Too Good To Be True

In Pictures: Literary Hoaxes And Fictional Authors

When Savannah Knoop was 19 and waiting tables for a living, she received an unusual proposition. Her sister-in-law, Laura Albert, had written a novel under the pen name JT LeRoy. Albert wanted Knoop to impersonate LeRoy and help promote the book.

Like many teenagers, Knoop was trying to figure out who she was; pretending to be someone else might give her a better fix on her own identity. So she said yes, even though LeRoy was supposed to be many things she was not: a former prostitute, a recovering addict, an increasingly famous writer and a man.

"There was a part of it that felt like performance art," she says. Implausibly, the ruse worked from 2000, when Albert's first novel, Sarah, was published, until 2006, when The New York Times unmasked Knoop. Two years later, she has returned to the book-promotion circuit, this time with her own name on the cover. Her new memoir, Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy, tells the story of her participation in the notorious hoax.

In Pictures: Literary Hoaxes And Fictional Authors

The LeRoy novels were billed as autobiographical, so they provided Knoop with a ready-made history, which she eagerly embraced. LeRoy's troubled life attracted her in the same way that it attracted readers to Albert's books. "I thought how strange it can be [that] when you meet some people, you want to devour that person, to consume their story, which seems larger and more profound than your own," she writes in Girl Boy Girl. "At certain points in my life I've wished I were more neurotic, less passive and emotionally hesitant. I've wished that something extreme had happened to me, which would have made me more extreme. I felt empty and boring."

A lot of people apparently feel that way, which accounts for the huge market for so-called "Misery Lit" memoirs by authors with larger-than-life troubles. It also accounts for the ever-lengthening list of hoaxes that have rocked the publishing industry in recent years. The most prominent involved James Frey, whose addiction-recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces turned out to be partly fiction.

Ironically, Frey had less success when he wrote a novel. Misery Lit readers much prefer memoirs. They want to identify with their favorite authors in the same way that people once identified with martyrs like St. Sebastian. "We're living in a post-faith culture," says Susanna Egan, an English professor at the University of British Columbia who is writing a book about autobiographical impostors. Misery memoirs, she says, make up a "Lives of the Saints" for a secular age.