The photograph depicts a child - perhaps nine or ten years old - with bushy brown hair and bright, dark eyes that reveal a certain strong-willed ambition. In a portrait from the mid-1970s, the child wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the words 'I want to be me!'1 (Figure 1). It is a nice sentiment and one that reflects our modern interest in authenticity and the search for self. It would be unremarkable, except to a doting parent, were it not for the fact that the child depicted here grew up to be involved in one of the most convoluted cases of impersonation in recent history. In that light, ? want to be me!' begins to take on a less inspiring, more desperate tone. How startling that a message on a T-shirt - the very de rigueur location for ironic sloganeering - should be not only such a prescient indicator of future events but almost too painfully appropriate in its irony. Jeremiah 'Terminator' LeRoy was the son of a truck-stop prostitute. He was pimped out by his mother, lived rough on the streets of San Francisco, recovered from heroin addiction, contracted AIDS and was in the process of transitioning from male to female. LeRoy was remarkable not only for having lived through so much while so young; more remarkably, he had overcome this adversity to become an enfant terrible, admired by the literary and entertainment industries and a legion of readers. In 1999, his first novel, Sarah, the story of a child prostitute, was published to critical acclaim; within a year, LeRoy was the darling of a hip celebrity crowd. Madonna sent him books on kabbala; Winona Ryder, Courtney Love, Billy Corgan, Shirley Manson, Liv Tyler, Carrie Fisher and Gus Van Sant all counted him as a close friend. By 2003, LeRoy had graced the cover of Vanity Fair and had been compared with some of the twentieth century's most important cultural icons - among them Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Truman Capote. He not only befriended rock stars, he lived like one: LeRoy wrote lyrics for his own band; he travelled with an entourage; he had a standing rider for every gig; and he always appeared in public heavily disguised. That was LeRoy 's life, but his fiction was no less sensational: his stories were a commercially savvy blend of trauma, exploitation, dysfunctional family life, sex, drugs and mysticism - all set before the background of West Virginian truck-stops, flea-pit motels and white-trash dives. Although classified as fiction, the connections between the life of the author and the content of his stories gave his work the feel of memoir. There was little doubt that his own life experiences had a major impact on his writing. Except that LeRoy never existed. The books were written by Laura Albert, the young child wearing the T-shirt in the photograph. Albert, a forty-something woman, had spent several decades drifting around the fringes of San Francisco's counterculture, writing stories and articles and performing music under a number of different names. The product of Albert's imagination, 'J. T. LeRoy' was a literary device that, she later explained, gave her the freedom to be the real her.2 Writing as LeRoy, Albert drew on her experiences with sexual abuse, the punk underground, sex work and Ufe on the streets. When, during the civil fraud trial relating to the hoax in 2007, Albert was asked to explain her actions, she testified: 'he [LeRoy] was my channel for air. To me, if you take my JT, my Jeremy, my other, I die.'3 How do we account for the identity known as J. T. LeRoy? Was it simply a case, as the civil courts found, of fraud? Is this another chapter in the long history of literary hoaxes? And what of his creator: how do we match the girl in the picture who wanted 'to be me' with the woman who explained LeRoy as her life source, a 'channel for air'? This essay will argue that the J. T. LeRoy hoax demonstrates the author as a collective identity, formed by writers, readers and the publishing industry acting in concert towards a common aim. …