Laura Albert keeps on tickin’

I was pleased to read in PW this morning that Laura Albert, writing as JT LeRoy, will publish her new novella, Labour, with Last Gasp. The San Francisco publisher should be credited for going ahead with the book despite the revelation (duh, okay, was it really a revelation?) that JT LeRoy, as such, does not exist. James Frey, meanwhile, has been dumped by Riverhead. These are two very different situations. In one, an author wrote works of fiction under an assumed name. In the other, an author pawned off fictional books as nonfiction. In my opinion, Albert’s literary hoax doesn’t pose the same ethical dilemma that Frey’s act of deception does. Authors have written behind the mask of pen names for centuries, and the author’s persona is often quite different from the actual person who writes the books. Of course, Albert took the persona to the extreme, using it to publish books that might not otherwise have found a publisher. Sure, she worked the system. Sure, she hoodwinked a lot of people. But the fact remains that the LeRoy books, although assumed to be “autobiographical,” never claimed to be forged from the iron of facts. Frey’s did. There’s a difference.