Editor's Note: The following interview was conducted in late 2004, a year before Stephen Beachy, in New York magazine, exposed JT LeRoy as a literary persona created by Laura Albert.

J. T. Leroy was a teenager living on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area, turning tricks and suffering from dissociative episodes. Today, he is a critically acclaimed author whose first two books, the novel Sarah (Bloomsbury, 2000) and the collection of short stories The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (Bloomsbury, 2001), have been translated into more than a dozen languages—most recently, Turkish. His novella, Harold’s End, illustrated by renowned painter Cherry Hood, with an introduction by Dave Eggers, was recently published by Last Gasp, an independent press in San Francisco.

The speed with which LeRoy has ascended from his personal lows (he was abused and then abandoned by his charismatic mother, Sarah) to his professional heights (the film adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which he cowrote, debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May) has left him in a unique position: He has attracted famous admirers—Lou Reed and Bono among them—and thousands of fans, but he can relate to few of them.

LeRoy was born in 1980, and though he has written for much of his life—as a child, he encoded his writing journal so his mother couldn’t read it—he fell into publishing accidentally. In 1993, the psychiatrist whom he credits with saving his life, Dr. Terrence Owens at St. Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco, asked LeRoy and other adolescents in the McAuley Adolescent Inpatient Psychiatric Program to write as a form of therapy in order to expunge the horror they had endured. Owens realized that LeRoy's writing—stark, brutal, truthful, illuminating—stood apart. He spoke to a friend in the publishing community, who helped him obtain an agent for LeRoy. Still using his street moniker “Terminator,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to his diminutive stature, LeRoy was first interviewed by the New York Times when he was seventeen.

While reporters often fixate on LeRoy’s friendships with Courtney Love and Billy Corgan and his penchant for wearing blond female wigs and oversized sunglasses, the more substantive story line is LeRoy's literary excellence; his book reviews are uniformly spectacular. And his subject matter stands alone. Sarah chronicles the adventures of a boy who becomes a “lot lizard” (a truck stop hustler) to compete with his mother. The stories in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things explore a young boy’s life on the road with a speed-addled mother and her lovers, all of whom beat or rape him. Although Harold’s End was just published, LeRoy is already at work on a new novel, to be published sometime next year.

Poets & Writers Magazine asked LeRoy about the forthcoming novel and whether it will be a departure from his earlier, dark writing and explore new themes.

JT LeRoy: God, no. Who wants new themes? [Laughs.] I think writers have their essence, like cooks. I've noticed that people who cook, all of their food has a distinctive flavor, even if they use different spices. And it's like that with a writer. They have their essence of the things that are important.

P&W: You can get a sense that this author wrote this work or that person wrote that work. There's that flavoring. I think there's no such thing as pure fiction, because often the truest thing we write is fiction. No matter what, the writer is in there. You can say it’s science fiction, you can say it's paranormal, but it's the writer who's in there one way or another. I don't care how many characters are in the story itself—they don't exist without the essence of the writer.

JT: I also think there's no such thing as autobiographical writing either. I remember reading about this experiment: They took third-year law students and they had them do a mock trial. In the middle of the mock trial, the experiment conductors staged a hold up, but nobody knew it was staged and the kids were terrorized. And they filmed the whole thing, so there was fact, a concretized fact. And they got depositions from everyone there.

P&W: And everyone had a different point of view?

JT: No one got things correct—what they wore, things like that. Each experience was really personal and subjective. So, if my mother had written a book, it would be very, very different, you know? [Laughs.] I remember going to a [Narcotics Anonymous] meeting and at first they were dealing with substance abuse. And the next thing you know, they have vague memories of being raped by a tribe that practiced devil worship. And I think they felt that way, you know? And maybe there was some form of molestation, but a lot of times …

P&W: … there's a power of suggestion?

JT: Yeah. I had a lot of doctors—when I'd go into hospitals—try to suggest to me the satanic abuse thing because they saw the marks on my body, which I did myself. Or mostly I did myself. I finished what was started because I'm a perfectionist like that. But anyway, it was like, um, sure. And people get really into it and you can input memory.

P&W: Especially with a kid.

JT: Oh, yeah. But anyway, the main point is that I think that a lot of what people experience, it's all very subjective and a lot of it is metaphor. And that's why everything I publish will always be fiction.

P&W: I've seen The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things in the fiction section at bookstores and I've seen it in the memoir section. Does that bug you?

JT: Nope. People can make it whatever they want.

