“LOVERS XXX”: Laura Albert in conversation with Allie Rowbottom
Confronting porn through a literary lens – In the first part of my interview with Allie Rowbottom, we focus on her new novel Lovers XXX, set in the world of 1980s pornography. “I get a little bit of a thrill from pushing buttons,” she acknowledges, “especially in a literary industry, where everybody is so prudey and buttoned up.” We examine the challenge of writing about porn without becoming porn, along with the difficulties that porn’s consumers can experience in separating the fantasy from the reality. Allie also reflects on how positively so many female performers of that era have talked about their work in porn, and how she avoided judgmentalness in writing about an industry that has become “too great of a cultural machine to be reduced to good or bad.”
Laura Albert has won international acclaim for her fiction. Writing as JT LeRoy, she is the author of the best-selling novels Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and the novella Harold's End. Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, reissued by HarperCollins, have also been released as audiobooks by Blackstone Publishing. Laura Albert is the subject of Jeff Feuerzeig's feature documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story and Lynn Hershman Leeson's film The Ballad of JT LeRoy. She has written for The New York Times, The Forward, The London Times, Spin, Man About Town, Vogue, Film Comment, Interview, L'Équipe Sport&Style, Filmmaker, I-D, and others – more recently, the cover article for Man About Town and her reflections on fashion for VESTOJ. A writer for the HBO series "Deadwood," she also wrote the original script for Gus Van Sant's Elephant and was the film's Associate Producer. She has written the short films Radiance for Drew Lightfoot and ContentMode, and Dreams of Levitation and Warfare of Pageantry for Sharif Hamza and Nowness. For Tiempo de Literatura 2020's “The Narrative Universe of Laura Albert,” she engaged in a wide-ranging ZOOM conversation with Fernanda Melchor, International Booker Prize Shortlist author for her acclaimed novel Hurricane Season.
Twitter: @lauraalbert
Instagram: @laura_albert
