Fake Writers Rule!

I read the Laura Albert/JT Leroy interview in the fall issue of the Paris Review and while I have no idea how manipulative and exploitive the whole thing really is (so many layers of impersonation), or how earnest or truthful Albert is in that interview, I do know that her telling of things (how she invented a fake writer) comes off as a very powerful redemption story, a hopeful one, possibly even a beautiful one.  Not the reaction I expected to have, particularly because the reason everyone feels so cheated about the whole JT Leroy hoax is that the non-existence of his life story negates the redemptive nature of his writing.  So probably I got played, because even as I was reading it I was thinking "this isn't true" and "I bet she wrote those journal entries [alleged to be from her teen years] yesterday," but regardless, someone who wasn't a really good storyteller couldn't play you that way.  Of course, it could be that the really good storyteller is Nathaniel Rich, the senior editor who honed down "many daylong conversations...[interrupted by] digressions, jokes, impersonations, and extended flights of metaphor" into a fairly linear twenty page interview, because when you read some of her other interviews, she's not so compelling.  Or maybe she's just really good at adapting herself to the context.  And there is something touching about the fact that she gave her interview to The Paris Review, instead of Entertainment Weekly (which reminds me, where is my EW subscription?).