Rating: 
Summary: A beautiful book
Review: This book is one of my favorites. J.T. LeRoy has an amazing ability to present truely painful and harsh things experienced throughout his life in such a way that gets under your skin. I think that many people; even in this review forum; are far too naive for an author as honest as J.T. LeRoy. It is far too easy for others to judge him based on his unfourtunate upbringing as "sick" or "ugly". Even going so far as to assume that he will self-destruct before he reaches the age of thirty because he is eccentric. What makes this book amazing is that these events are real and painful. This book is not for the faint of heart or naive minded. I think that the message of this book gets lost in people's opinions of the author.
I found this book beautiful and heart wrenching; a true testament to the phrase "bloom where your'e planted". If you think that your life is tragic; this book may serve as a wake up call that there is always someone out there that has it worse than you do. This book is also an eye opener into the truth about how horrible people can be to one another. Not to mention; beautifully written and gripping.
Rating: 
Summary: the hype machine rolls on
Review: ...everyone is on a high about this cat. I bite on this for some reason and end up spitting it out because it's stale, used and rotten. Maybe it's just me, but the main idea here seems to be to shock and somehow stun. Sorry Bubba, but this style has been played out far better in the past. Leroy attempts to make the reader uncomfortable with his tales of abuse and comes up short. So his mommy was a drugged up whore and his grandparents were religious freaks. He was taught to hate being a boy and that he should have been born a girl. Blah, Blah, Blah...it all reads like an after school special. "Why did you glue your penis between your legs Johnny? Because you're evil?" Cry me a river. Leroy and his fans act like he is the first and only young boy to have ever been abused. The writing is nothing short of average. The only people that will find this book interesting at all are folks that have faced nothing resembling horror in their lives. Anyone that has lived a life will find this book boring and a pathetic. If you are interested in reading a book that will turn your stomach and is well written should check out "The Room" by hubert Selby Jr. That book makes Leroy seem like he's writing for Boy's Life. In the end this clown is getting by on hype. The thank you list of this book reads like a who's who of wannabe hepsters. Leroy is this generations Brett Easton Ellis or Tama Janowitz. Who? Exactly.
Rating: 
Summary: Nature vs Nuture?
Review: Anyone who still questions Nurture vs Nature would do well to study JT Leroy's autobiographically based collection of short fiction. 4 year old Jeremiah is removed from a stable foster home by his teenage biological mother, Sarah. She introduces her son to drugs, her transitory husbands who molest him, and a deep-seated paranoia that grows beyond her control. Through her abuse and fear-mongering, she forges in him an eager subject for her psychological domination.
Jeremiah is often abandoned, ending up with his severely religious and brutal grandparents, or trying to fend for himself in empty apartments or rest stop parking lots. Sarah forces him to impersonate her sister to make it easier to hook her next husband, then brutalizes him when things go wrong. He is desperate for her approval and subverts his independence through acts of self-abasement, but makes the reader understand and sympathize with the non-conditional love he has for his abuser.
The writing is incredibly mature despite Mr. Leroy's youth, and though billed as a collection, Heart reads like a novel - each story builds upon the previous leading up to "Natoma Street", where the adult Jeremiah pays for the abuse he sustained from his now absent mother. This is an incredibly honest and complex tale of child abuse, and was well worth the hype.
Much better than "Sarah", which was a bit diasappointing. Read this one instead.
Rating:
Summary: Ruthless Review
Review: Clean version, courtesy of ruthlessreviews.com The Award Winning Pornographer sez' I normally don't review books, given my background in porno and the perceived bias it carries, as well as the penchant most literary reviewers have for overlooking critical passages and focusing on mundane or misinterpreted text. With J.T. LeRoy's The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, I had to make an exception. Damn all convention. First, a little bio on our boy wonder genius writer, if you please. It is my understanding, gleaned largely from interviews read in Salon, XY Magazine, and elsewhere in contemporary media culture, that much of what is written in The Heart is autobiographical. That means that not only was LeRoy subjected to mental and physical cruelty beyond the scope of imagining as a child, but he also attempted to be a woman most of his life. The Heart chronicles his story, the story of a boy named Jeremiah, who is taken from foster care at the age of four by his newly eighteen year old mother, and paraded across the country in a beat up Datsun. Along the way we meet his grandfather, a preacher who forces his children to scrub their skin with scalding hot water and bleach and vigorously clean their genitals with a wire brush. We also meet his mother, Sarah, who works as a lot lizard for a while in between her sugar daddy boyfriend and her speed dealing boyfriend that blows up the house and melts his eyelids off. What's a lot lizard you ask? Oh, I'm sorry. That's a prostitute who turns tricks in a parking lot full of truck drivers. While staying there, in the parking lot, Jeremiah meets a twelve-year-old prostitute named Milkshake, whose mother is a crackwhore, and learns the do's and don'ts of tricking truck stop style. He never gets his chance to try out being a lizard himself, but reminiscent of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, his mother teaches him to dress like her and he eventually steals one of her boyfriends who tears his [fanny] open so badly he has to go to the hospital. There is so much good stuff in this book, so much real horror and angst, done to a child, in the worst of possible ways that you will be unable to put it down. Offsetting and accentuating this unrelenting assault of tragic and life-shattering episodes is the beautiful prose and idiomatic feeling. At one point he speaks his mother's name aloud and describes the magical, shaman-like affect it has on him.
