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the book “humane and deeply affecting” and praised the author for writing “with a novelist’s eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist’s eye for social rituals and routines.”
    The book was a fabrication, and “Margaret B. Jones” did not exist. (The author’s duplicity was exposed by her own sister.) “Jones,” it turned out, was the persona of Margaret Seltzer, a thirty-three-year-old white woman living with her daughter in a four-bedroom 1940s bungalow in Eugene, Oregon. Seltzer had grown up with her biological parents in affluent Sherman Oaks, California, and had attended a private Episcopal day school. She did not have a black foster mother whom she called “Big Mom,” nor foster siblings named Terrell, Taye, Nishia, and NeeCee. She was neither a Blood nor a Crip. And she had not, at fourteen years old, received a gun as a birthday gift.
    Riverhead Books, the publisher of Love and Consequences , promptly canceled the author’s publicity tour, recalled copies of the book, and offered refunds to those who had purchased it. For her part, Seltzer claimed that her intentions had been honorable. “I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” she said in an interview. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us, because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing—I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.” Seltzer had written much of the book at a Starbucks in Los Angeles.
    The morbidly shy young writer JT LeRoy, a teenage drifter and recovering drug addict from West Virginia, courted (mostly by phone, mail, and fax) the sympathetic attention of Hollywood celebrities such as Winona Ryder and Drew Barrymore, and prominent authors including Mary Karr and Dennis Cooper. Another fan of his work, Madonna, once sent LeRoy some books on kabbalah as a gift. No one actually met him.
    He maintained an enigmatic allure, and it wasn’t long before rumors circulated that there was no JT LeRoy. (Chloë Sevigny said that he was definitely real because “he’s left several messages on my answering machine.”) When the writer Mary Gaitskill wanted to meet him in person, the “real” LeRoy—Laura Albert, a former phone-sex operator from Brooklyn—paid a nineteen-year-old boy she’d met on the street (“You want to make fifty bucks, no sex?”) to meet Gaitskill quickly at a San Francisco café, “get freaked out,” and leave. Later, other “stunt doubles”—always wearing sunglasses and a blond wig—were hired to embody LeRoy for public appearances.
    Following publication of the cult favorites Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things , LeRoy was praised as a wunderkind and his work described as a “revelation.” Although both books were works of fiction, LeRoy’s marketability (and his many celebrity friendships) depended on his image as a wounded kid with a hardscrabble background. The director Gus Van Sant spoke to LeRoy by phone for hours every day, and gave him an associate-producer credit on the 2003 film Elephant. Dave Eggers edited (and wrote the foreword to) LeRoy’s 2005 novella, Harold’s End , which appeared first in McSweeney’s. Eggers wrote that LeRoy’s books would prove to be “among the most influential American books in the last ten years.”
    Several months later, a journalist revealed LeRoy’s true identity, and the fallout was immediate and severe. A company that had optioned the film rights to Sarah successfully sued Albert for fraud. Still, in the wake of the ignominious scandal, the middle-aged author was unapologetic: “I went through a minefield,” she said, “and I put on camouflage in order to tell the