Savannah Knoop and I meet up at a hotel in London – on April Fools' Day, a date so ludicrously apt I can't resist commenting on its suitability. “Oh yeah,” they say, with a slightly strained grin. (Knoop identifies as gender neutral and requests they/them pronouns.) Knoop believes what they did was not so much a prank as a performance: “Although someone recently described it to me as a caper. I liked that,” they say, making the rigid wide grin so familiar from the millions of photos of them, back from when the public knew them not as Knoop, but as the cult author JT LeRoy.
What Knoop and their then sister-in-law, Laura Albert, did is most commonly described as a hoax, or more specifically, “the greatest literary hoax of modern times”, to cite one headline. Back in the headily weird days of the late 90s and early 00s, when celebrities from different milieux mixed to such an extent that it was hard to distinguish between hype and hero, there was none as credible as Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy, the son of a truck-stop sex worker, who became an author and object of international fascination. Winona Ryder gushed about their friendship, Bono mentored him and Gus Van Sant wanted to work with him. Madonna wanted to convert him to Kabbalah and Garbage wrote a hit song about him. He was on the cover of Vanity Fair and every zeitgeisty figure of that era, from Liv Tyler to Courtney Love, spent hours talking on the phone to him, enthralled by his tales of sexual abuse. Asia Argento had an affair with him. Everyone wanted proximity to LeRoy's edgy realness.
Alas, LeRoy did not exist. The books were written by Albert and Knoop was the public face, donning a ridiculous blond wig and large black sunglasses for appearances as LeRoy. Of the many writing hoaxes of that era, from James Frey's drug addict “memoir” A Million Little Pieces to journalist frauds Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, none was as bold or bizarre as LeRoy, and Albert and Knoop kept up the pretence for six years. During that time, LeRoy published a collection of short stories, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and bridged pop culture worlds from literary to fashion, from queer counterculture to mainstream acceptance. Albert and Knoop were finally exposed in 2006, and duly vilified. But in retrospect it was the celebrity acolytes and publishing insiders who were really made to look foolish. They prioritised a voyeuristic personal backstory over literary talent, valorising the work of two interesting but obviously vulnerable women only to drop it when they turned out to be less sexy than a former male prostitute.
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