As soon as the Love and Consequences scandal broke, media outlets began tossing in references to other famous faked memoirs, and the list of five from the NY Daily News somehow included JT Leroy‘s Sarah, which whatever you think of its author’s deceptions off the page was still sold to the public as a novel. At least when AFP cobbled together its “we will always have the fake writers with us” space-filler, they only referred to her work as “an ostensibly true tale,” but then they had to go and claim “the books were snapped up by millions of readers.”
Hardly. As I reported shortly after Laura Albert was convicted of fraud, sales of Sarah “never mustered up 1,000 copies a week in sales during the most red-hot portion of its release cycle, couldn’t even sell half that the week of Leroy’s November 2004 profile in the Sunday New York Times, rarely broke the 100-a-week barrier after the ‘fraud’ became public, and… is still barely managing to find its way off the bookshelves.” Now Albert’s attorney is stepping into the fray: I’m told a tersely worded statement has been sent to AFP claiming that her sales worldwide for all her published works amount to “less than 100,000 units.”
“That’s possible,” said Ira Silverberg, Albert’s former agent, noting that the “edgy, marginal” qualities of her fiction generated a lot of critical attention but never a lot of sales. “It’s probably much closer to 100,000 than a million.”