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"The case of Laura Albert - professionally known as JT Leroy - could
be read as a literary cautionary tale, the story of a writer who hid
behind her own assumed identity and lost herself for many years while
reaching for the truth.

Where there might have been a single life, there was instead a pair:
JT Leroy, addict, androgyne and the ostensible author of "Sarah," a
novel of truck stop prostitution set among the diesel fumes of a West
Virginia highway. And Ms. Albert, a mother in her 40s who had never
been to West Virginia, a writer of such reclusive instincts she
required not only a pseudonym, but another personality, to write.

For almost five years, these two distinct personas lived together in a
sort of double helix as JT Leroy rocketed to stardom while Laura
Albert, living in obscurity, wrote the books and staged the interviews
that fed her alter ego's rising fame. But today creator and creation
were finally forced together by the power of the witness stand, that
sometimes brutal institution used to arbitrate identity and truth.
Testifying at her own civil fraud trial in Manhattan, Ms. Albert told
the jury the compelling tale of how, and why, it was she sought the
shelter of an all-consuming nom de plume.

"He was my respirator," she said. "He was my channel for air. To me if
you take my JT, my Jeremy, my other, I die."

Stripped of its emotion and labyrinthine literary games the trial, in
district court, is actually a mere contractual dispute. A film
production company has sued Ms. Albert, saying that a contract signed
to make a feature film of "Sarah" should be null and void, for the
simple reason that its chief signatory, JT Leroy, does not exist."

Article is in today's NYTimes