Oprah taken again,literary hoax revealed.......

The writer penning the novels of "JT LeRoy," a purported 25-year-old former male prostitute and drug addict, has been unmasked as a 40-year-old woman who allegedly undertook the ruse to get her work recognized.

LeRoy never existed and Laura Albert authored the books, her estranged partner, Geoffrey Knoop, told The New York Times in a story published Monday on its Web site. Knoop, who apologized for playing a role in the hoax, said the stress of keeping it secret had become too much to bear. The couple split in December after 16 years and were fighting over custody of their young son.

"It got to a level I didn't expect," Knoop, 39, said. "If you're feeling more and more suffocated by the complications and lies, it's not worth it."




http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060207/ap_en_ot/jt_leroy

I may be wrong, but I don't think this was part of Oprah's book club. I've been following this story on gawker.com for a few months.

Edited to add that everytime I look at the picture of "LeRoy" all I see is a woman.

Masterj said:

I may be wrong, but I don't think this was part of Oprah's book club. I've been following this story on gawker.com for a few months.

Edited to add that everytime I look at the picture of "LeRoy" all I see is a woman.

Click to expand...

Hi Masterj,
I cannot find the whole article that I had read about this.
Parts of another article are here;
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Frey is but one example. JT Leroy is another.

Leroy was, to his readers, a cause celebre, a former teenage male prostitute who converted his pain into the searing prose of several books and became the darling of A-list Hollywood. The only problem being that JT Leroy apparently never existed. He appears to be the figment of a middle-aged couple who, when necessary, enlisted a relative to play Leroy.

The lesson is clear: The story only sells if you have a tragic mascot to lure in the crowds.

So what if you have to lie? So what if you appropriate the suffering of disenfranchised populations? Isn't that what America in the post-9/11 era is all about? We're a country firmly dedicated to self-victimization, even as we're launching wars.

The bottom line is that publishers aren't really that interested in literature anymore. There's just not enough profit there. They like the idea of literature. They like feeling that they are engaged in the pursuit of elevating the human spirit. Like Oprah and many readers, they embrace the convenient, self-congratulatory aspects of literature.


http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2006/01/22/memoir_as_fiction_not_so_fast/?page=3



Also talked about was Jonathan Franzen in Oprah's book club in 2001.The book was called"The Corrections"