea that we're peeling back the layers until, eventually, we get to our true selves. That if you are as vulnerable as possible with yourself and your work, you'll finally become your authentic self, as if it's just waiting in there. But I think that's false. I don't think there is a secret person inside. I think everything you're making and everything that comes out is true because truth is in the process of creation. And that's all that truth is.

I think we're complex people. Fitzgerald said that true intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory things at the same time. When I was outed, the questions were: Is she crazy? Yes or no? Is she evil? Yes or no? Male or female? Yes or no?

Right, people want the story, but then they are so mad at you. But then they love the scandal of it all, too. I feel like a lot of people critique memoirs when their authors aren’t trauma dumping. They're like, "I didn't get my money's worth because there's not enough trauma in this book."

It's not about pure plot and content. You can write from a place where you're caring more about how each sentence sounds and how it's going to pierce the reader and how it's going to viscerally feel to read.

I like that. I am trying to pierce the reader...

Yeah, you're trying to hurt them a little.

You know what? I did go to piercing school. I pierced a tongue. I pierced one of my best friend's belly buttons.

But you didn't go into the biz?

Laura Albert, Steven Phillips-Horst, and Lily Marotta at Press Play, 2024.Photo: Bomin Ahn

No. I had a book deal already, but I didn't feel the writing was ready. How many people walk away from a book deal? I did, because I really felt like I wasn't there yet. And so I thought, well, what's something scary I can do? Piercing school.

How long is the program?

It was about a week, and we actually did a labia. That was graduation.

Oh, a week? I'm getting my degree next week.

I'm imagining this kind of 1920s, surgery-in-the-round or whatever. And everyone's watching with their little clipboards.

Yeah, actually, you're setting the scene. We just didn't have a drum circle. But it was San Francisco.

That is wild.

If my memoir doesn't sell, I might set up a shingle as a piercer.

You've got that to fall back on.

One thing, just to circle back, is that I realized after I had my son in ’97, that if anyone did to him what was done to me, I would kill them. And the girls in the group home, we made a pact that if somebody did something to our kids, we wouldn’t go to the cops, nor the courts. We'd take them out ourselves. We knew the impact. And what's interesting is most of us—pretty much all of us—had boys.

I'm not past putting a pretty picture on Instagram to sell a cap or a book or whatever. But it's about holding both things at the same time. I think it's becoming increasingly normal for young artists wanting to break through by using sex to sell themselves. That’s something that I'm not going to sit in judgment of, but there's an expectation that comes with it as well. I hope that people are constantly having that conversation, because it's like that bestselling book—The Body Keeps the Score.

I'll model your new line of hats. Which will be for sale right after the show.

Yeah. Support a non-sex-worker writer.

Yeah. Ex-piercer, non-sex worker.

One of the few ones left. Speaking of books, when is your memoir out and available?

I'm meeting with my agent and I have no doubt that he will tell me, "This is way too long and we need to do some editing," and I will tell him, "I've already done some," and he'll say, "Not enough."

We’re getting a peek behind the scenes.

So, it'll be a minute, but it'll be soon.

Yeah. But something that was very moving to me is that Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things were reissued by HarperCollins in the U.S. and Little, Brown Book Group in the U.K., but with my name on them. Najeebah Al-Ghadban made the cover art, and Adalis Martinez designed the covers. It was really something to see my name and photo on the books, because back in 2000 I fought hard not to have my identity attached. It's like John Waters told JT LeRoy, "The most un-American thing you can do is reject fame." And I guess I'm kind of un-American. ♦

This conversation took place on December 7th, 2024, during Press Play 2024. You can buy tickets to Press Play 2025 here.