P&W: As long as they're buying it?

JT: With Sarah, I've had people ask questions like, "How did you walk on water?" People like R. Crumb have read the books and he liked them but they really disturbed the fuck out of him. And he was really concerned that people like this existed and I had to assure him that Sarah was fictional.

P&W: [Laughs.] I love R. Crumb, but it cracks me up that you were able to disturb him.

JT: I know.

P&W: Have you seen the short stories he illustrated for Bukowski? The ones that Black Sparrow press put out? There's a bookstore in Seattle, Arundel Books, that carries every bit of Bukowski or John Fante you could hope to find, and it carries all of the Bukowski/Crumb stories. They're more like vignettes, instead of fully developed presentations like your work with Cherry, but they're great. Speaking of illustrations, I could see you and Art Spiegelman collaborating.

JT: I first contacted him when I was sixteen. Fifteen, actually, and he signed my book and he wrote, "To Terminator from Ruminator." And he said that he'd been asked to participate in this museum exhibit, "A Day Without Art." Not "Art" like "Art Spiegelman," but "art" like "artwork." He said that originally he didn't know what he was going to do, but he said, "Now I know. I'm going to hang and frame your letter."

P&W: Wow.

JT: And this is when I was fifteen.

P&W: Right. I know you've talked about this in your online diary and in other interviews, but has that shock started to wear off—the surreal experience of having Art Spiegleman hang your letter when you were fifteen? Does it still hit you out of the blue or are you used to it?

JT: It does still hit me out of the blue sometimes. It's nice. There's this part of me, like when I walked the red carpet at Cannes—that felt very fuckin' surreal. That just felt really punk rock.

P&W: Weren't you behind Angelina Jolie?

JT: I was, yeah. It's like today, I've gotten emails from Heather Graham, Liv Tyler, Dave Eggers, and it's kind of like, there's a part of me, like if I step back, that goes, "What the fuck?" And you can adjust to anything. I remember one of the questions that I got in Cannes was, “How do you know that people adjust so quickly? Did you study social-whatever?” I was like, "No, I fuckin' lived it." People are very adaptable, and they're very much in whatever their experience is. You either adapt or you die.

P&W: There's a sociological theory that people adapt the fastest during wartime. I think that's apt with The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things because in a sense, it was war on a personal level.

JT: Yeah, and you adapt.

P&W: My father grew up under Nazi occupation in Greece when he was a kid, and he says the same thing, that at the time, you don't stop to think about it. You can't. He says exactly what you're saying, that it hit him when he was older. When the war was going on in Bosnia, it dredged it up for him again. But when he was a kid, he said he just lived it moment to moment. He knew that if he stopped to think, he'd be dead.

JT: Yeah, exactly.

P&W: Where do you see yourself 25 years from now?

JT: I don't know.

P&W: You've done so much with the first 25 years. It's pretty remarkable.

JT: Yeah, I know. I don't know. I'd like to be alive. You know, I've hit so many points where I'm like, "That's it, I'm gonna die, I'm suicidal." And then, two weeks ago, I almost got hit by a car. And it was really close. This woman ran a red light. And I really got this sense of how much I wanted to live. I talked to my therapist about it, about how much I really want to live. I want to live. At the same time, I feel like there's things I cannot tolerate, I cannot take. I'll survive. But I feel like I've gotten a lot softer, like my ability to cope is not the same.

P&W: Because you're not in that moment of crisis?

JT: Because I've been shown a better way. I could not go back to living in the street. Fuck, I don't like sleeping on certain sheets. I mean, if you give me the wrong pillow, I'm like all pissed. [Laughs.]

P&W: You've joked before that your chocolate has to have at least 70 percent cocoa.

JT: [Laughs.] Oh yeah, it's amazing. I can be a bigger princess than anybody. It's hard to stay in the gratitude. Sometimes I'll talk to my shrink, and I'll be like "Jesus Christ, was it really that bad?" We're comin' up on eleven years of working together and I'll ask him, "What was I like? Tell me what I was like." Because, you know the difference between a three year old and a ten year old? That's what it's like for me in this space of time, with my functioning. And people just don't understand that. And I need people who will remind me of that, because they were there and they know. They know how bad it was. They were there with me through it.

P&W: And there might be a need to distance yourself from it a little bit.

JT: Oh, yeah. I mean, like with people who went through periods of hunger, it's a progression. I don't have to store food under my bed anymore, you know?

P&W: Right.

