"You think I'm balanced?" answers the bemused LeRoy, his voice for once rising above a whisper. "Whatever I am, I turned out as I did because of my foster parents. In the years between our first meeting and now I had never got the chance to question how he could have survived such abject hell and emerged a seemingly balanced chap, so I asked him. He was polite, sweet and impressively well mannered, and gave me a bag of typical J T gifts: a Raccoon's penis-bone necklace, a jewellery case and a signed copy of Sarah. Such was the power of both prose and subject matter that suddenly his cult status and celebrity patronage made total sense J T is the real McCoy. That is why the rock'n'roll world has been more open to me."It was through such double-groovy New York rock'n'roll connections that I first met J T some years ago. It's a great thing for me - it's not at all vacuous.""Anyway," he adds after a pause.
"The literary world is very up its own arse, and they hate newcomers, whereas the rock'n'roll world thrives on new blood. "They are all well respected in their own fields and are all artists in their own right It's not as if Paris Hilton is following me about I [like to] hang around with other artists. "I am very flattered by the people who support me," states LeRoy, leaning forward in his oversized chair, his wig slipping slightly to the left. In a much celebrated shot in Vanity Fair in 2003, Tatum O'Neal, Debbie Harry, Rosario Dawson, Winona Ryder and Asia Argento surrounded the glowing writer; Madonna sends him notes on the Kabbalah, Shirley Manson wrote a song about him and Carrie Fisher is a confidant. "I don't apologise; I don't judge; I don't say that child prostitution is good - that's obvious. But, there is condemnation between the lines and although I don't say that child prostitution is bad outright, at the same time the paedophiles get punished and the morality is in my books, but it is not overt."Sarah, an instant cult hit, soon attracted an array of celebrity followers, including Debbie Harry, Winona Ryder and Shirley Manson, all of whose attentions have been accused of overshadowing LeRoy's obvious talent.
"I just present my world on my terms," says the writer for once ever so slightly animated. When we'd go shoplifting, it was better for me to be a girl, even if I couldn't be as pretty as her."One of the strengths of LeRoy's work is its seemingly permissive approach that sneakily condemns paedophiles by its seemingly liberal attitude. It always reminded me of those nature films of a mother bird regurgitating food into its baby's mouth and left me feeling as full as if she had. "Sarah used to dress me up herself," LeRoy writes in the book "She would do my make-up. I loved watching her lick her finger and run it gently under my eyes.
