Image by Dawn Cerney

According to his autobiographical fiction, Jeremy “Terminator” LeRoy was born in West Virginia in 1980 to a viper of a mother. She was a prostitute and a crack addict, often homeless and in the company of men who abused and raped her young son. LeRoy was himself a “lot lizard” by age 13, addicted to various government controlled substances and living the sort of life that sometimes winds up in a ditch on Unsolved Mysteries.

In 1995, LeRoy fled to San Francisco and was walking through traffic in a drug-addled haze when Laura “Speedie” Albert picked him up, took him home and got the poor kid into therapy. LeRoy’s shrink, impressed by the boy’s autobiographical writing, asked his neighbor, an editor, to take a look. The positive feedback he gave was electrifying for LeRoy. “It was like feeling a switch go on inside me; it had nothing to do with sex or how I looked, it was the pure thing,” LeRoy once said in an interview with The Village Voice.

He became the ultimate fan, pursuing his favorite writers, musicians and celebrities through letters and phone calls. His gift for networking was preternatural—Sharon Olds, Dennis Cooper, Mary Gaitskill, Suzanne Vega and a gaggle of other celebrities soon counted themselves among his circle of friends and admirers.

Sarah, ostensibly a work of fiction predicated on LeRoy’s shocking biography, appeared on bookstore shelves in 1999. In its wake, critics and readers overwhelmingly lauded his ability to turn a living hell into transcendent art. Though constantly accompanied by Albert, his closest ally and friend, LeRoy was still too shy to do a book tour or readings. Instead, he enlisted the help of pals like Shirley Manson and Lou Reed to read for him. By the time Bloomsbury published his semiautobiographical novel The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things in 2001, LeRoy was writing for Salon, Nerve and The Stranger; he had a movie deal with Gus Van Sant, the adoration and admiration of fans and friends; and he rarely appeared in public.

Turns out, there was an excellent reason for this. The headline of the Jan. 9, 2006, New York Times article half said it: “JT LeRoy: In Public, He’s a She.” In other words, LeRoy wasn’t a boy, and he also wasn’t an HIV-positive, androgynous former prostitute.

In fact, there was no JT LeRoy at all.

Laura Albert had made him up. After bearing witness to 10 years of lies, her now-estranged husband, Geoffrey Knoop, decided he’d had enough and tattled to The New York Times. The voice on the phone had been Laura’s. She had written the fan letters, the articles and three brutally beautiful books. Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey’s younger half-sister, had been playing the part of LeRoy in public, donning the wig, the sunglasses and the borderline personality required of the role.

LeRoy was a hoax—a hoax that had fooled Vanity Fair, Viking Press, Dave Eggers, Carrie Fisher and Bono, to name just a few. Not bad for a little slip of a girly-boy from West Virginia who never existed in the first place.

Weirdly enough, the LeRoy story wasn’t the only literary hoax to break that week. As of Jan. 8, 2006, Laura Albert shared the public doghouse with would-be memoirist James Frey. Outed by The Smoking Gun for exaggerating significant chunks of his bestselling, Oprah-endorsed debut book, A Million Little Pieces, Frey, too, was making headlines.

The ensuing media circus amplified some serious questions: Is fiction more valuable than fact? How did these writers fool so many people? Did we fool ourselves? Does any of this matter? And if not, can we please get back to reading the new Harry Potter?

This isn’t the first time these questions have begged to be asked, and Frey and Albert are just the latest in a long lineup of literary hoaxes. As far back as 1770, a time of religious aestheticism, 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton published his poetry as the work of a 15th-century monk—and went on to off himself with arsenic just before being exposed. A couple hundred years later, a former Ku Klux Klan member wrote The Education of Little Tree, which was supposedly the memoir of a Cherokee man. In 1995, Helen Darville of Australia lent real-life cache to her novel about Ukrainians in the Nazi death squads by peppering her speech with Russian and dressing like a babushka for public appearances. And just a few years ago, Anthony Godby Johnson’s memoir about AIDS and sexual abuse endeared him to Armistead Maupin and national audiences—that is, before folks figured out that the real author of the book was the woman who claimed to be his mother.

