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Loading... Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoyby Savannah Knoop
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  caedocyon | Jul 18, 2023 |   Savannah Knoop was a directionless young adult when her sister-in-law Laura, the actual author of LeRoy's works, asked her to don sunglasses and a wig to portray the fictitious author at personal appearances and press conferences. In her role as JT, Savannah hobnobbed with celebrities and had the unusual experience of passing herself off as a former male prostitute who recently had sex-reassignment surgery to become a girl. The ruse got rather awkward when Savannah developed a crush on Asia Argento, the Italian actress who played JT's mother in the movie version of one of JT's "memoirs". If you don't remember much about JT LeRoy, you will find this book hard to follow. It is sadly lacking in context. There are no sympathetic characters here, just endless remembrances of clothes and food. The fraud angle, which was the aspect I was most interested in, is quickly wrapped up in the last chapter. Recommended only for JT LeRoy's remaining fans. (  ) akblanchard | Dec 27, 2016 | anderlawlor | Apr 9, 2013 | no reviews | add a review
The JT LeRoy scandal is a story of our times. In January 2006, the New York Times unmasked Savannah Knoop as the face of the mysterious author JT LeRoy. A media frenzy ensued as JT's fans, mentors, and readers came to terms with the fact that the gay-male-ex-truck-stop-prostitute-turned literary-wunderkind was really a girl from San Francisco, whose sister-in-law wrote the books. Girl Boy Girl is the story of how Savannah Knoop led this bizarre double life for six years, trading a precarious existence as a college dropout for a life in which she was embraced by celebrities and artists-Carrie Fisher, Courtney Love, Mary Ellen Mark, Winona Ryder, Asia Argento, Sharon Olds, Gus Van Sant, Mike Pitt, Calvin Klein, and Shirley Manson, to name a few-and traveled the world. Telling her side of the story for the first time, Savannah reveals how being perceived as a boy gave her a sense of confidence and entitlement she never had before. Her love affair with Asia Argento is particularly wrenching, as they embark on an intimate relationship that causes more alienation than closeness. As Savannah and Laura struggle over control of the JT character, Savannah realizes the limits of the game - - and inadvertently finds herself through the adventure of being someone else. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)306.0973Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Biography And History North America United StatesLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (2.93)
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Wikipedia in English
3
***
I was expecting high drama and excitement, but got anxiety and confusion. Maybe more accurate in some ways, but the result was surprisingly slow-paced and not as fun to read as I'd hoped. The outing had a lot of potential to spice up the book, but instead of drawing it out and going deep into the messiness, Knoop ends the book suddenly after barely a chapter.
Also not that insightful unfortunately. Not surprisingly I was most interested in the Gender of it all, especially since Knoop later came out as nonbinary, but there's almost no understanding demonstrated in the book itself. The things that the book doesn't understand about gender are a whole other kind of interesting: I think there's a scholarly essay in what on earth S&L were trying to get at by making JT a "t****y" (yeah, warning, that word gets thrown around), and how all the other famous people around JT understood JT's gender, because clearly they thought they did? I guess it's just a snapshot of cis projections on/about trans women, but man are those strange. (