JT’s Mentor Writes Novel About Fake Writer

…but before you get all excited, let’s be more specific: Alev Croutier, a founder of San Francisco publisher Mercury House and author of several books, says the book she’s working on now is “based on an actual literary hoax that involves a famous writer and three women who live in a harem in Turkey…at the turn of the 20th century.” Also, Croutier’s been working on the story for two decades now, so even though Savannah Knoop (a.k.a. the public face of JT LeRoy) is in Croutier’s writing group, chances are the novel’s probably not about her.

Well, what is it like, then? “I finally had a breakthough that it had to be told as a ‘confessional novel’ with a first-person voice. Maybe even several narrators,” Croutier says of the writing process. “This once-popular genre has gone underground for some time but I like resurrecting old conventions—for example, the gothic novel, or the fable—but with a twist that indicates the writer is playing.” Yeah, sure, it’s gone underground—so far underground that Dominic Stansberry’s The Confession won the Edgar Award for best paperback original last year. Oh, wait: That wasn’t about “playing” with “old conventions” in a literary manner, that was just straightforward storytelling…

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