JT: I couldn't sleep last night because I was convinced there were ants crawling on me, because we've got a problem with ants. It used to be when we had ants, everyone else in the house would come in and yell at me and ask, "Where's the food? Where do you have it hidden?" And I'd be like, "What food?" And they'd follow the ant trail and there it'd be. But I couldn't not do it.

P&W: My dad says the same thing. They had to sleep outdoors [during the war] and the rats would chew on their ears at night. And for years, if he turned against the pillow in a certain way, for instance, he'd wake up and think rats were chewing on him. I think experiences like that never quite leave someone. They might be put into perspective but, you know, people talk about closure. I think there's closure on a practical level, where you're not still putting the food under your bed. But sure, it's still going to be something that stays with you.

JT: I heard Billy Corgan at a book reading, and a guy asked him if working on a certain record—I forget which one—was cathartic, and Billy said, "No! It's not." I forget all what he said, but I'll put it in my own words: Writing about all this stuff, at the time, it's not cathartic. But later, it comes back and teaches me stuff, like, oh, this is how I felt.

P&W: James Ellroy has said something very similar to that. Have you read his memoir My Dark Places?

JT: No.

P&W: His mom was raped and murdered when he was ten. He wrote The Black Dahlia, in part, because the story was so similar to his mother's, and it was a way of tackling some of his issues surrounding his mom's death before he could actually write about it. In My Dark Places, he writes about her murder directly, and he says the same thing about closure and catharsis. By writing about it, he could give it a beginning, a middle, and an end, but, like he says, it's never completely gone. You know this pop psychology idea that if you try hard enough you can let go of everything? His theory is that you're not going to let go of it so much as find a way of incorporating it into your life that's healthier and less self-destructive. I'm not trying to knock the new age-y stuff, but it doesn't recognize that profound trauma cannot be reduced to these bite-size, fortune-cookie salves.

JT: Right.

P&W: Is there anything you'd like to answer that you haven't been asked yet?

JT: I don't know. Let me think.

P&W: Like something you'd really like to talk about but no one's ever asked you?

JT: Yeah, about how much I like chocolate. [Laughs.] I put a solicitation for chocolate in the back of my book.

P&W: [Laughs.] You do that in every interview.

JT: I know.

P&W: On one hand, it's kind of childlike, and on the other …

JT: … it's so me. You know, if someone's got a habit… When I first went on tour, there was this association of me with the street. And a lot of people would bring me drugs. Expensive shit, too. And I'm like, wow. Even famous people, they'd meet me and they'd hand me a bag of stuff. And that was not good for me. And I realize that the way I am with chocolate and with my teeth is the way I used to be with drugs. I didn't ever give a shit about drugs really. Drugs were something I did because I didn't have food. I much prefer food.

P&W: That makes sense.

JT: A lot of people who went with tricks did it for the drugs. I went with tricks who gave me food. With chocolate, my habit is way more expensive than I can afford. So, I need help. The thing is, I need the chocolate to write. I've been writing to Zadie Smith about this: How do you fuckin' write without eating? And she said, "I know. It's really hard." It's fuckin' impossible for me. I'm getting fatter and fatter.

P&W: I can be really good during the day when I'm writing. But you know when it's four in the morning and you're on vapors?

JT: Yeah. [Laughs.]

P&W: That's when it's hard not to go, "Oh look, peanut butter M&Ms." I want to touch on something else: I've recommended The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things to friends and they'll start reading it and stop and say it's too dark. And that drives me nuts because none of your work is nihilistic.

JT: The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things is really fuckin' dark.

P&W: Of course it's dark, but not in a way that makes darkness trendy or palatable or something cool. It's a dark story, but it's transforming, too.

JT: Right.

P&W: I felt like I'd gotten inside of someone else's head. You can never fully know what it's like to be someone else, but it offers insight and empathy.

JT: I think there's a lot of hope there.

P&W: I've noticed that artists tend to pick up on your work faster than anyone else.

JT: Actors and musicians, yeah. But sometimes other writers seem a little bit threatened.

P&W: There tends to be competition within an art form.

JT: But in the beginning, everyone who championed me, they were all writers, you know? Writers, then musicians like Suzanne Vega. I once had this kind of Sophie's Choice dilemma. Billy Corgan wanted me to go back to the hotel, but Dave Eggers was waiting for me at the restaurant. And you know what? I went to the restaurant.

P&W: That's totally Sophie's Choice.

JT: It was, and I chose literature over rock and roll.