Today, truth and lies can wield the brute force of world-class armies. Even the news from the White House can sound about as truthful as James Frey’s claims that he really did undergo a root canal without Novocain—honest. So please forgive the bibliophiles for getting so excited over the Frey and LeRoy hoaxes last winter while bombs were exploding in Iraq. The last time they got this much national attention, Salman Rushdie had a price on his head and Bush Sr. was in office.

The fact is that fictions still have a ton of currency in our culture, especially when they’re presented as truth, which explains why Random House published Frey’s novel as a memoir, without a disclaimer, in order to sell more books. The stories of JT LeRoy and James Frey are, at their core, only slightly disguised American myths whose deeply ingrained, Horatio Alger narratives have blinded us to any evidence that their authors were less than credible. Frey says so himself in the book: “They are all the same. Had it all, got fucked up, lost it all. Trying to recover. The Great American Sob Story.”

Here’s proof: When we meet the fictional James Frey in A Million Little Pieces, he has nothing, not even his front teeth. By the end of the book, he still doesn’t own anything, but he has gained both self-control and self-respect. It’s no coincidence that many of his devoted fans are current or recovering addicts. To them, Frey is (or was) a shining example of recovery, an affirmation, a source of hope. To top it off, our little crackhead not only rose from the ashes, he became a best-selling author—a feat few ever achieve with or without a flair for the dramatic and a sweet spot for nose candy.

LeRoy, too, started from nothing, pulled himself up by his bra straps, and turned his awful life into an awfully good story. His is a classically American, homegrown, rags-to-riches success that tapped into a wellspring of belief in the resilience of human nature. To create him, Laura Albert appropriated the pathos of the mangled waifs on daytime talk shows and the ethos of the fast-talking queers in Dennis Cooper’s fiction. The resulting character is a mocktail of drama and romanticism from the extreme edges of American society. LeRoy takes us on tours of truck-stop brothels, of meth houses, of the mattresses where adults rob children of more than their innocence. He is a pastiche of cultural castoffs, a sexy celebrity other whose life-on-display moved readers beyond their routine, middle-class sentiments.

But at least Frey was a real person. And though his lies made him notorious, he isn’t really a hoaxer. He’s a writer. He fudged the truth to turn his life story into the stuff of novels, and then he made two big mistakes: One, he allowed his publisher to market the book as a memoir, and, two, he got buddy-buddy with the most powerful woman in book groups and then made her look like a fool. We should cut Frey some slack. After all, he admits he’s “an Alcoholic and a Drug Addict and a Criminal” ad nauseum throughout the book. Readers could’ve taken the hint.

But we didn’t.

Ultimately, both authors built their credibility on the authenticity of their public personas. Frey became a sensitive but bad-ass advocate for recovering addicts. LeRoy, in his rare public appearances, endearingly appeared as nervous as a cat in a bath, courting and shunning fame like any an emotionally mangled young artist might do. They invited us to conflate their celebrity with their fiction, and many readers were happy to play along.

If there is a lesson for us to learn in preparation for the next charlatan waltzing down the blowhole, it isn’t to demand facts from fiction. That’s no fun at all. It is to question whether the book, once stripped of celebrity, is still any good. When the LeRoy hoax broke, many people who didn’t know him personally tossed it off as a fascinating addendum to literary history. But to the people who thought they knew the real JT LeRoy, the hoax wasn’t just a bit of humbug. It was a betrayal. “A lot of people really did just care,” says Seattle-based writer Litsa Dremousis, who interviewed LeRoy in 2003 and continued to correspond with him (LeRoy loved her mother’s baklava) up until the day the hoax broke. “It’s easy to wonder how people were able to believe [the LeRoy hoax], but I think it goes back to something [The New York Times’] Warren St. John said: We’re predisposed to believe that the person on the other end of the line is who they say they are.”

So perhaps the real question is, why do we hunger so much for authenticity? When a presidency and a faux Fendi bag can both be bought in a back room for the right price, what value do we place on the truth?

Savannah Knoop, as JT LeRoy, once answered this question while suffering through a Q&A at the end of a London reading. “The truth…” she muttered. “The truth…” As her mouth moved, her words became inaudible. “…isn’t it?” she concluded, smiling, and the audience broke into rapt applause.