“Lovers XXX” Pt 2: Laura Albert in conversation with Allie Rowbottom
The Performative Element – Part 2 of my interview with Allie Rowbottom deals with her decision to embody aspects of her new novel “Lovers XXX” in its promotion: Posting Instagram thirst traps of herself, giving readings in which she will partially disrobe, memorizing sections of text rather than reading from its pages so she can directly engage her audience as she speaks. She describes how this approach enables her to hold multiple truths at the same time: “The art doesn’t stop just because I’ve finished writing the book.” Allie’s performative promotion raises the intriguing question if female writers who use sex to promote their work can negatively impact how seriously the publishing industry perceives them.
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
