In late 2005, the decade-long career of JT LeRoy — purported Appalachian teen-boy prostitute-turned-literary wunderkind and celebrity magnet — came to an end with a New York magazine article. The article had asked why LeRoy, so articulate in his extensive phone relationships with writers and celebrities, was in person a suspiciously girlish mute in sunglasses. Also, why was one middle-aged woman always in tow, from parties to book tours, answering his questions for him?

That handler turned out to be Laura Albert, a struggling musician from San Francisco and the real author and phone voice behind LeRoy. The public LeRoy, in ambiguous drag, was Savannah Knoop, the sister of Albert’s then-boyfriend. Knoop was hired at age 18, when interest in LeRoy grew enough to necessitate a real person to appear as the fake author. Appropriately, then, Knoop is the first to come out with her own tell-all, Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy (Seven Stories Press, 224 pages, $19.95), much to the displeasure of her former employer.

I traded questions with Knoop over email, the better to roll with the spectral, confusing nature of the case. “I wanted to sort the experience out for myself,” Knoop says upfront. “After it ended it was all a blur.”

As Radar magazine recently noted, Girl Boy Girl is written with a “Patty Hearst–like detachment.” Though Knoop opened up considerably in round two of questions — after I asked about her fashion line, which she was busy preparing for the fall season — Girl Boy Girl does read like Andy Warhol’s autobiography as written by the wig. As a hired hand, Knoop wasn’t as invested in the hoax as Albert was, resulting in a limited, but still fascinating, view that focuses on the strangest part of the JT LeRoy story: the coterie of celebrities that clung to the icon.

In her account, Knoop is a gender-bending Donnie Brasco, jetting between her simple, Mission-District life to index magazine parties and meetings with celebrities who were under the illusion Knoop was the same person they knew from long phone calls. During those halcyon days, Winona Ryder said to the press of LeRoy, a.k.a. Albert, a.k.a. Knoop: “He’s one of those guys you can lay in bed with and watch movies with and cuddle with and feel safe doing that. He is so true, such a poet.”

While Knoop’s book doesn’t confirm whether or not she lived up to Ryder’s high cuddle standards, Knoop did get to second base with Asia Argento in a luxury hotel room. At the time, Argento was developing a doomed film adaptation of LeRoy’s The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. Their friendship is the central, recurring incident of Knoop’s book and a painful one given her dissimulation. When I ask if there was one moment in which she felt she went too far with the hoax Knoop replies, “It was constantly beyond one’s comfort zone, that was the thing. I felt constantly stretched by it. And yes it was unsettling, insanely uncomfortable and transcending at the same time. It was not my world.”

Knoop attempts to correct my use of the word hoax, stating, “I don’t think that we were operating out of a hoax. I think we were operating out of exploring identity and if anything it was about art.”

The words “hoax” and “art” aren’t mutually exclusive, but I don’t buy Knoop’s reframing of her experience as just an art project gone wild: it doesn’t jibe with her misgivings about the scam, and with her anger at Albert for her manipulative behavior over the years. True, like art, a stunning con says much about the era in which it is perpetrated. The popularity of victim culture in the 1990s primed many boosters into believing LeRoy’s preposterous biography. In tandem, and more important, our belief that autobiographical fiction is more “authentic” puts an easy gloss over Albert’s violent, but cornball and clichéd, writing. While this gives a seemingly artful arc to the hoax, and as tempting as it is to laugh at Winona Ryder and The New York Times being equally hoodwinked, remember that one person’s wily folk hero is another’s sociopath.

Starting in 1996 (long before Knoop was hired), Albert had stalked several authors and agents by phone, preying on their sympathies by posing as a boy with an adenoidal drawl and a sensational life story of abuse very similar to the pages of fiction “LeRoy” was also sending out. In a post-hoax interview with Rolling Stone, Albert argued that her careerism — mercilessly trading contacts until “LeRoy” had written a screenplay for Gus Van Sant and guest-edited a volume of Da Capo Best Music Writing — was due to her multiple personalities. Because she had the foresight to set up a dummy Nevada corporation and hire Knoop as a front, a court last year found Albert liable for $116,500 in damages to a film company that had optioned the LeRoy novel Sarah. Therein lies the difference: artists tend to invite us in on the ruse before they take the money.

Author Joel Rose — one of LeRoy’s earliest supporters — told Vanity Fair after the story broke, “If you’re going to pull off some kind of scam or hoax it seems like it could have been a lot more succinct.” By my own rough estimation of known book and film rights numbers, Albert grossed up to $300,000 (not including celebrity-fluff articling) over a five-year period.

If Albert’s solution to questions was to answer with bigger lies, as Knoop claims, then the casting of a young woman as LeRoy and the adding of “transgendered” to LeRoy’s bogus marginalization checklist (which also, in a just-as-exploitive move, included being HIV positive off and on) was an incredibly effective obfuscation tactic. As Knoop explains, “People suspected that, for whatever reason, I was a biological woman who wanted to believe she was a male-to-female girl. In other words, they knew that I had to be a biological woman pretending to be a boy who was trans. If someone wants to believe something, they believe it until proven otherwise. I know I am like that.”

Intimates, agents, publishers and Knoop herself may have rationalized it, but by the end Albert had pushed the con too far, with discovery almost guaranteed. As to Albert’s motivations for creating that 10-year-long hoax, Knoop is remaining quiet. “I cannot answer that,” she tells me, twice over.

She is, in fact, generally reluctant to speak about Albert, but, in Girl Boy Girl, Knoop can’t hide her growing frustration while acting as LeRoy’s earthly vessel on a minimum-wage leash. As Knoop reminds me, “I symptomatically quit being JT every few years because it would become this overwhelming thing that bled into my life and I wouldn’t know how to process it or come to peace with it.”

Yet even after his official death, LeRoy refuses to die, so much so that the two women most responsible for his existence seem to be struggling over custody. Upset about Knoop’s book, Albert railed with an eerie lack of self-awareness to the New York Post, “Just because you play a writer doesn’t mean you are a writer. It’s disgusting they’re using celebrity names to sell it.”

The phenomenon of JT LeRoy hemorrhages contradictions like this, with details that have the air of metaphysics, despite the story, at heart, being rotten with avarice. The uncanny nature of LeRoy never stops. As revealed in her book, Knoop, at the end of her tenure as LeRoy, believed in the character enough to have creative differences with Albert. She writes: “[LeRoy] had Laura’s taste. It shouldn’t have mattered to me, but I am a music snob. And it pained me to say I liked Pearl Jam and Silverchair.”

As humorous and as strange as Knoop’s experiences often were, the lack of any outright admission of accountability is the flaw of her memoir, which ends up a mea culpa minus the culpa. Even Howard Hughes biography faker Clifford Irving concluded his tell-all, The Hoax, by stating, “You want me to grovel? I can’t. You want me to feel guilty? I don’t. Because I enjoyed every goddamn minute of it.” Knoop’s own book is lacking that kind of amoral defiance. Her words suggest creeping guilt over her supporting role, but do not articulate the emotion. Knoop obviously wants to move on but hasn’t gotten the hang of confessing. To do so, after all, would mean saying goodbye to JT LeRoy, permanently — something I suspect she isn’t ready to do quite yet.

“I miss [LeRoy],” she admits to me with no qualifications. “[I miss] his character and sometimes I miss that specific allotted space that I had in my life for exploring identity and having an alter ego.”