Sarah: A Novel

The national bestselling first novel by a virtuosic young talent.

Cherry Vanilla, twelve years old with a penchant for short leather skirts and make-up, has one dream: to become the most famous 'lot lizard', or truck stop whore, in the business. With his blond curls and his naked ambition he is determined to be more woman than most, and to match his idol, rival, and mother, Sarah. Adopting her name and sex, he heads off into the dangerous and fantastic worlds pocketed away in the West Virginian wilds. On his journey for fame he meets with sinister pimps, luck-restoring Jack-a-lopes, superstitious prostitutes who take him for a saint, and a host of bizarre and beautiful outcasts that make up his unusual, heartbreaking world.

So many reviewers appear to be so angry over who wrote this book. To me, it doesn't matter who wrote it. I loved the book for the story it told. Yes, I read it many years ago believing that a street kid named JT Leroy wrote it. We now know that this wasn't the case. It doesn't change anything though. It's still a beautifully written book that tells quite a sad story, one that touched me enought to want to read The Heart is Deceitful and Harold's End. JT may not have lived in life, but he certainly lived in my heart and remains there. His story, as most stories are, is one of fiction. There are SO many works of fiction that people worship. This is one that I

honestly consider one of my favorites.

. T. LeRoy has written a book about "lizards," or truck stop prostitutes. Glading Grateful ETC...is a pimp in West Virginia and has a son with Sarah. At age 12, Cherry Vanilla joins the family trade and Glad exploits her beautiful blond locks to sell her as a beautiful girl. Glad goes slow with Cherry, so Cherry decides to escape with another "lizard," Pooh, to a truck stop run by Le Loup. There she assumes her mother's name, Sarah and at first is thought to be a miracle. She is revered until her luck turns and every trick she turns gets bad luck.

Sarah's luck turns for the worse and she is handed down to Stacey, who treats her terribly and exploits her miserably. But eventually Glad reclaims her.

I've been gay for many years but have never dealt with truck stop prostitution. This book was not a pleasant read, and as a matter of fact it was quite disturbing. Whatever purpose Mr. Leroy had in witting it, is lost to me.

I don't care if the arthour was a hoax. I read this book because it was a good read, not because i heard the aurthor was a former gay prostitute. I was not even aware of that the aurthor was special, or a hoax. You read a book for the book, not the name of who wrote it, so please everybody get over yourselves.

A year or two ago, there was a sort of mid-level scandal in the

publishing world when, at around the same time, it was revealed that

James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces, had palmed off as a

factual memoir what was, in reality, an almost total fabrication, and

that J.T. LeRoy, the author of Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful above

All Things, was not, in fact, the bizarre, very young, camera-shy

homosexual man that was presented to the public, but instead a woman

in her thirties named Laura Albert.

I'd read A Million Little Pieces a year or so before it was exposed as

fiction - no; "fiction" does it an undeserved credit - before it was

exposed as a load of horsefeathers, and for my own part, recognized it

before I was halfway through as the tissue of feeble, self-glorifying

lies it could not have been other than. I'd also read Sarah several

years earlier, and although I certainly considered Mr. LeRoy a very

odd character, I never saw any meaningful reason to doubt his

existence, or even give it any thought. It wasn't an issue. Sarah

remains one of the four or five greatest American novels of the past

ten years, and whether it was written by J.T. LeRoy, Laura Albert, or

a monkey hitting random keys on a typewriter, it's a flat-out

masterpiece.

George Eliot wasn't really a man. The Ramones weren't really brothers.

Dr. Seuss did not, in reality, hold a valid medical license. You may

even be shocked to learn that my name isn't actually zarpex. But for

some reason, J.T. LeRoy is called a hoax. Authorial identity is one of

the crutches available to the aesthetically crippled. Few people, it

pains me to say, possess the faculties even to understand what they

like or dislike. The majority would wince at a glass of wine poured

from a bottle labeled "Gallo" and rhapsodize over the same wine poured

from a bottle labeled "Chateau Lafite." If Toni Morrison were to be

revealed in tomorrow's newspapers as a wealthy Caucasian, her writing

would suddenly be recognized as the facile twaddle it has always been,

and its newly identified creator would be hanged from the nearest tree

by the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature.

If anything, the invention of J.T. LeRoy should be regarded as a

creative accomplishment unto itself, stranger and more complex than

Ziggy Stardust (which, for all its endurance, was really little more

than a pseudonym), possessing both an absurdity and a plausibility

that stands toe-to-toe with Borat. And is it not possible that Laura

Albert could not have written her books without creating an alternate

character to speak through? Wagner had to dress in period costume to

compose; Brian Wilson, whose feet, as far as I know, have yet to touch

a surfboard, compensated by resting them in a box of sand when he sat

at the piano to write.

A misfortune of timing lumped an important work of art together with a

piece of crude literary onanism, and our culture is the weaker for it.

Do yourself a favor if you haven't already, and read Sarah.

The IAU stripped Pluto of its status as a planet, but you know what?

It's still out there.

By zarpex

I found this work to be moving, poetic and original. A year later I still find myself thinking about it. As I see it, the brouhaha about the author's identity is irrelevant. The book is not offered up as a memoir. It's presented and sold as fiction. So whether or not you approve of the author's behavior, there's actually no literary scam to speak of. I don't know about the rest of you, but when I read Sarah, it sure seemed like fiction to me--and extraordinary fiction at that. Instead of hounding the author, we should be encouraging this rare and extraordinary talent to write more.