Savannah Knoop

if I can't spend my hard-earned cash on a discounted copy of a trashy trans memoir, what's even the point?! :P

***

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.… (lisätietoja)

Girl Boy Girl tells the odd story of JT LeRoy, a 1990s literary phenom who turned out to be a fraud, from the point of view of the woman who played "him".

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.… (lisätietoja)