JT Leroy Scribe Tells Tales in 'Rolling Stone'

It turns out JT Leroy exists after all! He just happens to be trapped in the body of a middle-aged woman.

Or so that woman, Laura Albert, told Guy Lawson, who interviewed her for Rolling Stone. And if Lawson didn't believe the explanation she gave for her decade-long impersonation of a transgendered, AIDS-afflicted street kid -- that Albert suffers a remarkably mild and lucrative form of multiple personality disorder -- that doesn't stop him from relaying all of her self-justifying and inconsistent rationalizations with a poker face.

As Alan Feuer showed a few months ago in The New York Times, being exposed as a fraud hasn't stripped Albert of a compulsive desire to pass off fiction as truth. Yet when Lawson requests an interview with "JT" and is denied, he reports Albert's answer -- "I can't find him" -- and the "deep, inconsolable sobs" that follow it without apparent skepticism.

He calls his story "the first complete recounting [Albert] has ever offered" of her story. But "complete" implies completely accurate. What, I'd like to know, makes Lawson so confident that the details won't all change when it comes time for the second complete accounting? What is there to be learned from listening to a world-famous fabulist tell stories about herself?