As Seen on TV

Starred review from June 18, 2001
LeRoy rose to considerable notoriety as the teenaged author of last year's Sarah, a novel about a gender-confused kid whose mother is a truckers' prostitute. In his latest work, a rawly written, riveting series of 10 interlocked stories that read fluidly as a novel, LeRoy returns to the themes of guilt and sin in the first-person voice of a boy so viciously abused by his caretakers that he is left with barely a sense of his own identity. Jeremiah is a child nobody wants, and he passes swiftly from foster parents to his angry and vindictive teenaged mother, Sarah, to his fanatically Evangelical grandparents. Sarah, herself badly wounded by her punishing, Bible-obsessed parents, gave birth to the boy when she was only 14; she returns at 18 to claim him. "Nobody takes what's mine," spouts the foul-mouthed, pill-popping, paranoid young woman. It's soon clear that Sarah cares nothing for her son, who becomes an unwelcome tagalong on her transient cross-country misadventures in hooking louche sugar daddies, stripping, turning tricks for truckers and cooking up explosive "crystal" in one boyfriend's cellar. The boy, who begins to crave Sarah's punishment as a way of keeping his life in balance, is frequently whipped for bed-wetting and is raped by her unsavory boyfriends; his denial of his sexuality becomes a pathetic attempt to identify with his tormentor. LeRoy depicts his ill-begotten characters as tenderly as Jean Genet, and delineates their acts of sadism and self-mutilation as unsparingly as A.M. Homes. Yet the stories resist spiraling into mere sensationalism. While Sarah becomes almost cartoonish in her savagery, the characters of the trucker child prostitute Milkshake and the lumbering biker Buddy are poignantly understated. Jeremiah, conflicted, emotionally bled but never self-pitying or defeated, elicits a gratifying sympathy. LeRoy's work is a startling achievement in his accelerating mastery of the literary form.

August 9, 2000
Sixteen essays, many written "simply for the pleasure of the act," are gathered and introduced by author and poet Grealy. "Mirrorings," from Harper's magazine, describes her childhood cancer and disfigurement, the subject of her critically acclaimed Autobiography of a Face (selected as one of LJ's Best Books of 1994). In another essay, she is shocked to find herself face to face on a talk show with a fan who had been stalking her and whom she was supposed to surprise. Other pieces deal with the rootlessness of immigrants (her family came from Ireland and England), the physical nature of love for animals and the competition for a dog's attention at a friend's house, and her lack of closeness with her twin sister. The author struggles with tango lessons, and she falls in love with the boots on a model in an advertisement in spite of their impracticality. Although she's sometimes guilty of "interrupting myself and going off on tangents and including extraneous information," her observations are fresh and laced with humor. For public, academic, and medical libraries.--Nancy P. Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2000
%% This is a multi-book review. SEE the title "Into the Looking-Glass Wood" for next imprint and review text. %% ((Reviewed August 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2001
It's rare for a book written by a teenager to be published for an adult audience, but the 10 stories collected here showcase an author who, despite his age (he wrote some of the stories at 16), has a genuinely authoritative voice. Nowhere is this more evident than in the title story, which portrays the sexual abuse of a child by his mother's former lover in horrifying, clinical detail. Although LeRoy's youth is occasionally apparent both in his choice of big themes and in the lack of complexity with which he treats them, the raw power of his prose overcomes these intimations of immaturity. His refusal to sentimentalize the abuse and criminality that his characters suffer and inflict illuminates a disturbing world about which LeRoy clearly knows too much. What's truly remarkable about these stories is the way they reflect one teenager's frightening vision of the human heart as being both fundamentally deceitful and awash in depraved indifference toward the emotional well-being of children.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2001
The stories collected in this volume by cult writer LeRoy, whose debut novel Sarah was published to critical acclaim, constitute a picaresque memoir set mainly in the urban underbelly of San Francisco. The author's challenge here is to extract something fresh from a terrain so familiar that it is a well-established microgenre, yet it's difficult to assess how well LeRoy succeeds, since one's judgment is inevitably skewed by the presentation of these stories as autobiographical. On the other hand, given how well LeRoy fulfils the ground rules of his narrative, its documentary value might be beside the point. This is the kind of work that gets described as "raw" and "honest," and while it certainly occupies a niche in the literary market, it's hard to imagine that this particular example is essential in any but the most comprehensive collections. Philip Santo, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.