"I say it softly like a magic word you use only when severely outnumbered."
In another passage he intersperses the image of birds eating his insides out with the police at the hospital demanding to know the identity of his rapist, who is in fact his mother's newly ditched husband. Always present there in his writing, just beneath the surface of the ordinary, you find an electrical current, biting into you, sickening you, and yet, demanding that you see this novel through. I read the whole thing in two sittings - just under twelve hours - then started reading it again. If you have a strong enough stomach, you might finish this book in similar time. Definitely buy this book, read it, then burn it, but you won't be able to get the images out of your head. I promise. Even considering my background.
- ruthlessreviews.com
Rating:
Summary: Powerful and Poignant
Review: Here's a promise: This book will be one of the most powerful books you've read this year (no matter what year you read it). Greatly influenced by authors such as Dorothy Alison and Mary Gaitskill, Leroy's stories are open, unashamed, and written incredibly well given the age of the author. But unlike Gaitskill, the shock-factor in these stories never seems overused. Leroy has, to generalize, been through some tough stuff, and his writing is theraputic in every sense of the word. Based on his life as the son of a truck-stop hooker, this book grabs and doesn't let go. Be sure to check out his other book, "Sarah," as it acts as a companion to this one.
Rating:
Summary: Is J.T. Leroy a real person?
Review: I can't help but think he's the brainchild of Mary Gaitskill and Dennis Cooper. I see the two of them cooking this "person" up and writing novels under "his" name. He's brilliant, there's no doubt about that, but it's odd all the photographs of him never really show the same person from photo to photo. And all this talk about his being too shy to read in public...I think the powers that be have hired a stand-in to soothe the rabid fans (including myself) into thinking they are seeing the real thing. If it's a hoax, it's the most elaborate and breathtaking one that's come about in years. Buy it. Read it. Get yourself dazzled.
Rating:
Summary: Challenging, but quite the work.
Review: I find this a very challenging piece to read, really. A substantial amount of the content is based on the abuse and neglect of the main character as a child. It's not very uplifting, really, but it drew me in and wouldn't let me go. My dream is to write this well, this strongly, this candidly. If you're up for some food for thought, something truly gripping, captivating, pick this one up, let it grab you. You will get into it, and it will get into you.
Rating:
Summary: Brutal Crap.
Review: I have never read anything that literally took my breath away until i read this book, by the second chapter i felt like my heart stop completely. I love, heart, sigh, and love again JT LeRoy. The protagonist in the book goes through so much trials and tribulations as a child you wonder how he is even a live to tell the story. Read the book and try not to cry.
Rating:
Summary: tear your heart out and eat it
Review: I have never read anything that literally took my breath away until i read this book, by the second chapter i felt like my heart stop completely. I love, heart, sigh, and love again JT LeRoy. The protagonist in the book goes through so much trials and tribulations as a child you wonder how he is even a live to tell the story. Read the book and try not to cry.
Rating:
Summary: God help us all
Review: I honestly have no idea how much of this book is fiction and how much is memoir, but while reading it I had a sneaking suspicion that it was all true. Ultimately, I suppose it doesn't really matter: "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" is an extraordinary book either way. Jeremiah, the young protagonist, is a child totally at the mercy of all the adults in his life, who are all insane, predatory and heartless. He is horrifically abused physically, sexually and psychologically until he completely loses all sense of self and identity. The tales are told so lucidly and honestly that the reader can completely understand why Jeremiah eventaully both learns to mistake pain for love and wages a personal war against his own body and sexual identity. In a way Jeremiah's story is a metaphor for how our exploitive society eventually destroys all our children's sense of self. God help us all.
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